From March, 2010, Irish President and Labour Party official Michael D Higgins responds with good old Irish spirit to a right-wing radio host to defend workers, regular people and affordable health care in the USA. This was from a radio broadcast in Boston, Massachusetts.
From Wikipedia: "Higgins was born in Limerick in 1941. When his father's health grew poor, with alcohol a contributing factor, his mother sent Higgins, aged five, and his four-year-old brother to live on his unmarried uncle and aunt's farm near Newmarket on Fergus, County Clare. His older twin sisters remained in Limerick. He was educated at Ballycar National School, County Clare; St. Flannan's College, Ennis; University College Galway (UCG); Indiana University; and Manchester University. As an undergraduate at UCG, he served as Vice Auditor of the College's Literary and Debating Society in 1963–1964, and rose to the position of Auditor in the 1964–1965 academic year. He also served as President of UCG Students' Union in 1964–65. Higgins holds a graduate degree in sociology.
"In his academic career, he was a Statutory Lecturer in the Department of Political Science and Sociology at University College Galway and was a Visiting Professor at Southern Illinois University. He resigned his academic posts to concentrate fully on his political career."
The host is Michael Graham of Boston Newstalk 106-108fm.
It seems during and after each war, the good folks at the Veterans Administration again and again make the same mistakes that have been made in past wars---treating too many returning soldiers and marines as "used" and, if they are not physically wounded, trying to dismiss them as malingering or having "bad conduct" when all too often they are as wounded as those who have sustained physical wounds.
This is true especially with those soldiers and marines--an estimated one in five of those deploted--who suffer from post traumatic stress disorders. The results are even more acute in the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where soldiers have been deployed over and over again and less than one percent of the population of the United States who could be at war are involved in these distant and now unpopular conflicts.
"A 1990 survey of more than 90,000 Marines found those who served in combat zones and received a PTSD diagnosis were more than 11 times more likely to receive a misconduct discharge than those who did not deploy and did not have PTSD.
"There's the Catch-22: Service members who suffer combat-related PTSD are entitled to medical treatment — unless they misbehave and get kicked out of the service because they suffer from PTSD."
Your Humble Correspondent tried to do something I had been threatening myself to do for some time--to stop blogging about the current elections. Anyone who knows me from my Multiply blog knows this a radical step for me. I' wasn't t even sure I could stop it--is there such a thing as Election Junkies anonymous?
As it turns out I can't keep that promise. Not even for a day. Politics is my nicotine. Here I go again.
One thing that is clear is that we have two and one half months to go before the General Election and, honestly, if anyone hasn't decided whom they are going to vote for (Obama, Romney, Jill Stein of the Greens, The Libertarian Guy Who I Can Never Remember) than they really haven't been paying attention.
Part of the reason for this has been my sheer frustration in seeing candidates like Romney get away with not disclosing the most basic information one should have about their candidacy in the modern Presidency; at least 5-7 years of their tax returns. Why did isn't a law that all candidates to high office need to disclose their taxes when they are running for national office baffles me! The other is the notion that Romney and Obama are essentially the same. In some ways, perhaps they are I'll admit in foreign policy matters; but Romney candidacy will have a very different impact on professional, and middle and lower income families and the elderly.
In plain terms the Romney Ryan ticket will devastate the social safety net for the jobless, those who are seriously ill , the elderly and for all people who actually have to work for a living. And then give yet another round of tax breaks to millionaires! So while the policies of the USA in the Middle East may not change so much if one or the other of these political birds wins, it makes a huge difference to a middle-aged and middle class guy like me.
As it should to anyone who has paid into the Medicare system since I started working and now, because I am just under 55 at this point, I and million of others will face paying thousands of extra dollars for health care for the "crime" of living to age 65 or 67, and/or be handed a "voucher" for health care and put to the tender mercies of the private health care system when I am in my 70s if I have the good or bad luck of living that long. And, even if I don't, no one of my age bow should have to face that!
So, yes, there is a difference in this election, at least to me and some of my co-horts, even among the two candidates.
The USA has a lot of problems right now, at home and abroad. We have had high unemployment since 2008 and a stagnant economy in part because greedy people played fast and loose with the personal housing market, and investment bankers on Wall Street shovelled money into a system that created a huge bubble that burst on us and took an estimated 14 trillion dollar out of the pockets of people who were the bedrock of our economy.
This economic tsunami will not be cleared up by anyone in four years or even eight. The country is in a state of slow and painful recovery. I see the only way out is to for the average income Americans coming together and saying "NO" to anyone who wants to take us back to the Wild West days on Wall Street. No one likes being regulated but we all have to drive on the right hand side of the road and stop at a red light over here to drive. Just as a driver of a car or a truck needs regulations, so do mortgage holders and bankers. Romney and Ryan want to pretend that 30 years of deregulation and increased income inequality under Reagan, and the Bushes didn't happen. Sorry it did. We need to restore a serious regulatory system such has the Glass-Stegall Act again and we need to start making the wealthy pay their fair share again---not 13 percent or 17 percent but more like 30-35 percent to build up our infrastructure. And cut the loopholes back as even Ronald Reagan and the Democrats in Congress did in 1986.
And lest you cry our "class warfare" my visiting Republican friends bare in mind that the last and longest post-World War II growth we had was under Bill Clinton and he raised taxes through Congress to a top rate of 39 percent.
As Warren Buffett the enlightened billionaire investor ruefully put it, "Yes, there is class warfare in this country. And my side is winning."
It's time we change that course, once and for the rest of the decades to come.
The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, was the largely fallacious "casus belli" used by President Lyndon Johnson, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk to begin unlimited military operations against North Vietnam and Vietcong forces in the southern regions of that divided nation.
Wikipedia, the helpful reference guide for the Internet , provides some background to the events that occurred this very week 48 years ago:
********************"The Gulf of Tonkin incident, or the USS Maddox incident, are the names given to two separate confrontations, one actual and one now recognized as intentionally fabricated, involving North Vietnam and the United States in the waters of the Gulf of Tonkin. On August 2, 1964, the destroyer USS Maddox, while performing a signals intelligence patrol as part of DESOTO operations, engaged three North Vietnamese Navy torpedo boats of the 135th Torpedo Squadron.[1] A sea battle resulted, in which the Maddox expended over two hundred eighty 3-inch and 5-inch shells, and in which four USN F-8 Crusader jet fighter bombers strafed the torpedo boats. One US aircraft was damaged, one 14.5 mm round hit the destroyer, three North Vietnamese torpedo boats were damaged, and four North Vietnamese sailors were killed and six were wounded; there were no U.S. casualties. The second Tonkin Gulf incident was originally claimed by the U.S. National Security Agency to have occurred on August 4, 1964, as another sea battle, but instead may have involved "Tonkin Ghosts"[6] (false radar images) and not actual NVN torpedo boat attacks."*********************http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident
We now know that President Johnson and his officials lied about the August fourth incident and lied again about the mission of the ships, and in stating that the position of the destroyers "Maddox" and "Turner Joy" were simply patrolling in international waters. (A dubious claim, in light of later revaluations. )
Some suspected this at the time but it wasn't until several years later in a 1970 documentary by the CBS News program "60 Minutes" that reality began to catch up to the chicanery in Washington. The release of the classified "Pentagon Papers" by former US Marine and intelligence analyst, Daniel Ellsberg, also played a major part in opening the eyes of Americans to the deceit.
