Author: Jonathan Schwarz

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40 Years Later, (The Late) Martin Luther King Still Silenced
by Jeff Cohen

Soon after Martin Luther King’s birthday became a federal holiday in 1986, I began prodding mainstream media to cover the dramatic story of King’s last year as he campaigned militantly against U.S. foreign and economic policy. Most of his last speeches were recorded. But year after year, corporate networks have refused to air the tapes.

Last night NBC Nightly anchor Brian Williams enthused over new color footage of King that adorned its coverage of the 40th anniversary of the assassination. The report focused on the last phase of King’s life. But the same old blinders were in place.

NBC showed young working class whites in Chicago taunting King. But there was no mention of how elite media had taunted King in his last year. In 1967 and ‘68, mainstream media saw Rev. King a bit like they now see Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

The rest.

Five retired NATO generals (from the US, UK, Germany, France and the Netherlands) recently released a report with the Center for Strategic and International Studies called “Towards a Grand Strategy for an Uncertain World: Renewing the Transatlantic Partnership.” It details new and terrifying threats the world has never faced before (p. 27, pdf):

In addition to the ongoing threats posed by international terrorism by non-state or proxy-state actors, acts of war can be committed by individual nation states or allied states by abusing the leverage that other resources bring. China and Russia today are economic powers that might be tempted to deter other nations with the weapons of finance and energy resources. This kind of deterrence by non-military means represents a new phenomenon and has never been a part of traditional military thinking. To appreciate such cases strategically will demand a much broader conception of strategy than we have hitherto employed…

On the one hand, I thank God the United States and Europe have never stooped to using the “weapons of finance and energy resources.” But how will innocents like ourselves know what to do when confronted with such nefarious enemies?

ALSO: Note the slippery change from one sentence describing other countries committing “acts of war,” to the next sentence, where these countries merely are “tempted to deter other nations.” This belief, that it is unacceptable and essentially an act of war for other countries to have the power to deter us from doing whatever we want, runs deep in US strategic thinking.

A good example is in this little-known January, 2001 memo from Donald Rumsfeld. As you see, Rumsfeld is concerned “regional powers” possessing WMD. But the problem isn’t that they’ll use them to attack us in a first strike, but rather that WMD will allow them to deter us and therefore deny us “access” to rest of the planet:

The collapse of the Soviet Empire has produced centrifugal forces in the world that have created new regional powers. Several of these are intensely hostile to the United States and are arming to deter us from bringing our conventional or nuclear power to bear in a regional crisis…

The post-Cold War liberalization of trade in advanced technology goods and services has made it possible for the poorest nations on earth to rapidly acquire the most destructive military technology ever devised including nuclear, chemical and biological weapons…

These universally available technologies can be used to create “asymmetric” responses that cannot defeat our forces, but can deny access to critical areas in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia…”asymmetric” approaches can limit our ability to apply military power.

Another example is found in a September, 2002 speech by Philip Zelikow, executive director of the 9/11 Commission and author of the 2002 National Security Strategy, about the threat posed by Iraq. Once again, this threat is not that Iraq will attack us, but that their WMD will make it possible for someone to deter us (and Israel):

I criticise the [Bush] administration a little, because the argument that they make over and over again is that this is about a threat to the United States…

Now, if the danger [from Iraq] is a biological weapon handed to Hamas, then what’s the American alternative then? Especially if those weapons have developed to the point where they now can deter us from attacking them, because they really can retaliate against us, by then.

So watch out, world: you having the power to deter us from attacking you is the same thing as you attacking us. Not only that, but if you may be able to “attack” us like that in the future, we’ll attack you for real, right now.

We shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves, and we should remain vigilant and increase the pressure, but this change in policy from Nancy Pelosi is the most encouraging thing I’ve seen in a long time.

Spencer Ackerman has written an important and informative piece for the Washington Independent about how the Bush administration is attempting to lay the groundwork for a permanent U.S. occupation of Iraq before they leave office.

If you don’t know the background, here’s what’s been happening up to now:

U.S. troops currently operate in Iraq under a UN Security Council mandate. The mandate has been renewed annually since 2004. It gives coalition troops the legal authority to use force there.

A majority of the Iraqi parliament wants the US to leave Iraq, and for several years has been trying to prevent the mandate from being renewed unless it includes a specific timeframe for us to depart.

The executive branch of the Iraqi government (ie, Prime Minister Maliki and friends) wants the US to stay indefinitely. That’s because we want to stay, and Maliki is our puppet. Maliki therefore successfully got the UN to renew the mandate at the end of 2007, even though the Iraqi parliament opposed it and, under the Iraqi constitution, must approve all treaties. Maliki is exactly like Bush in this way; the legislative branch tries to assert its constitutional rights, and Maliki tells them: fuck you.

The mandate is now set to expire again at the end of this year. It would be near-impossible for Maliki and Bush to get another year’s extension, because the Iraqi parliament has now gotten its act together. And even if it could be extended, it’s undesirable from the administration’s perspective, because it doesn’t tie the hands of the next president.

Thus, Bush is attempting to create a bilateral “agreement” with Iraq via Maliki. It won’t be called a treaty, because as noted that would require the Iraqi parliament to approve it; even worse, under the US constitution, it would require the two-thirds approval of the US Senate.

So what the administration tried to do was quietly institute this accord between itself and Maliki (essentially between itself and itself), and write it so it was a treaty in all but name, giving the US the right to “protect” the Iraqi government from foreign and domestic threats.

However, Congress has actually been doing its job and pushing back on this—holding hearings, asking questions—and the administration has been somewhat stymied. That’s where Ackerman picks up the story.

GQ covers Meagan McCain:

Meghan has been given a prominent place in her father’s presidential campaign, most notably with her blog, McCainBlogette.com. Loosely inspired, she says—loosely!—by Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72, McCain Blogette is a sometimes irreverent, sometimes overly rah-rah account of life on the Straight Talk Express…

Meghan puts it [] succinctly: “I’m almost incapable of bullshit.”

It’s really fun to live in a country where the people at the very pinnacle of the establishment are rootin-tootin’ maverick insurgents. I’m guessing Meghan’s no-bullshit blog is particularly inspired by this part of Fear and Loathing:

This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.