Many officials after the fact--even Bobby McNamara himself admitted a few years before his death in the Errol Morris documentary "The Fog of War" (2007) that the second and most politically significant attack on August 4 th never occurred.
This was either a "false flag" operation or a mistake that LBJ seized on to thrust America into direct combat operations and ramp up a war that had been previously touted as a war between North and South Vietnam with the Americans in an "advisory" role. The term "advisory" must be considered loosely in light of the fact that there were 15,000 US forces in Vietnam when Lyndon Johnson assumed office at the time of John Kennedy's assassination. It is also clear that, unlike Kennedy, Johnson had zero ability to say "no" to the Pentagon until his own Presidency was at risk in 1968 and the US largely conscript forces has sustained high casualties. With no end in sight and General William Westmoreland braying for 150,000 more troops on top of the over half-million already there, AND that public opinion in his own Democratic Party turning away from him, Johnson chose not to run for re-election.
By the time Lyndon Johnson left office 550,000 American troops were engaged in the war and 20,000 had died. While never officially declared as a war by Congress, as per the Constitutional requirement spelled out directly in the document, a Gulf of Tonkin Resolution giving the President wide powers to wage war was approved on August 9th, 1964. It passed by a wide margin in the Senate. Only two Senators, Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska, voted against this measure.
Another 38,000 thousand Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese would die before this most destructive part of the Vietnam War would finally end almost eleven years after the "USS Maddox Incident".
(below) From the 2007 documentary, "War Made Easy", narrated by Sean Penn: here is a segment devoted to the Maddox incident. It also covers what would happen 39 years later in the run-up to the next major "war of choice" by the US Pentagon chiefs, a willing President, and a gullible major media, against Iraq in 2003. Think we'll get a retraction from the media on that one, ever?
Recent news reports have given us a better idea of what is going on inside the Obama Administration and the drone strikes and Hellfire missiles attacks in the Near East and Africa.
Human Rights groups are bringing up objections to the escalations of these attacks. Congressional Democrats, led by Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, are asking for clarification of "targeted attacks". The CIA? They won't confirm of deny anything, as usual.
Most of the NATO powers have been silent--at least publicly--on the attacks.
Meanwhile the increase in drone strikes have clearly killed some real terrorist leaders, including Anwar al-Awlaki, an English-speaking Yemeni-American who looked to be the next big leader of al-Queda, at least in it's AQAP (al-Queda in the Arabian Peninsula) group. Dozens of others have been killed as well, as have been people who were by-standers.
The military brass itself has put pressure on Obama to go after a large group of targets. So far, at least according to Newsweek's Daniel Klaidman's book excerpt "Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency", http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/05/27/drones-the-silent-killers.html
Obama has been reluctant to give an o.k. to any strike that doesn't identify a specific identifiable target. The notion of "signature strikes"--taking a shot at a group in an isolated area which looks like a terrorist camp is something Obama has been reluctant to do. He prefers "personality strikes"--knowing to the best of the ability of the NSA, CIA, et al,--exactly where a known terrorist(s) are.
For most of the 20th Century, war was carried out without "direct target" strikes. Bombs were released on cities, harbors, plants, troop concentrations, et al. There were always attempts to hit a given target, but most of the bombs dropped by the Allies in World War II, for instance, were estimated to be well off their prime targets.
At least a high-tech targeted strike, some critics say, is better than a Dresden/Coventry/Tokyo style firebombing. Or the napalming campaigns of the US Air Force in Vietnam during that war. But what is the acceptable number of collateral victims of the strike? (I guess it depends on whose kid is standing under the bombing range to my mind.)
And what compromises are there in the global war for morality advantage the USA and other nations might hold over a terrorist group if so many civilians are killed by a strike to pre-empt or retaliate in an attack? And what if the intelligence is wrong, and the White House kills the wrong people? Or we get the right people but too many died who weren't terrorists?
And how can we use lethal force in another country barring something like a declaratioo of war, even a nation like Pakistan or Yemen or Somalia? These three are nation-states which cannot or will not persue terrorists or support American efforts to do so. The government in Pakistan clearly see this as an unwelcome intrusion into a vacuum of state power.
On the other hand, waiting and doing nothing against groups like AQAP seems a deriliction of power as well. Every nation has the right to use force to defend itself--certainly from other national force. But what of "non-state actors" who pose a threat to a nation like the United States which have already been attacked by a terrorist group?
This being an election year, there is no doubt that President Obama, as a Democratic President, is under the gun from conservative critics and his opponent, Mitt Romney, to be "tough on terrorism"--- which transfers to more air strikes. A successful terrorist action against Americans abroad or at home would likely trigger a loosening of the criteria for a high-tech strike.
And the issue of using drones as domestic surveillance tools for law enforcement is another problem---a major and dangerous precedent. One may feel safer (or not) that Obama or Romney or some other developed country with a national leader will use drone technology wisely. But at least in the United States it is understood that presidents are accountable to more than just their intimates in the Oval Office.
The spectre of September 11, 2001 and 3,000 innocent lives snuffed out haunts the whole overview of this action. But so does the US Constitution. Through the War Powers Act of 1973 and Congress' War Declaration power, Congressional approval is needed, demanded in some form, for anything like an extended war.
Given all that is happening--threats and covert style-tactics from abroad from small cells of Muslim extremists-- is Obama's policies getting this right? Or ,as some say, is he simply a war criminal? (If the latter, I ask, what other modern leader who carries out any covert action in time of war or terrorist threat not a war criminal as well?)
Using "national security" as an overriding impetus, is the Obama Admistration justified in total to fight an unorthodox war with precision weapons and to ignore the demands of those in his own party like Dennis Kuchinich and international human rights critics? I don't think it's that simple either.
Further disclosure to Congress seems to me is needed as to what is going on and where the line needs to be drawn. International Law is not to be slummed off either. If a nation cannot handle terrorists who are threats to other nations inside her borders, it appears that some action through diplomacy is needed to declare via the United Nations that a portion of a nation is "ungovernable" and therefore justify this strange and troubling new phase of warfare.
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”
― Dwight D. Eisenhower
"More, more, more How do you like it, how do you like it? More, more, more How do you like it, how do you like it?" More, more, more"--Lyrics from the disco hit "More, More, More" by Andrea True Connection (1976)
It is said one cannot travel in two directions at once. But it seems that's just the way we will be going after the 2012 Elections when the foks in Congress and The White House will take time off from the endless political campaign season to actually propose and try to pass a budget and a few laws for a couple months or three before the campaigning starts all over and the mainstream media gets all frothy about who is running for what seat in 2014 or the top job in 2016.
One direction they will cover is the budget deficit, the accumulated debt the nation has borrowed to pay its bills. To do this many politicians will scare the middle class into supporting drastic cuts in spending programs like education, senior services and public health care. We are after all in serious overall debt to the tune of about 11 trillion dollars and its legitimate to want to address that issue in a comprehensive manner.
But let's say Obama is re-elected and the tea party Republicans don't advance like they did in the 2010 mid-terms. And maybe parts of the GW Bush Era tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 are really repealed, the ones passed in the middle of two wars that resulted in a net loss of jobs after the 2008 Wall Street banking/mortgage meltdown. OK, well maybe some modest cuts in some domestic programs and increased tax revenue will actually both stimulate the economy and bring down the deficit.
That's a best case scenario by the way. If Romney wins the election, he's already signaled he is going to push for cuts in just about all government spending in the domestic realm. He is marching in lock-step with that social Darwinist/Ayn Rand enthusiast, Paul Ryan of the House Budget Committee. The tax cuts will stay in place and the cuts will be deeper and the poor and the middle class will suffer as will anybody who is trying to get back on their feet in this economy.
Whoops! I left out the other direction we'll be heading in and it looks like we will be headed into it no matter who is in the White House and how the two parties count noses in the Senate.
It's a big omission called the National Security State. These are the people at Lockheed Martin and Pratt and Whitney and Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, General Dynamamics, et al. They have lobbyists who press our elected leaders to continue increasing the defense budget no matter how much we have already spent, how muc hwe need money for schools and police and job training programs. No matter how much we are already over stretched in foreign wars, no matter how many weapons systems we are buying----to the exclusions of basic military equipment and care for soldiers and marines after they return from tour after tour with physical and mental wounds.
How do you handle these guys, they got national defense on their side? Well, you don't handle them. You give in, even if, say, Pratt and Whitney or General Dynamics wants a program that the Pentagon itself doesn't want.
Think I'm kidding you on that last part? I wish I was! Here's a recent editorial in "The Baltimore Sun" that says otherwise:
"...Republicans are once again trying to save weapons systems that the military doesn't actually want. That's the kind of micromanagement that inevitably harms national security; Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has already warned that saving a low-priority weapon could result in harmful cutbacks to hardware the military actually needs.
"But wait, you may say, that's just the authorization — the shopping list, if you will. Unfortunately, the House Appropriations Committee, which actually helps decide how much to spend, is moving in the same direction. Earlier this week, the defense subcommittee approved more than $3 billion in additional Pentagon spending in 2013.
"What makes all this misplaced generosity toward the military-industrial complex all the more ludicrous is that the Pentagon still has the proverbial Sword of Damocles hanging over its head in the form of sequestration. Unless Congress and the White House reach some sort of budget compromise between now and the end of the year, automatic cuts will be triggered including more than $500 billion in future spending at the Pentagon, about $55 billion of it next year.
"Needless to say, Democrats and Republicans alike are unhappy with that threat, but it's the GOP that seems most interested in sidestepping it. "We shouldn't be cutting national defense spending and imperiling our security to meet arbitrary caps," was how Rep. Paul Ryan put it this week.
"To which we can only say, Mr. Ryan is absolutely correct. The problem is, that "train wreck" budget plan is there for a reason. The plan was adopted last summer, when Republicans and Democrats failed to reach agreement on a deficit-reduction deal. The required cuts were meant to be as painful as possible to force the two sides into negotiation.
"Naturally, that hasn't happened. The parties appear no closer to resolving their differences than they were when the automatic cuts were set in place. But if this is a game of chicken, the approaching cars are still a mile or two away, and there's time to swerve — just not a lot of it, given that the Pentagon must make some budget-related decisions by early next year.
"Mr. Ryan would avoid sequestration by foisting much more of the cutbacks on entitlement programs. It's essentially the same tune he has been singing for a couple of years now, and Democrats aren't dancing to it now any more than they did last year. Reducing the deficit can't be entirely at the expense of the nation's most vulnerable citizens in the form of cutbacks to Medicare and Medicaid, food stamps, school nutrition or other safety net programs."
The United States spent in 2011 over 41 percent (!) of all the military spending in the world with one -twentieth the population. China spent about 8.1 percent and Russia 4.2 percent. This according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. For a list of all major countries and their defense spending, see the link below.
William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) has taught at the Air Force Academy and the Naval Postgraduate School, and now teaches History at the Pennsylvanis College of Technology. He also has written a book Confesions of a recovering Weapons Addict. One ofhis most recent posts at Tom Dispatch is "The National Security State Wins (Again)! Here is a section from that blog. It makes for very interesting analysis of the power of the NSS. The full link is below.
"Despite his record as a “warrior-president,” despite the breathless “Obama got Osama” campaign boosterism, common inside-the-Beltway wisdom has it that the president has backed himself into a national security corner. He must continue to appear strong and uncompromising on defense or else he’ll get the usual Democrat-as-war-wimp label tattooed on his arm by the Republicans.
Similarly, to have a realistic chance of defeating him -- so goes American political thinking -- candidate Romney must be seen as even stronger and more uncompromising, a hawk among hawks. Whatever military spending Obama calls for, however much he caters to neo-conservative agendas, however often he confesses his undying love for and extols the virtues of our troops, Romney will surpass him with promises of even more military spending, an even more muscular and interventionist foreign policy, and an even deeper love of our troops.
Indeed, with respect to the national security complex, candidate Romney already comes across like Edward G. Robinson’s Johnny Rocco in the classic film Key Largo: he knows he wants one thing, and that thing is more. More ships for the Navy. More planes for the Air Force. More troops in general -- perhaps 100,000 more. And much more spending on national defense."
Johnny Rocco was a gangster in a play that became a movie a long, long time ago. But is this type of character---willing to scare and harm people just to make more money--really more modern than we think at first glance? I think so. He lives in the attitude of any politican or lobbyist or CEO who views high-cost arms program as a sacred cow. Hei s any arms merchant who wants to make a personal fortune on the backs of a nation whose greatest challenges are how we treat our neighbors and our neighbors' children.
In summation: In a time of great deficits, and an attitude that taxing the one percenters is off the table for an entire politcal party, and that sophisicated and expensive weapons ALWAYS trump a fraying social safety net, just how many "Johnny Roccos" from a National Security State can we afford?
Viewed from the bare bones of his life story, William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan (1883--1959) resembles a type of hero out of the mists of some fiction writer's imagination--a handsome and roguish character who was fearless in the face of enemy bullets--German or Japanese--in war and prepared to buck or go around anyone who got in his way to achieve a national or personal mission in the corridors of power.
It's the rags-to-riches story of a tough "shanty" Irish-American kid from the wrong end of the tracks. Born in the poverty stricken First Ward of Buffalo, New York, "Wild Bill" managed to work his way to a top Ivy League college (Columbia) at a time when "shanty" Irish Americans were shown a good deal of disdain, along with those of Jewish backgrounds.
He married Ruth Rumsey, a member of a elite Protestant family. By the age of thirty Donovan had a successful career as a corporate lawyer and was a rising star in the Republican Party in New York. Gifted with perhaps an excessive amount of charm and magnetism with the ladies, he enjoyed numerous affairs. The details might make for spicy reading for some, but Waller mercifully steers clear of most of it, keeping the story focused his subject's professional life. It is noted that Donovan and his wife essentially led separate lives for the remainder of the life-long marriage.
He went off to war as an officer in 1917 in a low-key border affair with Mexican rebels and later the trenches of France on the Western Front. It was in the latter theater of carnage that his courage and leadership blossomed. Donovan and his "Fighting 69th" Brigade overcame bad generalship at the top and German aggression at the front to emerge as one of the most highly decorated units in the last year of the war. He was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and the French Co-ix de Guerre. He refused the latter honor until a Jewish-American soldier was given his due,however, and latter dedicated his medal to the men he had served with who didn't come home.
In the 1920's Donovan became a State Attorney in New York and later ran--unsuccessfully--for the governorship of the "Empire State". By the time World War II broke out in Europe, this staunch Republican became an intimate of an old political opponent, the patrician Franklin Roosevelt. Two men of more different backgrounds could scarcely be found in the corridors of power in those days. But they shared one thing--a certainty that German and Italian Fascism sooner or later had to be stopped and Americans had to play a key part. Roosevelt sent Donovan over to Britain in 1940 to see the situation first-hand, meet with the new Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and coordinate anti-Nazi activities with Canadian-born William Stephenson, another hero from the First World War and the man heading up Britain's main intelligence service. Big Bill (Stephenson) and Little Bill (Donovan) became close colleagues. Although friction developed between the fledgling American intelligence service Office of Strategic Services (the OSS) and the British Security Coordination Office (BSC), they shared common enemies. And not just Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese Empire, but also J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI, who was highly suspicious of British intelligence services operating in America at any level. Hoover also kept up an internecine war with the OSS, gathering intelligence against the flamboyant Donovan and his crew of eccentric and unorthodox but often highly effective and intelligent staff members and agents.
Many Americans, including the fascist-leaning Ambassador to Britain, Joseph Kennedy thought that England was finished in 1940 . But Donovan, who was given unprecedented access by Churchill to his government and their wartime inner-establishment, thought otherwise. He also knew that it would take great deal more American aid than Congress was willing to give to help forestall a possible defeat for democracy and a Nazi death grip on the continent for decades to come.
Roosevelt would refer to Donovan as "his legs" throughout the war. This was high praise from a leader who rarely if ever confided in anyone beyond his inner, inner circle of advisers. Donovan indeed had no compunction about gathering information from any source--be they American Communists or European royalists to ferret out Axis agents. He also approved "black bag" units to go into foreign embassies in and out of Washington to crack open safes and gleam information from "neutral" countries like Vichy France, Spain and Turkey.
From the Washington Post review of the same book:
" ...six months before Pearl Harbor, Donovan sent a memo to President Franklin D. Roosevelt urging the creation of a central intelligence service. "Strategy, without information upon which it can rely, is helpless," the memo warned. Roosevelt, who badly wanted better information from abroad and regarded the military and State Department intelligence units as next to useless, embraced Donovan's idea. FDR gave him a bland interim title and in 1942 appointed him chief of the OSS.
"As the new player in town, Donovan was talented at making enemies, notably FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, but also the chief of G-2 (Army intelligence) and others. What comes through clearly is that Donovan spent as much time battling rival agencies as he did running the wartime spy service. Only his direct access to FDR saved him. And the turf wars among the spy agencies continue to this day."
This book should be highly entertaining for those interested in espionage and building an intelligence service from the ground up. The United States had Army, Naval and State Department intelligence units before the war but Roosevelt found them inadequate for actually getting in the field and doing things. In contrast, it was hard to get Bill Donovan OUT of the field. He insisted, sometimes against direct orders from higher-ups, to be in on every major Allied landing in Europe (including Utah Beach on D-Day) and came close to being killed or captured more than once. (He personally shot his way out of trouble in Sicily when ambushed by Italian soldiers, reportedly "as happy as a clam" to his military escort. Even in his fifties, Donovan exulted in being shot at. He also carried an "L" pill to use to kill himself in case he was taken alive by the enemy.
When he wasn't drawing fire and being frankly reckless, he was literally flying all over the globe during the war, from North Africa to Burma, London, Australia , Washington, Moscow, etc, to try and establish spy networks and to relieve those of his head operatives who had lost their grip.
But at the same time Waller points out Donovan's weaknesses. He was a poor administrator and could be careless with secret files. Many who worked under him found him too cavalier. And he could make enemies by never taking "no" for an answer.
After World War II and the death of Roosevelt, Donovan hoped to head up a post-war version of the OSS. It was not to happen as he and Harry Truman could never establish a good working relationship. The Cold War National Security Act of 1947 and the CIA went on without him. Except for a brief post as Ambassador to Thailand under Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950's Donovan's career in military affairs and government ended before he wanted it to.
"There is the case of the Philippines. I have tried hard, and yet I cannot for the life of me comprehend how we got into that mess. Perhaps we could not have avoided it—perhaps it was inevitable that we should come to be fighting the natives of those islands—but I cannot understand it, and have never been able to get at the bottom of the origin of our antagonism to the natives. I thought we should act as their protector—not try to get them under our heel. We were to relieve them from Spanish tyranny to enable them to set up a government of their own, and we were to stand by and see that it got a fair trial. It was not to be a government according to our ideas, but a government that represented the feeling of the majority of the Filipinos, a government according to Filipino ideas. That would have been a worthy mission for the United States. But now—why, we have got into a mess, a quagmire from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extrication immensely greater. I'm sure I wish I could see what we were getting out of it, and all it means to us as a nation.”---Mark Twain (founding member of The Anti-Imperialist League) from a letter in "The New York World", circa 1900.)
Starting in 1898, the United States, under President William McKinley, annexed the islands of Hawaii as a United States territory. (There had been a coup backed by US business interests there in 1893.) It was the first stirrings of American power beyond the continental frontier that stopped at the West Coast.
In February ,1898, after years of hyperbolic anti-Spanish "yellow journalism" in the big city papers of William Randolph Hearst and other publishers of "the yellow press", war broke out two months after the US battleship Maine blew up in Havana Harbor, with the loss of 200 sailors.
Soon ,despite attempts to placate the US government, Spain was locked in a war with the young nation over the islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean, the little island of Guam in the remote central Pacific and the large archipelago of the Philippines in Southeast Asia.
The United States intelligentsia, government and business officials paid very little attention to the Philippines in the decades before the war, according to Professor Richard Sibley in his 2007 book, "A War For Frontier and Empire". Indeed only a few dozen articles about the enormous chain of islands had even been published in American periodicals for the decades prior to the conquest.
By the Summer of 1898, the Spanish forces--which faced defeat from Filipino Independence fighters in all but its capital of Manila--were suddenly faced with defeat at sea. This came fromm American Admiral George Dewey's Pacific Fleet in Manila Bay itself. Spainish forces surrendered to the Americans after a one-sided sea battle. The "Battle for Manila" that shortly followed the loss of the Spanish fleet was more of a hand-over between high officials of two governments than an actual fight.
The point of the battle was to prevent the imposition of forces from The First Philippine Republic, led by President Emilio Aquinaldo, into the city. The new president was suffering under the impression that the Americans had no interest in an empire in his country--or so he had been led to believe reportedly by US officials in Hong Kong before the firing started.
But now he was frustrated from taking control of the capital city---the main conduit of commerce and information to the outside world. By early 1899--shortly before the US Senate in Washington was ready to vote to accept the annexation of the islands from Spain---a shooting incident on a bridge on the outskirts of Manila, started by one American soldier, precipitated an exchange of volleys between Alquinaldo's forces and the Yankees.
The second phase of the war, called "The Philippine Insurrection" by some historians, had begun.
The US Army and Marines drove the often lightly-armed Philippinos back in conventional attacks on the main island of Luzon. One of the American commanders was General Arthur MacArthur, the father of the more famous "American Caesar" of World War II and Korea, Douglas.
A bloody war became bloodier when the local forces broke into guerrilla groups later in 1899 to try and fight back against the Americans. To counter the "hit-and-run" strategy and the casualties brought on by unconventional warfare, the Americans became more aggressive. Torture techniques such as "the water cure" were introduced to get suspicious men to talk. This was like the water-boarding methods of today, only you put a man on the ground and force-filled him with water until his stomach was extended. If he didn't talk, as happened often according to reports, the torture was repeated.
Word of these techniques (as well as mass shootings in villages by soldiers and Marines ) were leaked out of the war zone by American soldiers and newspapermen from the USA, Britain, France, et al. Soldiers themselves risked court-martials by writing about what was taking place in their units to family members back home. They told of the "water cure" tactics and regular firing squad reprisals against villagers suspected of harboring "rebels". Then there were the camps:
From Wikipedia:
Filipino villagers were forced into concentration camps called reconcentrados which were surrounded by free-fire zones, or in other words “dead zones.” Furthermore, these camps were overcrowded and filled with disease, causing the death rate to be extremely high. Conditions in these “reconcentrados” are generally acknowledged to have been inhumane. Between January and April 1902, 8,350 prisoners of approximately 298,000 died. Some camps incurred death rates as high as 20 percent."
"One camp was two miles by one mile (3.2 by 1.6 km) in area and 'home' to some 8,000 Filipinos. Men were rounded up for questioning, tortured, and summarily executed"
"In Batangas Province, where General Franklin Bell was responsible for setting up a concentration camp, a correspondent described the operation as “relentless.” General Bell ordered that by December 25, 1901, the entire population of both Batangas Province and Laguna Province had to gather into small areas within the “poblacion” of their respective towns. Barrio families had to bring everything they could carry because anything left behind—including houses, gardens, carts, poultry and animals—was to be burned by the U.S. Army. Anyone found outside the concentration camps was shot. General Bell insisted that he had built these camps to "protect friendly natives from the insurgents, assure them an adequate food supply" while teaching them "proper sanitary standards." The commandant of one of the camps referred to them as the "suburbs of Hell."
Estimates vary over how many Philippine civilians died, but the numbers were in the hundreds of thousands. Most of them died from cholera and typhus outbreaks in the camps. As in all wars, atrocities were committed on both sides, but the suffering fell harder on least trained and out-fitted forces.
The US military lost 4,200 men in the war and 20,000 Philipinos combatants fell officially in action. By the end of the main part of the war (July, 1902) General Alquinaldo had been captured and the islands were on their way to becoming Americanized--with English-language schools, an American style court system and a lower house of elected representatives to bring a measure of democracy to the whole affair of American conquest. The Upper House remained in the hands of the American Commissioners, acting much as the viceroys and district commissioners of another empire.
The Philippine-American war is not much discussed in American schools, and is low on the radar of major US conflicts. But in it contains all the seeds of the modern wars in American history from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan. It's not surprise that this is so, given that the "frontier attitude" of many Americans combined well with the colonial aspirations of any emerging industrial nation of the time.
There seems little in this chapter of imperialism of just over a century ago that is becoming of a republic. And the words of Mark Twain above could have been said of Iraq and Vietnam and our extended time in other areas as well.
Some amazing color photographs of ordinary rural and urban life, both showing poverty and the rebuilding and rearming of the United States at a critical point in democratic history.
Anywhere in the former 13 Colonies of the Former British Territory known commonly as America or Baja Canada. This territory is sovereign and not eligible for Commonwealth status until things improve. Also added to the festivities are bits formerly belonging to Spain, Russia, France and Mexico. Bits of Native American Territory, too. Other bits include the islands of Puerto Rico, Guam and a couple of the Virgin Islands if they want to observe it...or not.
According to Tom Burnam's fun and lively argument-settler of a book "The Dictionary of Misinformation" (1975, Ballintine Books), none of the members of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia signed the "Declaration of Independence" on July 4th 1776. All that happened was that the final draft of the Declaration was approved by a majority of members. The New York delegation was not even present, and only showed up five days later to affirm the general will of the other members.
One fellow named Thomas McKean signed it only in 1781! One of the original committee of five to draft the document, Robert Livingston, never did sign the Declaration, although he both framed and voted for it.
It took over a month for most of the 56 signers of the Declaration to affix their signatures to this seditious and dangerous document.
The document was written by Thomas Jefferson after he was appointed on June 7th by Congressional delegate Richard Henry Lee, who was later a senior officer in the Continental Army. Mr. Jefferson was to write the document and have it vetted by four others, including Ben Franklin and John Adams. It was vital that a Virginian write this because of that colony's impact on commerce and exports to England.
A resolution of independence was actually approved by the Congress on July 2nd. The last draft was voted on two days later. Many, including Adams, believed that it would be the Second of July which would be the day for celebrations and fireworks in future years. That's was of course if the revolution succeeded, a far from likely outcome at that point.
Gerald Field is no career leftist. Although he did support Barack Obama for President before the 2008 elections, he previously served under President Ronald Reagan as Solicitor General. He is also a Harvard Professor of Law and knows a thing or two about the Constitution. A book he wrote with his son Gregory, a philosopher and chairman of that department at Suffolk university, recently wrote: "Because it is Wrong: Torture, Privacy and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror,"
Although I haven't read the book yet, interviews with the Frieds make clear its central thesis--that it is wrong to torture a person to any degree, under any circumstances and for any reason.
The Frieds note that the Constitution says government surveillance — essentially a search — is wrong, but only if it is unreasonable or conducted without a warrant. As Fried points out below, there is no power of torture laid out in the Constitution, despite the twisted logic of Bush Justice Department lawyers like John Woo and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, both of whom approved of "waterboarding" suspects under the guise of fighting terrorists.
Editorial excerpt below from The Medford (Oregon) Mail Tribune, Sept. 13, 2010:
"As Charles Fried said in an interview on National Public Radio, "that immediately shows there's a difference, because you can have reasonable snooping. You can have snooping pursuant to a warrant. I don't care what kind of a warrant you have, you can't torture and there is no such thing as reasonable torture."
His son Gregory agreed: "... I think it's essential to our identity as a nation that we hold to this absolute among others, that torture is one of the things that a democratic republic must not do in order to retain its character."
Charles Fried cited figures from American history who echoed that sentiment: "Washington said treat those captured in the battle with humanity and let them have no reason to complain over our copying the brutal example of the British army. Lincoln said military necessity does not admit of cruelty that is the infliction of suffering for the sake of suffering or for revenge, nor of maiming or wounding except in fight, nor of torture to extort confessions."
America's stature in the world owes much to its Constitution, a document that protects the rights of individuals from the actions of their own government. Americans should ask themselves what that great tradition is worth if our government takes away the rights of others in the interest of our own security."
If The United States is supposed to stand for something greater then just a territory or a brute force of Hegalian Statism--and I believe that is why we were conceived as a nation-- we should heed these mens' words well.
American veterans recently received from Congress and the President the ability to get more educational benefits if they attend a university than previously has been awarded to those who served. They can also now transfer unused education benefits to their spouse and children for the first time.
But back in the long, hot Summer of 1932 in Washington, as the nation slipped deeper into the grip of the Great Depression, veterans of the First World War got an entirely less hospitable response from President Hoover, the Senate and the military under General Douglas Mac Arthur.
"We are neural beings," states Berkeley cognitive scientist George Lakoff. "Our brains take their input from the rest of our bodies. What our bodies are like and how they function in the world thus structures the very concepts we can use to think. We cannot think just anything - only what our embodied brains permit."
"The Political Mind" is a book published last year which seems particularly timely today what with the unruliness, outright lies and scare tactics being practiced by right-wing interest groups like former Texas Congressman Dick Armey "Freedom Works" institute to scare people away from a non-profit-based health care reform plan.
Lakoff writes that people are unaware of 98% of the thinking their brains do. "The main battlefield is the brain", he writes, and the traditional ways that liberals and progressives approach that battlefield is to appeal to reason and logic to win the day for their issues. Progressives believe in the power of logic and empathy--often, in Lakoff's opinion---to their detriment. He advocates trading in 18th century Old Enlightenment reasoning, which discounts unconscious thought, for a type of 21st century "reasoning" which re-frames arguments not to win by logic or appeals to "common sense" but to control the language and specific words of the debate by exercising the neural transmitters in the brains of potential supporters with certain code words and phrases that cause some people to ignore the more rational centers of the brain and focus on the neural processes that create a sense of unease and danger about issues like health care reform or curbing "national defense" actions by the military that take place halfway around the world for extended periods of time.
Here Lakoff expounds on one of the most important aspects of his theories, the process of "framing" an issue in the subconscious.
"Facts never speak for themselves. They take on their meaning by being embedded in frames, themes which organize thoughts, rendering some facts as relevant and significant and others as irrelevant and trivial. Framing matters and the contest is lost at the outset if one allows ones adversaries to define the terms of the debate. To be self conscious about framing strategy is not being manipulative. It gives coherent meaning to what is happening in the world. One can either do it unconsciously, or with deliberation and conscious thought.
"A frame is a thought organizer. Like a picture frame, it puts a rim around some part of the world, highlighting certain events and facts as important and rendering others invisible. Like a building frame, it holds things together but is covered by insulation and walls. It provides coherence to an array of symbols, images, and arguments, linking them through an underlying organizing idea that suggests what is essential — what consequences and values are at stake. We do not see the frame directly, but infer its presence by its characteristic expressions and language."--from a 2005 interview.
Lakoff's theorizes that conservatives operate much better at framing for example the debate between Americans over the role of government in their lives. One example of this is the myth that "deregulation or privatization of a moral mission of government eliminates government", and by extension presumably gives ordinary people more power over their lives. "But", he continues, "it doesn't. Large corporations also govern our lives--often making life and death decisions that affect us. Government isn't eliminated. It is just shifted from the public sector, where there is an ethic of protection and public accountability, to the private sector, where there an ethic of profit...The "free market" doesn't free us from government; it just gives us unaccountable government without a moral mission."
Obviously this is a book designed to rub conservatives the wrong way. But, given the dominance of conservative thought since the Reagan Era, the message of Professor Lakoff is a readable counter-weight, and, for some, a new way of thinking about the mind and its control over literally how we view the world and the powers around our lives.
This is the face of a young Marine who had just participated in a house-to-house sweep in an Iraqi village.
The toll of boomerang re-deployments for these depleted soldiers and marines aren't just taking their toll in physical maiming (everything to lost limbs to brain trauma caused by powerful remote controlled exploding devices--IEDs-- ), but in the loss of long-term mental stability as well. New rules that make it impossible to send soldiers back until a year's "rest" from deployment do not address the still lamentable fact that the wars, particularly in Afghanistan, appear to be nowhere near ending and this country is relying on National Guard and Reservists troops in numbers that have not been seen in the Armed Forces since World War II.
Although it has been nearly three years since the first major findings came out recording high combat stress-related disorders plaguing American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, things seem to have only got worse. Recent studies by the Department of Veterans Affairs show that of the 289,328 veterans returning from combat across the globe, 37 percent are suffering from either clinical depression or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Alcoholism, violence (including suicide and homicide) are a record levels. In just one Army unit, based in Fort Collins, Colorado, over eleven homicides have been carried out by returning soldiers who saw intense fighting in Iraq.) And yet, despite, the studies, according to Daniel Swerdling of National Public Radio, the psychiatric staff at Army Medical facilities stateside are still under-funded and under staffed.
This is a report on the Fort Carson incidents from the pro-Veteran site, VetsVoice (not affiliated with the Department of Defense):
"Soldiers from a Colorado unit accused in nearly a dozen slayings since returning home - including a couple gunned down as they put up a garage sale sign - could be showing hostility fueled by intense combat in Iraq, where the troops suffered heavy losses and told of witnessing war crimes, the military said Wednesday.
In what was billed as its most comprehensive study to date of violent crimes and combat exposure, the Army looked at soldiers from the 4th Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division - nicknamed the Lethal Warriors - who were accused in a spate of five killings around Colorado Springs, home to Fort Carson, in 2007 and 2008.
Six other slayings involving unit soldiers occurred in Colorado and other states since 2005
We've been hearing about a number of incidents, that is by 'we' those who use multiple mostly online sources and either accidentally find them or use the right search words. The MSM is virtually silent except when one or two who get it are brave enough to fight to get the reports aired!!
Army investigators compared the Fort Carson unit of about 3,700 soldiers with a similarly sized unit and found it suffered more combat deaths in Iraq and was deployed there longer.
"This deployment experienced higher levels of combat intensity," the report said, adding that the soldiers also faced "significant disruptions in family-social support."
Lt. Gen. Eric B. Schoomaker, the Army's surgeon general, said Wednesday the unit's crime cluster appeared to be unique among Army bases and that its combat exposure and length of deployments are just two factor officials are looking at.
"We're starting to look into the deployments and ... how it's related with attitudes and behavior," Schoomaker said.......Rest Here
Soldiers returning need not only more down time, between deployments, they should be serving one if any at all. They need time between deployments! They need the help they seek! They need to be understood when seeking that help!"
It is clear that, in the course of American military history, to paraphrase a famous statesman of the past: Never has so much been demanded of so few, over and over again. I wonder how long the Afghan War would last if the leaders in Washington came out for a draft of men to fight the war. The very unpopularity of such an idea--among rank and file members of both parties--calls into question the very need for this war. And with troops strength recently doubled to 80,000 Americans in Afghanistan, and little continued support for this war outside America, this policy seems to be designed to continue to produce violence not only abroad but pain and suffering for families and their loved ones on the home front.
I enjoyed the Gerry Anderson series "Space:1999" (1975-77) with Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, at least in its first season. As a teenager I often wondered what life would be like in the new century. Would we be putting our energies into space exploration, or would the world continue in perpetual conflicts, some drummed up by our own leaders? Would there still be poverty and racial-tinged neglect in our cities?
Tomorrow, July 1st, began a battle which decided the fate of American history. On that day in 1863, 74,000 Confederates forces under the command of General Robert E. Lee, General James Longstreet, et al, advanced from the northeast into a small town in southern Pennsylvania, Gettysburg. If successful, Lee's battled hardened and largely successful corps of men could have threatened major northern cities and likely ended the Civil War in a forced truce that would have left slavery intact in the United States and divided the Republic-- perhaps forever.
The Union, led by a newly-appointed Commander, General Meade, pushed quickly up the Baltimore Pike road from the southwest to meet the invader with slightly larger forces (90,000). Three days later, after 50,000 men had been killed or badly wounded in a horrific series of skirmishes and mass charges, the biggest battle in the Western Hemisphere ended with a narrow Union victory and a renewed hope for an end to slavery and the joining of Americans as a single nation on a path of progress in human equality.
Here's a portion of the 1993 film, with no shots fired or bombs exploding. It is a scene taken from Michael Shaara's award winning novel, "The Killer Angels," and serves as a reflection of what vast differences there were--perhaps always are--in how experience shapes how we perceive our fellow beings.
Wherever Goose-step Marching Is Considered 'Trey Declasse"
Fascism gets thumped--bombing people declared off-limits for a time!
What was left of the Nazi government surrendered on this date in 1945 to The British and Her Commonwealth Nations, The Soviet Union, Free French forces, and the United States, the last big power in the fray (better late then never) but with millions of "ordinary" men and women pulling their own weight!
Music is from Duke Ellington's "Jump For Joy" (1945)
"Assassination Vacation" is a 2005 book by Sarah Vowell--who among others things contributes humorous and satirical essays to a popular National Public Radio called "This American Life" and also is a frequent guest on talk-shows. This volume documents her various trips around the East Coast with one or two companions--she doesn't drive and so must rope friends into these quixotic endeavors.
The pilgrimages, and she compares them to the medieval Christian kind, are dedicated to exploring the lives and tragic deaths of three slain 19th Century American Presidents--Abraham Lincoln, James A. Garfield, and William McKinley. Because these are men long in their tombs--one well remembered as The Great Emancipator, one of interest as a imperialist "war president" sending troops to conquer foreign soil (McKinley) and the last, Garfield, remembered perhaps only in his native Ohio by history buffs--Vowell can take license to bring out a number of off-beat and witty observations about the men and their killers.
Lincoln, for instance, was shot by John Wilkes Booth, from the back at Ford's Theater while he was watching a play. A lot of people know that. What many don't know is that Booth timed his shot to a laugh-line in the play, "Our American Cousin" that Mr and Mrs Lincoln and their companions were watching from balcony seats just above the stage. 'At least", she writes, "he allowed Lincoln to go out on a hoot."
And here is Vowell on the then-current Bush Administration:
"Proportionate to my own mounting frustrations at feeling increasingly excluded from the best interests of the current administration's control in these extraordinary times helps me toward a visceral understanding of the motivation of one who would perpetrate a violent act upon the leader of the free world. My capacity for this depth of empathy also gives me pause, for I have no idea how far away I am from the "invisible line" that separates me from a similar or identical purpose....Please allow me to state for the record that I am completely against violence of any kind as a way of resolving conflicts.
"That crafty explanation slaps me in the forehead with all the force of "duh." Until that moment, I hadn't realized that I embarked on the project of touring historic sites and monuments having to do with the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley right around the time my country iffily went to war, which is to say right around the time my resentment of the current president cranked up into contempt. Not that I want the current president killed. Like that director, I will, for the record (and for the FBI agent assigned to read this and make sure I mean no harm -- hello there), clearly state that while I am obsessed with death, I am against it."
Clearly Ms. Vowell has a bit of a twisted take on the subject of historical events, which she admits as much in her referring to the quest as ''this whole morbid assassination death trip".
What Vowell produced is a cheery and informative book that both educates us about the American past as shows us how this past has a peculiar habit of replicating itself in modern times. This is especially true when she recounts the distressing activities of President McKinley who in 1898 ordered American military units to conquer the Philippines, in a bloody and sadly torture-filled campaign, from the indigenous rebels who were trying to liberate the islands before the Americans even showed up. She correctly contrasts this with activities of Messers Bush and Dick Cheney, et al, in invading Iraq on what we now know to be less than up-front pretenses.
Here is an animated clip inspired by Vowell's ventures to a Bed and Breakfast in the course of her research of Assassinations Past.
"Where did the long-armed baboon come from?" In 1855 Abraham Lincoln was then a forty-six year old former one-term Congressman and long-time Illinois state legislator. He was also the senior attorney in a two-lawyer firm. He had worked his way into the profession by self-learning and clerking in a law office. The former dry goods store clerk, mailman and day laborer had a strong reputation around the Illinois circuit courts, and had even worked for some railroad companies and been effective.
But when he travelled by train to Cincinnati, Ohio, to serve as adjoining counsel on a patents case involving the agricultural technological wonder of the time, the McCormick Reaper, he was in for a professional embarrassment so bad he told a friend there that he would never come to Cincinnati again, period. (The case, known as "Manny vs. McCormick" was originally to be tried in Chicago but there was a last minute change of venue.)
The future President arrived from his long train trip from Springfield in a disheveled and dusty state. (Not unusual for Lincoln, a man who was never one for sartorial splendor in the best of times.) He managed to get to the hotel where he was staying, change into his best suit, and head for the law office representing his client. Soon, he ran into Edwin M. Stanton, considered by many the best attorney in the region. Stanton had also been retained by a certain Mr. Harding, who was representing the McCormick interest in the infringement case. It was then that, after snubbing Lincoln on the sidewalk in front of the law office when the taller man tried to speak to him courteously, turned to a colleague and compared the lanky Lincoln to a baboon. During the trial, in which Lincoln was not invited to join the other lawyers at the bench, it only got worse.
"Stanton was even heard to speak contemptuously of Lincoln as a backwoods bumpkin. Lincoln was hurt by the snub but stayed to watch the trial and was impressed by Stanton's courtroom brilliance. Six years later Stanton, a Democrat, was practicing in Washington during the wars first year and referred disdainfully to Lincoln in conversations with friends. Lincoln was aware of Stanton's opinions, but when he decided to get rid of the incompetent Simon Cameron, who had made a hash of military mobilization, he appointed none other than Stanton as secretary of war."--New York Tiimes Review, 2005.
Why Lincoln set aside the natural animosity against Stanton, as he did with his other political rivals like the brilliant former front-runner for President, New York Governor William Seward, the power-grasping Salmon P. Chase (who tried to get the 1864 Republican Party Presidential nomination in a covert and overt campaign against Lincoln), and Edward Bates of Missouri, is the subject of Ms. Kearns-Goodwin's book. Unlike the other Lincoln biographies I'm come across this one brings much more focus to the men around Lincoln and how he handled them. The three gentlemen mentioned above all wanted to be President and Lincoln brought all of them, including Stanton, into his cabinet not because of what they thought initially of Abraham Lincoln as a man but because they were the best men for the job--a job of vital importance since the nation was split apart and literally fighting for the notion that the Republic itself could survive.
There are dozens of interesting stories in this amazing book, which has gathered a lot of attention because of Barack Obama's interest in the work and his own gathering of former rivals in his presumptive cabinet. If you are interested in how the seemingly out-of-his-depth Lincoln could maneuver his way to political, moral and military success, this is a good book to pick up and savour.
Goodwin's writing style is brisk and refreshingly devoid of the overly-psychological bent that characterizes many Lincoln biographies.
Stanton by the way later said he had completely misjudged Lincoln in their initial meeting. It was Lincoln, "the long-armed baboon", whom he later spoke of after his assassination in the 16th President's most famous epitaph:
The Central Asia Institute is a non-profit, non-governmental organization. It was started by Greg Mortenson, a one-time child of Christian missionary parents (sent to Tanzania for much of his youth). He later enlisted in the military and became a medic, and later a trauma nurse by profession and a skilled mountain climber. He was trying to climb the infamous "K2" mountain in the Himalayas when disaster struck his party about 800 meters from the summit. He barely made it down the mountain alive and was nursed back to help by Muslim villagers in an isolated mountain town.
Thanks to the generosity of these strangers, Mortenson made a vow: he would return to the village and build the people there a school for their children. The efforts to get funding for the endeavor (and the beginnings of the Central Asia Institute's main efforts to promote female literacy in Pakistan and later Afghanistan) were outlined in a July 2008 column by Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times (excerpt below)
"Scrounging the money was a nightmare — his 580 fund-raising letters to prominent people generated one check, from Tom Brokaw — and Mr. Mortenson ended up selling his beloved climbing equipment and car. But when the school was built, he kept going. Now his aid group, the Central Asia Institute, has 74 schools in operation. His focus is educating girls.
"To get a school, villagers must provide the land and the labor to assure a local “buy-in,” and so far the Taliban have not bothered his schools. One anti-American mob rampaged through Baharak, Afghanistan, attacking aid groups — but stopped at the school that local people had just built with Mr. Mortenson. “This is our school,” the mob leaders decided, and they left it intact.
"Mr. Mortenson has had setbacks, including being kidnapped for eight days in Pakistan’s wild Waziristan region. It would be naïve to think that a few dozen schools will turn the tide in Afghanistan or Pakistan.
"Still, he notes that the Taliban recruits the poor and illiterate, and he also argues that when women are educated they are more likely to restrain their sons. Five of his teachers are former Taliban, and he says it was their mothers who persuaded them to leave the Taliban; that is one reason he is passionate about educating girls.
"So I have this fantasy: Suppose that the United States focused less on blowing things up in Pakistan’s tribal areas and more on working through local aid groups to build schools, simultaneously cutting tariffs on Pakistani and Afghan manufactured exports. There would be no immediate payback, but a better-educated and more economically vibrant Pakistan would probably be more resistant to extremism.
“Schools are a much more effective bang for the buck than missiles or chasing some Taliban around the country,” says Mr. Mortenson, who is an Army veteran.
"Each Tomahawk missile that the United States fires in Afghanistan costs at least $500,000. That’s enough for local aid groups to build more than 20 schools, and in the long run those schools probably do more to destroy the Taliban."
Mr Mortgenson's is also the co-author of a bestselling book about his experiences called "Three Cups of Tea" which has been on the best-seller lists in the USA for 90 weeks, despite not having a major publisher initially to promote it. It was mainly by word of mouth. It was through my wife that I first heard of this amazing organization and these efforts to help children, particularly in promoting education for girls in isolated mountain villages around the old Northwest Frontier of Central Asia. His organization also promotes the training of teachers from within the local communities themselves. www.threecupsoftea.com
(above) Here a camera crew visits a school and interviews Farhat, an eighth-level scholarship student, at a village school in the Pakistani part of Kashmir.
One of the mottos of the organization is "educate girls and save the world". It is estimated by the Council on Foreign Relations that this is a key to break the cycle of poverty that afflicts this area, the overwhelming number of whose victims are women.
For more on Greg Mortenson and the work of CAI, here is a clip from an interview from Borders Books television:
