THE DIRTY & DEADLY CONNECTION

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, a husband and wife team, began their experience in Afghanistan when they were the first American journalists to acquire permission to enter behind Soviet lines in 1981 for CBS News and produced a documentary, Afghanistan Between Three Worlds, for PBS. In 1983 they returned to Kabul with Harvard Negotiation project director Roger Fisher for ABC Nightline and contributed to the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. They have continued to research, write and lecture about the long-term run-up that led to the US invasion of Afghanistan. Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story published by City Lights. Their next book Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire will be published February, 2011.

OBAMA'S CZECH MATE

• Obama has shown once again his magician capabilities by with one hand pulling back the proposed George W. Bush missile offense deployments from the Czech Republic, but then with the other hand now saying that the U.S. will put a "missile defense center" into that country. Luckily the Czech resistance will respond quickly and make it tough on their new government which actually came into power after the former government was toppled due to their support for the previous Bush "missile defense" deployment plan. This whole thing just goes to show how serious the U.S. is about militarily surrounding Russia.

• Our local newspaper, the Times Record, wrote an editorial yesterday entitled "$7 Billion a Month?" It calls into question the spending on endless war and quotes our two members of the House of Representatives that voted against the $33 billion war supplemental earlier this week. The editorial concludes with this: "More money for war means less for our real needs. Perpetual war is wrecking our economy." It is obvious that our Bring Our War $$ Home campaign is having an effect. See the full editorial here

• On the brighter side, we picked our first ripe tomatoes (several of them) yesterday from the garden. I've lately been watching on-line videos about the care of tomatoes and have picked up some tips that have allowed me to get our first harvest much earlier than ever before.

• Noise report: They are now drilling the rocky ledge under our street directly in front of our house in order to put the new sewer lines in the ground. My head feels like a wire is loose and every time I move my head something is rattling around inside my brain housing.

THE SCIENTIFIC ORIGINS OF MY GRUMPINESS!

To my friendly critic I say - put that in your water pipe and smoke it.

Of course I say this in a gentle caring sort of way.

Bestselling author, activist, and social and ethical prophet Jeremy Rifkin investigates the evolution of empathy and the profound ways that it has shaped our development and our society.

FROM GRUMPY TO INSANITY

Right out in front of my bedroom window, at this very moment, is a huge noisy machine that looks like this. It is called the Recyclersaurus and it tears up the street as it slowly drags along and turns the asphalt into a dirt road. The city is going to replace the water and sewer pipes on my street and they expect this project to last until November. Even then they say they won't repave the road until next spring.

This machine must use about a million gallons of diesel fuel per second. Now I understand the war for oil. The ground is shaking and the dust is flying. We were told they would start at 7:00 am each morning but they come earlier than that and it lasts until 6:00 pm. Needless to say our sleep at the Addams-Melman House has gone the way of the dinosaurs.

It feels and sounds like we are living on top of a West Virginia mountain that is being strip mined for coal. My sister Laura is to arrive today from Florida for a vacation visit. She is going to love this.

The description of me yesterday by one blog reader as a grump will prove to be true in the days ahead. Be prepared for increasingly surly blog posts.

All the windows are closed to keep the noise and dust out. But the house still shakes and the groans of the Recyclersaurus penetrate the walls. In those rare moments when this monster machine pauses, bulldozers hauling gravel or other big machines move into action. The infernal beeping sound is destroying my brain cells. Thus the pleasures of working at home will now be interrupted for the next three months.

My friend Peter warned us last night to be sure to wash our garden veggies well recognizing that the toxic road dust stirred up by these diesel driven dinosaurs will completely cover our sweet produce. I pain for my new squash bed that I planted this spring in the front yard near the road never suspecting that it would now be under attack by the machines of madness.

Pray for me dear friends. I just might go from grumpy to insane right before your eyes. The only thing that gives me hope is the knowledge that the dinosaurs became extinct - so maybe the Recyclersaurus might as well.

The sooner the better.

FOR THE GRUMPS LIKE ME OUT THERE

According to one comment in a recent blog I am nothing but an old grump who needs the war machine to keep me from having to find a real job....or something like that.

In other words, Bruce get a life! Be positive, be happy. Stop your raging against the machine!

Here is acclaimed journalist, author and political activist Barbara Ehrenreich as she explores the darker side of positive thinking.

Sorry folks, call me a grump all you want. But if that's what you call someone who cares about peace and social justice then yes, I am a full-fledged grump!

WAR PARTIES JOIN HANDS IN $$$ ORGY

There were two important votes today in the House of Representatives (one must wonder who is really being represented by most politicians these days).

The first was a vote on Rep. Dennis Kucinich's resolution calling on the U.S. to remove its military forces from Pakistan. It went down in a blazing vote of bi-partisan unity 372-38. Those brave souls who voted in favor of the resolution were:

---- YEAS 38 ---

Baldwin
Campbell
Clarke
Clay
Cleaver
Davis (IL)
Delahunt
Duncan
Edwards (MD)
Ellison
Farr
Filner
Grijalva
Gutierrez
Jackson (IL)
Johnson (IL)
Jones
Kucinich
Lee (CA)
Lewis (GA)
Lofgren, Zoe
Maffei
McDermott
Miller, George
Napolitano
Ortiz
Paul
Pingree (ME)
Quigley
Rohrabacher
Rush
Sánchez, Linda T.
Serrano
Sires
Stark
Towns
Velázquez
Woolsey

Thirty-two Democrats and six Republicans voted in favor.

Then there was the vote on the $33 billion war supplemental for the remainder of 2010. Again the Democrats and Republicans held hands and passed it overwhelmingly showing skeptics that the two parties do find areas to agree with each other - namely war and corporate welfare.

In this case the vote was 308-114 in favor of the war $$$. Those who voted No were 102 Democrats and 12 Republicans. Those who passed the war spending bill were 160 Republicans and 148 Democrats.

Here is the list of those folks who voted NO on more war $$:

---- NAYS 114 ---

Baldwin
Becerra
Blumenauer
Broun (GA)
Brown, Corrine
Campbell
Capuano
Castor (FL)
Chaffetz
Chu
Clarke
Clay
Cleaver
Cohen
Conyers
Costello
Crowley
Cummings
Davis (IL)
DeFazio
Delahunt
DeLauro
Doggett
Doyle
Duncan
Edwards (MD)
Ehlers
Ellison
Eshoo
Farr
Fattah
Filner
Flake
Frank (MA)
Fudge
Garamendi
Gingrey (GA)
Grijalva
Gutierrez
Hastings (FL)
Hinchey
Hirono
Holt
Honda
Inslee
Jackson (IL)
Jackson Lee (TX)
Johnson (GA)
Johnson (IL)
Johnson, E. B.
Jones
Kagen
Kaptur
Kilpatrick (MI)
Kucinich
Larson (CT)
Lee (CA)
Lewis (GA)
Linder
Lofgren, Zoe
Maffei
Maloney
Markey (MA)
Matsui
McCollum
McDermott
McGovern
Meeks (NY)
Michaud
Miller, George
Moore (WI)
Moran (VA)
Murphy (CT)
Nadler (NY)
Napolitano
Neal (MA)
Oberstar
Obey
Olver
Pallone
Paul
Payne
Pingree (ME)
Polis (CO)
Quigley
Rangel
Richardson
Rohrabacher
Rush
Sánchez, Linda T.
Sanchez, Loretta
Schakowsky
Schrader
Scott (VA)
Serrano
Shea-Porter
Slaughter
Speier
Stark
Stupak
Thompson (CA)
Thompson (MS)
Tierney
Tonko
Towns
Tsongas
Velázquez
Waters
Watt
Waxman
Weiner
Welch
Woolsey
Wu

Our Congresswoman Chellie Pingree (D-ME) from the 1st district voted right on both of these. She deserves a pat on the back. Maine's Congressman Mike Michaud (D-ME) voted wrong on the Pakistan resolution but then voted correctly on the war $$ supplemental. A bit confusing for sure.

When Democrats come around this fall seeking your money and your vote in November ask them how they voted on this war $$ bill. When they start talking about all the bad things Republicans will do if they get elected - like cut unemployment, teacher jobs, health care, and the like - ask these blowhards how they figure they can pay for their social spending promises and fund two wars at the tune of $7 billion a month.

It's enough to make you sick. The Democrats have proven that when it really counts most of them love the Republican agenda of endless war.

I refuse to give up or give in. There is far too much at stake.

WAR SUPPLEMENTAL VOTE LIKELY TUESDAY

Looks like the House will vote again (probably Tuesday) on the $33 billion Afghan war supplemental bill. It recently passed the Senate and has to go back to the House since the one previously passed by the House is different from the Senate version.

After the revelations yesterday by WikiLeaks one would presume that the Congress would be highly embarrassed about its total lack of oversight of these wars. Both parties have handed over zillions of dollars to the Pentagon for what is now widely known is a dead-end street.

Maybe the upcoming House vote will surprise us all but I am not holding my breath. The Democrats, who rode the anti-war horse into power, have shown they are quite similar to the Republicans when it comes to deceiving their base on issues they care about.

I read tonight that the teachers unions are on the verge of declaring total war on Obama and his "race to the top" which is part of a union busting move. At their recent national conventions the two teacher unions did not invite anyone from the Obama administration to speak which is highly unusual.

The president of the National Education Association, Dennis Van Roekel, summarized teacher's experience with the Obama administration:

"Today our members face the most anti-educator, anti-union, anti-student environment I have ever experienced."

This is an extraordinary statement and illustrates that Obama is proving to be more anti-teacher than was George W. Bush, who introduced the terrible No Child Left Behind program. Teachers thought Obama would get rid of it. Instead he has expanded it and made it worse.

So the peace movement has been betrayed by Obama and the Democrats. The teachers feel the same as do many other unionists. Environmentalists are being screwed by Obama and the Dems. Hispanics are getting nailed as Obama is now escalating deportations. Black unemployment rate is now at an epidemic level. The list could go on all day long as we see Obama and the Democratic party leadership pander to Wall Street and corporate America.

If the Democrats had any damn sense they'd start by banding together and use the $7 billion now being pissed away every month on endless war to create real jobs at home building rail systems, wind turbines, solar systems, fixing bridges, rehiring teachers that are being laid off and much more.

But for reasons that are becoming obvious they will again take a dive and keep us mired in Iraq-Afghanistan-Pakistan. Only handful of Dems have the guts to stand up to their own party leadership. They are basically lemmings and are taking the rest of us over the cliff with them.

We should be quickly figuring out that our real enemy is not the tea bag movement. The real enemy is crooked weaselly politicians who are screwing working people on the left and the right.

Let me go on record now and say that I don't see much "real world" difference if the Republicans take back the Congress in November.

What are they going to do, keep us mired in a war and waste all of our money?

NO MORE U.S. BASES ON GUAM

Pagat, a sacred site in Guam, has served as a center for the communal revitalization of the indigenous Chamorro people for millennia. Now, sixty-five years after the U.S. liberation of the tiny island (half the size of Okinawa) from imperial Japan—the U.S. military wants to transform this beloved gathering spot into a firing range. This threat to the sacred is one of many U.S. plans in its proposal to militarize even more of Guam, 30% of which is already covered with military bases.

For more info on Guam organizing look here

AFGHAN WAR LOGS REVEALED

Afghanistan war logs: Massive leak of secret files exposes truth of occupation

By Nick Davies and David Leigh
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
Sunday 25 July 2010

The war logs reveal civilian killings by coalition forces, secret efforts to eliminate Taliban and al-Qaida leaders, and discuss the involvement of Iran and Pakistan in supporting insurgents.

A huge cache of secret US military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency.

The disclosures come from more than 90,000 records of incidents and intelligence reports about the conflict obtained by the whistleblowers' website Wikileaks in one of the biggest leaks in US military history. The files, which were made available to the Guardian, the New York Times and the German weekly Der Spiegel, give a blow-by-blow account of the fighting over the last six years, which has so far cost the lives of more than 320 British and more than 1,000 US troops.

Their publication comes amid mounting concern that Barack Obama's "surge" strategy is failing and as coalition troops hunt for two US naval personnel captured by the Taliban south of Kabul on Friday.

The war logs also detail:

• How a secret "black" unit of special forces hunts down Taliban leaders for "kill or capture" without trial.

• How the US covered up evidence that the Taliban have acquired deadly surface-to-air missiles.
• How the coalition is increasingly using deadly Reaper drones to hunt and kill Taliban targets by remote control from a base in Nevada.

• How the Taliban have caused growing carnage with a massive escalation of their roadside bombing campaign, which has killed more than 2,000 civilians to date.

In a statement, the White House said the chaotic picture painted by the logs was the result of "under-resourcing" under Obama's predecessor, saying: "It is important to note that the time period reflected in the documents is January 2004 to December 2009."

The White House also criticised the publication of the files by Wikileaks: "We strongly condemn the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organisations, which puts the lives of the US and partner service members at risk and threatens our national security. Wikileaks made no effort to contact the US government about these documents, which may contain information that endanger the lives of Americans, our partners, and local populations who co-operate with us."

The logs detail, in sometimes harrowing vignettes, the toll on civilians exacted by coalition forces: events termed "blue on white" in military jargon. The logs reveal 144 such incidents.

Some of these casualties come from the controversial air strikes that have led to Afghan government protests, but a large number of previously unknown incidents also appear to be the result of troops shooting unarmed drivers or motorcyclists out of a determination to protect themselves from suicide bombers.

At least 195 civilians are admitted to have been killed and 174 wounded in total, but this is likely to be an underestimate as many disputed incidents are omitted from the daily snapshots reported by troops on the ground and then collated, sometimes erratically, by military intelligence analysts.

Bloody errors at civilians' expense, as recorded in the logs, include the day French troops strafed a bus full of children in 2008, wounding eight. A US patrol similarly machine-gunned a bus, wounding or killing 15 of its passengers, and in 2007 Polish troops mortared a village, killing a wedding party including a pregnant woman, in an apparent revenge attack.

Questionable shootings of civilians by UK troops also figure. The US compilers detail an unusual cluster of four British shootings in Kabul in the space of barely a month, in October/November 2007, culminating in the death of the son of an Afghan general. Of one shooting, they wrote: "Investigation controlled by the British. We are not able to get [sic] complete story."

A second cluster of similar shootings, all involving Royal Marine commandos in Helmand province, took place in a six-month period at the end of 2008, according to the log entries. Asked by the Guardian about these allegations, the Ministry of Defence said: "We have been unable to corroborate these claims in the short time available and it would be inappropriate to speculate on specific cases without further verification of the alleged actions."

Rachel Reid, who investigates civilian casualty incidents in Afghanistan for Human Rights Watch, said: "These files bring to light what's been a consistent trend by US and Nato forces: the concealment of civilian casualties. Despite numerous tactical directives ordering transparent investigations when civilians are killed, there have been incidents I've investigated in recent months where this is still not happening.

Accountability is not just something you do when you are caught. It should be part of the way the US and Nato do business in Afghanistan every time they kill or harm civilians." The reports, many of which the Guardian is publishing in full online, present an unvarnished and often compelling account of the reality of modern war.

Most of the material, though classified "secret" at the time, is no longer militarily sensitive. A small amount of information has been withheld from publication because it might endanger local informants or give away genuine military secrets. Wikileaks, whose founder, Julian Assange, obtained the material in circumstances he will not discuss, said it would redact harmful material before posting the bulk of the data on its "uncensorable" servers.

Wikileaks published in April this year a previously suppressed classified video of US Apache helicopters killing two Reuters cameramen on the streets of Baghdad, which gained international attention. A 22-year-old intelligence analyst, Bradley Manning, was arrested in Iraq and charged with leaking the video, but not with leaking the latest material. The Pentagon's criminal investigations department continues to try to trace the leaks and recently unsuccessfully asked Assange, he says, to meet them outside the US to help them. Assange allowed the Guardian to examine the logs at our request. No fee was involved and Wikileaks was not involved in the preparation of the Guardian's articles.

See much more here and here




Interview with Wikileaks Julian Assange

SPEECH FROM NAT'L PEACE CONFAB

Journalist Glen Ford speaking at this weekend's national peace conference in Albany, New York. Ford writes for the Black Agenda Report.

Many of the other speeches at the event can be found here

LOOKING FOR A FIGHT

Right now the U.S. military is practicing an invasion of North Korea. The U.S. and South Korean military have just begun war games called "Invincible Spirit" which will include about 8,000 military personnel from both countries.

North Korea and China are not happy as they witness the U.S. currently doubling its military presence in the region. These war games, ostensibly aimed at North Korea, are ultimately being done in order to show China that the U.S. will "manage and control" this part of the world.

"We resolutely oppose any activities in the Yellow Sea that may threaten China's security," said a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman. Imagine if you would the howls of outrage if China was holding similar war game exercises off the coast of California. The politicians in America would be spitting on themselves as they screamed bloody murder. But when the U.S. does the same to other countries it is all "for the good".

Just last Friday Secretary of State Hillary Clinton got on her rostrum and amped up the war talk saying, "Peaceful resolution of the issues on the Korean Peninsula will be possible only if North Korea fundamentally changes its behavior."

Translation: North Korea must surrender to the U.S. or they will never have a moment of peace.

The U.S. destroyed North Korea during the Korean War. In his new book called The Korean War, historian Bruce Cumings recalls the truth about the war that to this day has not seen a peace agreement. Instead a truce was declared on July 27, 1953 but the U.S. war "games" today are evidence enough that the "conflict" still rages on.

The New York Times just days ago reviewed the new book by Cumings. Here are some parts of the review.

Americans need to get past the idea, Mr. Cumings says, that the Korean War was a “discrete, encapsulated” story that began in 1950, when the United States intervened to help push the Communist north out of the south of Korea, and ended in 1953, after the war bogged down in a stalemate. The United States succeeded in containment, establishing the 2.5-mile-wide demilitarized zone that still runs through Korea’s middle, but failed miserably at the war for the north, an attempt at Communist rollback.

Mr. Cumings argues that the Korean War was a civil war with long, tangled historical roots, one in which America had little business meddling. He notes how “appallingly dirty” the war was. In terms of civilian slaughter, he declares, “our ostensibly democratic ally was the worst offender, contrary to the American image of the North Koreans as fiendish terrorists.”

Mr. Cumings likens the indiscriminate American bombing of North Korea to genocide. He writes that American soldiers took part in, or observed, civilian atrocities not dissimilar to those at My Lai. An official inquiry is needed into some of these events, he writes, for any kind of healing to begin. (He also writes that this war, during which nearly 37,000 American soldiers died, deserves a memorial as potent and serious as Maya Lin’s Vietnam memorial.)

Among the most important things to understand about North Korean behavior then and now, Mr. Cumings writes, is the longtime enmity between Korea and Japan. Japan took Korea as a colony in 1910, with America’s blessing, and replaced the Korean language with Japanese. Japan humiliated and brutalized Korea in other ways. (During World War II the Japanese Army forcibly turned tens of thousands of Korean women into sex slaves known as “comfort women.”) About this history Mr. Cumings writes, “Neither Korea nor Japan has ever gotten over it.”

North Korea, which is virulently anti-Japan, remains bitter and fearful of that country and of the United States. It will do whatever it can to stay out of the hands of South Korea, where leaders have long-standing historical ties to Japan.

Mr. Cumings, in “The Korean War,” details the north’s own atrocities, and acknowledges that current “North Korean political practice is reprehensible.” But he says that we view that country through “Orientalist bigotry,” seeing only its morbid qualities. We wrongly label the country Stalinist, he argues. “There is no evidence in the North Korean experience of the mass violence against whole classes of people or the wholesale ‘purge’ that so clearly characterized Stalinism,” he writes.

The most eye-opening sections of “The Korean War” detail America’s saturation bombing of Korea’s north. “What hardly any Americans know or remember,” Mr. Cumings writes, “is that we carpet-bombed the north for three years with next to no concern for civilian casualties.” The United States dropped more bombs in Korea (635,000 tons, as well as 32,557 tons of napalm) than in the entire Pacific theater during World War II. Our logic seemed to be, he says, that “they are savages, so that gives us the right to shower napalm on innocents.”

Witness the carnage in this passage from early in “The Korean War”: “Here was the Vietnam War we came to know before Vietnam — gooks, napalm, rapes, whores, an unreliable ally, a cunning enemy, fundamentally untrained G.I.’s fighting a war their top generals barely understood, fragging of officers, contempt for the know-nothing civilians back home, devilish battles indescribable even to loved ones, press handouts from Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters apparently scripted by comedians or lunatics, an ostensible vision of bringing freedom and liberty to a sordid dictatorship run by servants of Japanese imperialism.”

You'd think that Obama and the Pentagon had enough war on their hands at this time. But the U.S. military is currently running provocative war games not only near China and North Korea.

Similar military operations are underway in the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman where the U.S. and its war allies have 100 ships on maneuvers. The U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet headquarters is based just across the Gulf from Iran in Bahrain. There can be no doubt that the U.S. strategy is to create an incident with Iran in order to justify U.S. and Israeli attack on that nation.

And in the Caribbean, the U.S. has positioned some 5,000 troops in Costa Rica, just a stone's throw from Venezuela, under the pretext of doing "drug interdiction" operations. Clearly, just like the cases cited above, the U.S. is militarily surrounding and provoking Venezuela in hopes to justify the overthrow of the Hugo Chavez administration.

In the case of Iran and Venezuela we know that both those nations have significant supplies of oil. China is a huge importer of oil and thus a rival with the U.S. for declining supplies of fossil fuels. In the case of China the U.S. is developing the naval infrastructure to interdict China's oil importation by sea - thus "managing" their economic expansion.

The bully empire is on the lose and is looking for a fight. But back home in the U.S. the economy is collapsing under the weight of these global military operations. Something has to give - and it will be soon. We will have either total global war or the U.S. empire will collapse.

Which side are you on?

NORTH KOREA DIDN'T SINK THE SHIP

Doubts surface on North Korea's role in ship sinking

Some in South Korea dispute the official version of events: that a North Korean torpedo ripped apart the Cheonan.

By Barbara Demick and John M. Glionna

Los Angeles Times

July 23, 2010

Reporting from Seoul

The way U.S. officials see it, there's little mystery behind the most notorious shipwreck in recent Korean history.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton calls the evidence "overwhelming" that the Cheonan, a South Korean warship that sank in March, was hit by a North Korean torpedo. Vice President Joe Biden has cited the South Korean-led panel investigating the sinking as a model of transparency.

But challenges to the official version of events are coming from an unlikely place: within South Korea.

Armed with dossiers of their own scientific studies and bolstered by conspiracy theories, critics dispute the findings announced May 20 by South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, which pointed a finger at Pyongyang.

They also question why Lee made the announcement nearly two months after the ship's sinking, on the very day campaigning opened for fiercely contested local elections. Many accuse the conservative leader of using the deaths of 46 sailors to stir up anti-communist sentiment and sway the vote.

The critics, mostly but not all from the opposition, say it is unlikely that the impoverished North Korean regime could have pulled off a perfectly executed hit against a superior military power, sneaking a submarine into the area and slipping away without detection. They also wonder whether the evidence of a torpedo attack was misinterpreted, or even fabricated.

"I couldn't find the slightest sign of an explosion," said Shin Sang-chul, a former shipbuilding executive-turned-investigative journalist. "The sailors drowned to death. Their bodies were clean. We didn't even find dead fish in the sea."

Shin, who was appointed to the joint investigative panel by the opposition Democratic Party, inspected the damaged ship with other experts April 30. He was removed from the panel shortly afterward, he says, because he had voiced a contrary opinion: that the Cheonan hit ground in the shallow water off the Korean peninsula and then damaged its hull trying to get off a reef.

"It was the equivalent of a simple traffic accident at sea," Shin said.

The Defense Ministry said in a statement that Shin was removed because of "limited expertise, a lack of objectivity and scientific logic," and that he was "intentionally creating public mistrust" in the investigation.

The doubts about the Cheonan have embarrassed the United States, which will begin joint military exercises Sunday in a show of unity against North Korean aggression. On Friday, an angry North Korea warned that "there will be a physical response" to the maneuvers.

Two South Korean-born U.S. academics have joined the chorus of skepticism, holding a news conference this month in Tokyo to voice their suspicions about the "smoking gun:" a piece of torpedo propeller with a handwritten mark in blue ink reading "No. 1" in Korean.

"You could put that mark on an iPhone and claim it was manufactured in North Korea," scoffed one of the academics, Seunghun Lee, a professor of physics at the University of Virginia.

Lee called the discovery of the propeller fragment five days before the government's news conference suspicious. The salvaged part had more corrosion than would have been expected after just 50 days in the water, yet the blue writing was surprisingly clear, he said.

"The government is lying when they said this was found underwater. I think this is something that was pulled out of a warehouse of old materials to show to the press," Lee said.

South Korean politicians say they've been left in the dark about the investigation.

"We asked for very basic information: interviews with surviving sailors, communication records, the reason the ship was out there," said Choi Moon-soon, an assemblyman with the Democratic Party.

The legislature also has not been allowed to see the full report by the investigative committee, only a five-page synopsis.

"I don't know why they haven't released the report. They are trying to cover up small inconsistencies, and that has cost them credibility," said Kim Chul-woo, a former Defense Ministry official who is now an analyst with the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses, a government think tank.

A military oversight body, the Board of Inspection and Audit, has accused senior naval officers of lying and concealing information.

"Military officers deliberately left out or distorted key information in their report to senior officials and the public because they wanted to avoid being held to account for being unprepared," an official of the inspection board was quoted as telling the South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo.

The Cheonan, a 1,200-ton corvette, sank the night of March 26 about 12 miles off North Korea. The first report issued by Yonhap, the official South Korean news agency, said the ship had been struck by a torpedo, but soon afterward the story changed to say the ship sank after being grounded on a reef.

The military repeated that version for days. The audit board found that sailors on a nearby vessel, the Sokcho, who fired off 35 shots with a 76-millimeter cannon around the time of the sinking, were instructed to say they'd been shooting at a flock of birds, even though at first they had said they'd seen a suspected submarine on radar.

On April 2, as Defense Minister Kim Tae-young was testifying before the National Assembly, a cameraman shooting over his right shoulder managed to capture an image of a handwritten note from the president's office instructing him not to talk about North Korean submarines.

Such inconsistencies and reversals have fueled the suspicions of government critics. U.S. officials, however, say the panel's conclusion is irrefutable.

Rear Adm. Thomas J. Eccles, the senior U.S. representative on the panel, said investigators considered all possibilities: a grounding, an internal explosion, a collision with a mine. But they quickly concluded that the boat was sunk by a bubble-jet torpedo, which exploded underneath the vessel and didn't leave the usual signs of an explosion, he said.

"The pattern of damage was exactly aligned with that kind of weapon," Eccles said in a telephone interview. "Torpedoes these days are designed to drive underneath the target and explode. They use the energy of their explosion to make a bubble that expands and contracts. It is designed to break the back of the ship."

Pyongyang, meanwhile, denies involvement in the sinking and calls the accusation against it a fabrication.

South Koreans themselves appear to be confused: Polls show that more than 20% of the public doesn't believe North Korea sank the Cheonan.

Wi Sung-lac, South Korea's top envoy for North Korean affairs, says the criticism from within has made it difficult to get China and Russia on board to punish Pyongyang for the attack.

"They say, 'But even in your own country, many people don't believe the result,' " Wi said.

DECISION TIME: CORPORATE WELFARE OR JOBS AT HOME?

This is the key question of our moment.

This war is a massive welfare contribution to the very corporations who want to control global resources and also cut social spending. This story is the same all over the world. Governments are militarizing and cutting back on human progress. Simple as that. They are working us to build weapons and fight their wars so they can control the declining "stocks" of planetary resources.

Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-ME) had a district-wide conference call last night and one of the questions came from Sally Breen (a key leader in our Bring Our War $$ Home campaign) from Windham, Maine who asked: "Thank you for your leadership on saying “no” to more war funding. You are a hero to us. What can we, here in Maine, do to support you in opposing more war funding, and even more important, begin economic conversion and spend more money on the environment and education?

Pingree Answer: Thank you for your kind words. The war supplemental is $37 billion and it is now in the Senate and expected to be heard next week. I voted “no” to more war funding because the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are costing us $7 billion each month, and that is being added to the deficit. We are spending $1 trillion on unfunded wars. We can’t afford to spend this money. I’m hearing from more and more of my colleagues and constituents on this matter. They say we are building roads, bridges and schools in Afghanistan, but we need to be doing that right here in Maine. You mentioned economic conversion. We have excellent workmanship right here at Bath Iron Works and Pratt and Whitney. We have wind turbines where I live on Vinalhaven. The blades for those turbines came from outside the USA. I believe that we should be building the blades right here at Bath Iron Works, and the materials for the blades should be being made in Maine. Pratt and Whitney builds some military equipment, but some of the equipment they build are for commercial uses. We should be seeing more of that here in Maine.

My hope is that everyone will find a small way each day to help kick this debate and new thinking into action. God knows we need to stop this corporate domination madness now while we can still breathe.

One friend told me about a Maine summer party encounter with a fellow worker who defended the military machine.....my friend challenged the thinking of his peer in front of others. Not something that is often done in that particular social setting. When this happens more often we have a movement of consciousness on our hands.

Please water the seed, even those of you living on an island.

CALLING FROM JAMAICA MON

• I sent around a copy of a new article by Democracy Now's Amy Goodman this morning called Deficit Doves. It's all about the federal budget crisis and the need to cut military spending. In the article she mentions our Bring Our War $$ Home campaign. It got picked up by Common Dreams web site and they put a link to our campaign web site and within a very short time I got an email from a Catholic nun out in the Midwest who said our site had been shut down. I called our web master Dan Ellis and he got on the case and found out someone had accused us of "spamming" and the web site company shut us down. Dan got them to put it back up but we likely lost hundreds of hits in the meantime. My guess is that someone who opposes our work called the server company and accused us of spamming. A version of cyber warfare.

• At 7:30 am this morning I was on the phone doing a half-hour radio interview with a station in Kingston, Jamaica about U.S. policy toward North Korea. Also on the interview was Dr. Han Park from the University of Georgia who over and over again said he agreed with my analysis on U.S. aggressive military expansion to control Russia and China - using North Korea as the excuse; the unlikelihood that North Korea sunk the South Korean ship Cheonan; and that Obama's foreign policy was turning out to be generally the same as that of George W. Bush.

I also got in at the end the fact that Obama is calling for the spending of $175 billion over the next two decades to build new nuclear weapons factories, testing and simulation facilities, and modernizing and extending the life of the nuclear weapons in the U.S. stockpile. In addition there will be more than $100 billion for the Pentagon during that same period to build the platforms needed to deliver the nuclear warheads. This includes a new class of ballistic missile submarines, a new long-range bomber, and a new tactical fighter-bomber. I made the point about total U.S. hypocrisy as Bush-Obama lecture North Korea and Iran about the "evils" of nukes while we keep setting the pace with new generations of such weapons. Add in our space technology developments and it is double hypocrisy.

• I finally got around to reading the final article in the Washington Post three-part series called Top Secret America. I made a few more additions to my previous blog post about it. See it here The 3rd article focuses on the massive expansion in the greater Washington DC area of the NSA and NRO and there is much more to come. It's your $$$ being flushed down the rat hole of surveillance and endless war.

TOXIC WATERS IN ALABAMA

Chemists tested several water and sand samples for oil content and one test actually exploded.....and some parents are allowing their kids to play in the water and sand.

Hello, anybody home!

92 YEAR OLD "THREAT"

U.S. forces in Afghanistan kill a 92 year old man in his bed. Shoot him 25 times.

Your money at work making us all safe back home - bringing us freedom and democracy.

Liberty.....and all that rot.

HOME & GARDENS

• I do our weekly radio show tonight with Peter Woodruff who works at Bath Iron Works (BIW) building Aegis destroyers. Each week we have a theme, tonight it is families and gardens. Lots of room to roam..... Peter is trying hard to help move BIW into building wind turbines. He is quite courageous.

• I've been working in the garden lots lately. Made some good pesto from garlic scapes and basil from the garden. Very good reviews from housemates. Yesterday I thinned the carrots so will make some kind of salad from them when I finish this blog. Our green beans are ready for picking if we can beat the Japanese Beetles who are devouring the leaves.

• Tomorrow night is the meeting of Maine Veterans for Peace. We are now one month away from the national convention which our chapter will host in Portland. We are trying to raise funds for the confab and will hold an event at Flatbread Pizza in Portland on Tuesday, August 3. We will get a cut on every pizza sold so please come join us for a fun night and help Maine VFP out.

• Our new housemate Amanda had a baby yesterday - a girl named Anda. That will make seven of us in the house now. Should also count the two skunks we've seen in the yard lately...they nightly bless us with their foul smell.

• One of my favorite musicians, Tom Neilson who lives in Western Massachusetts, will be doing a garden party concert in Brunswick on September 19. I am organizing it and always enjoy Tom's wit and his skill at using lyrics to speak the truth to the rich and powerful on behalf of working people. Tom grew up on a dairy farm in New York and is still grounded in those early roots. His latest album is called Biomess.

• Our Bring Our War $$ Home vigil continues here in Bath every Monday for 1/2 hour. Last Monday I was on my own but still had a good response. We've been counting honks and positive waves and have seen a slight jump in the numbers since we began doing this last winter.

RACE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE BARREL

Talking so-called education reform - more like education de-form. It's all about privatizing education like everything else the corporations are screwing up these days.

SOME SPICY BITS FROM "TOP SECRET AMERICA"

Knowing that many of you won't have time to read the long Washington Post expose on privatizing intelligence and war I thought I'd post a few interesting bits from the series.

In the end the story is not a surprise but the rich details give some insight into how the corporations have taken near total control of foreign policy and are becoming fat rich bastards to boot.

• In the Department of Defense, where more than two-thirds of the intelligence programs reside, only a handful of senior officials - called Super Users - have the ability to even know about all the department's activities. But as two of the Super Users indicated in interviews, there is simply no way they can keep up with the nation's most sensitive work.

• The result, he added, is that it's impossible to tell whether the country is safer because of all this spending and all these activities. "Because it lacks a synchronizing process, it inevitably results in message dissonance, reduced effectiveness and waste," retired Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines said. "We consequently can't effectively assess whether it is making us more safe."

• With so many more employees, units and organizations, the lines of responsibility began to blur. To remedy this, at the recommendation of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, the George W. Bush administration and Congress decided to create an agency in 2004 with overarching responsibilities called the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to bring the colossal effort under control.

• "You can't find a four-star general without a security detail," said one three-star general now posted in Washington after years abroad. "Fear has caused everyone to have stuff. Then comes, 'If he has one, then I have to have one.' It's become a status symbol."

• When hired, a typical analyst knows very little about the priority countries - Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan - and is not fluent in their languages. Still, the number of intelligence reports they produce on these key countries is overwhelming, say current and former intelligence officials who try to cull them every day.

• Within the Defense Department alone, 18 commands and agencies conduct information operations, which aspire to manage foreign audiences’ perceptions of U.S. policy and military activities overseas...... And all the major intelligence agencies and at least two major military commands claim a major role in cyber-warfare, the newest and least-defined frontier.

• So great is the government's appetite for private contractors with top-secret clearances that there are now more than 300 companies, often nicknamed "body shops," that specialize in finding candidates, often for a fee that approaches $50,000 a person, according to those in the business.

• "This is a terrible confession," Robert Gates said. "I can't get a number on how many contractors work for the Office of the Secretary of Defense," referring to the department's civilian leadership.

• The privatization of national security work has been made possible by a nine-year "gusher" of money, as Gates recently described national security spending since the 9/11 attacks....
  With so much money to spend, managers do not always worry about whether they are spending it effectively....."Someone says, 'Let's do another study,' and because no one shares information, everyone does their own study," said Elena Mastors, who headed a team studying the al-Qaeda leadership for the Defense Department. "It's about how many studies you can orchestrate, how many people you can fly all over the place. Everybody's just on a spending spree. We don't need all these people doing all this stuff."

• The National Security Agency, which conducts worldwide electronic surveillance, hires private firms to come up with most of its technological innovations. The NSA used to work with a small stable of firms; now it works with at least 484 and is actively recruiting more.

• Contractors can offer more money - often twice as much - to experienced federal employees than the government is allowed to pay them. And because competition among firms for people with security clearances is so great, corporations offer such perks as BMWs and $15,000 signing bonuses, as Raytheon did in June for software developers with top-level clearances.

• Hiring contractors was supposed to save the government money. But that has not turned out to be the case. A 2008 study published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence found that contractors made up 29 percent of the workforce in the intelligence agencies but cost the equivalent of 49 percent of their personnel budgets. Gates said that federal workers cost the government 25 percent less than contractors.

• [General Dynamics] embraced the emerging intelligence-driven style of warfare. It developed small-target identification systems and equipment that could intercept an insurgent's cellphone and laptop communications. It found ways to sort the billions of data points collected by intelligence agencies into piles of information that a single person could analyze.....It also began gobbling up smaller companies that could help it dominate the new intelligence landscape, just as its competitors were doing.....The company reported $31.9 billion in revenue in 2009, up from $10.4 billion in 2000. Its workforce has more than doubled in that time, from 43,300 to 91,700 employees, according to the company.

• Another official, a longtime conservative staffer on the Senate Armed Services Committee, described it as "a living, breathing organism" impossible to control or curtail. "How much money has been involved is just mind-boggling," he said. "We've built such a vast instrument. What are you going to do with this thing? . . . It's turned into a jobs program."

• From the road, it's impossible to tell how large the NSA has become, even though its buildings occupy 6.3 million square feet - about the size of the Pentagon - and are surrounded by 112 acres of parking spaces. As massive as that might seem, documents indicate that the NSA is only going to get bigger: 10,000 more workers over the next 15 years; $2 billion to pay for just the first phase of expansion; an overall increase in size that will bring its building space throughout the Fort Meade cluster to nearly 14 million square feet.

• Loudoun County, ranked as the wealthiest county in the country, helps supply the workforce of the nearby National Reconnaissance Office headquarters, which manages spy satellites. Fairfax County, the second-wealthiest, is home to the NRO, the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Arlington County, ranked ninth, hosts the Pentagon and major intelligence agencies. Montgomery County, ranked 10th, is home to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. And Howard County, ranked third, is home to 8,000 NSA employees.

• The schools, indeed, are among the best, and some are adopting a curriculum this fall that will teach students as young as 10 what kind of lifestyle it takes to get a security clearance and what kind of behavior would disqualify them.
  

My Comments:

All this reenforces for me the whole notion that America's role under corporate globalization of the world economy will be "security export".

I am reminded of the Crown family from Chicago that have been significant owners of General Dynamics. They were early supporters of Obama's campaign for president and early on did national fundraising for him. They also opened the door to national Jewish community support for him. You could say they have an investment in Obama.

As one line above says, this is becoming a jobs program. And good paying jobs, with huge perks, for those hired. All you have to do to be hired is bury your judgement and your conscience. You have to be willing to advocate and lobby for a continuation of this massive gravy train. This puts you in league with fascist elements who are then using people's greed to help construct a global military machine whose principal purpose is to advance the interests of corporate capital.

I'd love to see the "fiscal conservatives" and Tea Baggers take a crack at this one. Instead of complaining about immigrants getting treatment at the hospital emergency room they ought to be publicly taking on the corruption, waste, fraud, and abuse that is now at unheard of levels.

More than that the conservatives and Tea Baggers should be first in line to question our "liberty and freedom" being lost as we lose our democracy to the forces of denial, secrecy, greed, and imperialism.

All being funded by working class people who won't get anything out of all this except the tax bill and fewer rights.

TOP SECRET AIR AND SPACE OPS

TOP SECRET AMERICA

A Washington Post Investigation

Air and satellite operations

The warfare- and combat-related air and space activities and operations of the military, intelligence agencies and the federal government. The Air Force is the primary organization here, but the Navy and Marine Corps also fly large air wings, as do Customs and Border Patrol as well as the FBI. The NRO is the national organization responsible for the development and operation of reconnaissance satellites of all sorts. Those air activities primarily involved in intelligence collection are included under technical spying.

434 results for Air and satellite operations

27 government organizations/50 companies

Government Organization/HQ Location/Number of Locations/Number of Contracting Companies

Africa Command Stuttgart-Moehringen, AE 2 19
Air Force Arlington, VA 99 392
Air Force Intelligence Arlington, VA 113 153
Army Arlington, VA 106 353
Army Intelligence Fort Belvoir, VA 93 120
Customs and Border Protection Washington, DC 56 56
Central Command Tampa, FL 6 64
Central Intelligence Agency McLean, VA 36 114
Coast Guard Washington, DC 15 44
Defense Intelligence Agency Arlington, VA 22 317
Department of Energy Washington, DC 18 87
European Command Stuttgart-Vaihingen, AE 2 11
Federal Bureau of Investigation Washington, DC 448 173
Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Org. Arlington, VA 4 68
Marine Corps Arlington, VA 24 82
Navy Arlington, VA 56 385
Navy Intelligence Arlington, VA 31 104
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency Bethesda, MD 8 121
National Reconnaissance Office Chantilly, VA 6 124
National Security Agency Ft. Meade, MD 19 484
Other civil departments and agencies Washington, DC 31 4
Pacific Command Camp H.M. Smith, HI 6 27
Special Operations Command Tampa, FL 12 125
Southern Command Miami, FL 9 29
States and National Guard Washington, DC 3 3
Strategic Command Omaha, NE 14 99
Transportation Command Scott AFB, IN 2 11

To see the Frontline trailer click below:

PALIN WANTS OBAMA TO "REFUDIATE"

I am coming to the conclusion that the power structure is so happy with Obama's ability to give the corporations virtually everything they want, and demobilize the left while doing it, that they are working to ensure his reelection by keeping Sarah Palin's presidential hopes alive with non-stop national media coverage.

The Christian Science Monitor reports:

The Gallup polling organization has just released its latest on likely presidential candidates’ popularity within the GOP. Not surprisingly, Sarah Palin leads all the guys with presidential aspirations (Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and Bobby Jindal) … not counting everybody in the US Senate, all of whom believe themselves to be presidential timber.

Palin’s at 76 percent “favorable” among Republicans – at least 10 percentage points higher than any of the guys.

The oligarchy does not worry about her winning though. Her national unfavorable ratings with the entire electorate now stand at 52.3% while only 36.9% see her in a favorable light. This "refudiate" bit won't help her much.

Palin's response to this latest verbal dust-up? She tweeted her fans saying, "English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!"

The rich and powerful, who play with our democracy like a personal water toy, are surely enjoying this spectacle.

They want elections? We'll give them circus!

PUTTING IT IN REVERSE

Part of the street I live on here in Bath, Maine has been torn up for several weeks. When a road is not resurfaced properly it has to eventually be rebuilt. That is what is happening across the nation as local and state governments, currently in fiscal crisis, don't have the funds for proper road maintenance.

All across the country the road repair bills are mounting up to the point many communities are returning them to gravel. In Spiritwood, North Dakota residents report seeing ducks floating in big potholes in the road.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

In Michigan, at least 38 of the 83 counties have converted some asphalt roads to gravel in recent years. Last year, South Dakota turned at least 100 miles of asphalt road surfaces to gravel. Counties in Alabama and Pennsylvania have begun downgrading asphalt roads to cheaper chip-and-seal road, also known as "poor man's pavement." Some counties in Ohio are simply letting roads erode to gravel.

Rebuilding an asphalt road today is particularly expensive because the price of asphalt cement, a petroleum-based material mixed with rocks to make asphalt, has more than doubled over the past 10 years. Gravel becomes a cheaper option once an asphalt road has been neglected for so long that major rehabilitation is necessary.

Some experts caution that gravel roads can be costlier in the long run than consistently maintained asphalt because gravel needs to be graded and smoothed. A gravel road "is not a free road," says Purdue University's John Habermann, who organized a recent seminar about the resurgence of gravel roads titled "Back to the Stone Age."

These are just small examples of how America is literally falling apart as our Congress funds two endless wars in the Middle East and Central Asia and continues to increase military spending for an already bloated Pentagon.

Until the public begins to make these links and demands that the politicians cut war spending then we will continue to see a decline and reversal of life here in America.

The U.S. is no longer #1 in most indicators of the good life. But we just might be #1 as the country in quickest decline - we are witnessing the Third Worldization of America.

EQUAL TIME POLICY - The Clash singing "I'm so bored with the USA"

GI'S OPTING OUT OF LIFE

The military doesn't want to talk about this....the country must talk about this. GI suicides are happening for a reason.

You want to support the troops? Then end these wars now.

ANOTHER PARADE

Lisa Savage (right) having a little "quality time" with Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) before the parade began. Snowe said she would not vote against war funding - saying we had to support the troops.

Click on photos to enlarge

We did another parade yesterday. This one was called the Old Hallowell Days Parade, held in a small town near the state capital in Augusta. There was a very large crowd there and we had 17 of us doing our war $$ home message.

When we hit the thick of the crowd we stopped and began chanting "Bring Our War $$ Home" and for the first time ever in one of these parades some of the folks watching the parade began chanting with us. It was unusual and very exciting.

We were the 52nd entry in the parade so we had to wait awhile to get going and as we waited the Democratic Party group marched by us. There in clump of folks was our Congresswoman Chellie Pingree and several of our folks ran out into the middle of the street and thanked her for voting NO on the war supplemental two weeks ago. She has seen us several times now at these kind of events so she knows we are working hard around the state and that we will not let go of this knot.

After this parade some of our folks drove further north to Bar Harbor so they could protest where Obama is on vacation with his family. Have not yet heard how that turned out.

I came home and washed the car and worked in the garden. It was a hot day but a good one. The public is catching on to our message.

OIL FLOW STOPS FOR NOW - WORKERS IN GULF STILL SCREWED

Angry woman in Louisiana appeals to Obama to defend working people in the Gulf of Mexico region who are getting slammed.

BIG BOMBERS - BIG $$$

Wired reports:

Every time the Air Force sends a B-1B bomber on a mission over Afghanistan, it spends costs $720,000 in fuel, repair, and other costs. And when the plane comes back, it has to spend 48 hours being repaired for every hour it was in the air. All of which is double-crazy, because the bomber doesn’t really drop bombs over Afghanistan any more, thanks to the military’s airstrike restrictions. The B-1B just lingers over the country with a camera: a big Predator drone, at many, many times the price.

THE TOXIC KILLER

The U.S. fears legal and financial repercussions of acknowledging Agent orange and Depleted Uranium contamination. In the meantime victims, generations later, continue to suffer.

SWEET DREAMS AT MARTHA'S

Methodist summer camp cottages on the Vineyard
The ferry boat

I was back on the ferry this morning from Martha's Vineyard to Woods Hole, Ma. Then I grabbed the bus to Boston. In Boston I switched to a bus to Maine where I am writing this. (It's great that buses now have WiFi.)

Things went well last night at the library in Vineyard Haven where I gave my talk. The local peace group turned out their active membership and we had a great discussion about the Bring Our War $$ Home campaign and Obama's ability to demobilize the left. No one argued the point with me about Obama being the corporate place-holder that he is.

I stayed in a small cottage on the property of Sarah and Bruce Nevin last night and it was virtually surrounded with wild flowers, gardens, chickens, and goats. All of this seemed to contribute to a wonderful vibe so my dreams were quite creative and wonderful. I had sort of a "post-Florida-peace-camp" sequence of dreams where kind and enthusiastic people were all working together with young folks.

I had two swims yesterday after arriving on Martha's Vineyard. Sarah drove me around a bit and showed me the sights which included the Methodist summer camp, a real attraction. My first swim was along the beach near Oak Bluffs.

My second swim was at the summer beach home of Carole Abrahams who has been a Global Network supporter for many years. Carole lives in New York City and was at our annual membership meeting there in May. She is a summer member of the Peace Council that hosted my event last night. She and her extended family have spent summers in Vineyard Haven her whole life. Carole cooked a smashing lasagna for dinner before my talk.

I had a peek at the front page of the Boston Globe this morning and saw an article about Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) releasing documents from Vietnam-era Congressional secret hearings that are starkly similar to things being said these days about Afghanistan.

Here is a bit from the story:

The CIA director predicted it would be a “long war.’’ A senator from Missouri, expressing concern about the unconventional nature of the fighting, wanted to know, “Who is the enemy?’’ A senator from Tennessee, meanwhile, warned that if the American people were being misled that “the consequences are very great.’’

The words were uttered in secret more than 40 years ago during private meetings of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the Vietnam War. But they were made public for the first time yesterday by Senator John F. Kerry, now the panel’s chairman, out of a belief that the lively debates offer lessons for how to grapple today with the war in Afghanistan and other hot spots.

It would be nice though if Kerry would lead the fight to stop funding the war in Afghanistan. So far he has proven to be quite weak when it comes to really ending the mess.

ON THE ROAD TO VINEYARD

* I am on the bus from Portland heading south on my way to Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts for a talk tonight at the library in that community. The title of my talk is the one in the photo above. I change buses in Boston and take another one to Woods Hole, Ma. where I then take a ferry boat to the Vineyard. Hope to get a swim in the ocean while there and return home on Thursday afternoon.

* We had a conference call last night of our Maine Campaign to Bring Our War $$ Home and about a dozen people were on the call. Included in the group were four people representing national groups as interest around the country continues to grow in our efforts here in Maine. We reviewed the entire campaign and did a bit of brainstorming about future steps. We are now in the process of setting up meetings with our Congressional delegation. A series of events in the coming months will be held across the state that will incorporate our message. I'll write more about some of them soon. This coming Saturday we will be having a group of us with our banner in the Hallowell parade, gathering at 9:30 am.

* It's raining outside and my mood is reflective after seeing the video below about Israel ripping up the Palestinian apricot trees. This kind of thing has been going on for years. It's a form of genocide, the slow variety, but it still has the same results. Destroy a people's ability to sustain themselves, force them into refugee camps, limit their intake of essential food groups and medical care and you reduce the life span of the people. The Jews know how this works quite well because this is what Hitler did to them inside the Warsaw ghetto in Poland. Hitler's team created the "Caloric Reduction Intake Schedule" where they systematically created a plan to reduce food intake over a period of time knowing that it would cause the Jews to die. Genocide of another variety. It was evil then and it is evil now.

THE ORIGINS OF CONFLICT

If you ever wondered where the Palestinian rage comes from just watch this video. Palestinian fruit trees destroyed so Israeli settlements can pipe sewerage through their farm lands.

The arrogance is breathtaking. And the U.S. taxpayers essentially fund these Israeli operations.

OBAMA AND THE DEMS IN BIG TROUBLE

A U.S. war plane prepares to bomb Afghanistan

New polling data is revealing that Obama is wearing thin on the voters and it is having a sharp impact on how voters view their member of Congress as we approach the November elections.

A Washington Post poll shows that 54% of Americans disapprove of how Obama is handling the economy.

In responding to this question (Right now, are you inclined to vote to re-elect your representative in Congress in the next election or are you inclined to look around for someone else to vote for?) only 26% of registered voters say they would vote for their current member of Congress. This is a tidal wave of dissatisfaction that could wash the Democrats out of control.

The poll did not have any direct questions about Afghanistan which is puzzling since our current wars are such a primary factor in our economic collapse. But a June 17 Angus Reid Public Opinion survey found that only 50% of the American public now support the war in Afghanistan.

Support for the Afghanistan war is declining even faster in key NATO countries which will mean only more trouble for Obama. In Canada 59% of voters disagree with their current participation in the war. In Britain 55% oppose their participation. About 300 British soldiers have died so far in Afghanistan.

61 per cent of respondents think Australia should withdraw its troops from Afghanistan, up 11 points since March 2009.

With support for Obama's "good war" fast declining in the U.S. and around the world, and the global economy worsening, the Democrats are going to have to begin to take on their president if they wish to win back voter support.

We all know there will be no economic recovery as long as we are pissing away nearly $12 billion a month in Iraq-Afghanistan-Pakistan on wars that are unwinnable. The voters obviously are increasingly making the connections between economic collapse here at home and our wasteful and immoral wars.

Just as Lyndon Johnson was driven from the White House in the 1968 election over the Vietnam War, Obama could face a similar fate before the 2012 national election unless he turns this sinking ship around quickly. I frankly don't see him having the guts to do it.

Just yesterday Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) was quoted by Raw Story saying, “I think that this war, if it goes on and if it escalates, has the potential to destroy this presidency and to destroy the Democratic majorities in Congress."

It is obvious that the Obama magic is wearing thin. I spoke with well-known peace activist Kathy Kelly on the phone yesterday and asked her if she was hearing people defend the president anymore at her speaking engagements. She replied that virtually no one is doing that anymore.

If the Democrats are smart they will jettison their Republican-lite president and his corporate war policies. If they hang onto his sinking ship they very likely will be going down with him as he falls to the bottom of the oily sea.

Speaking of Polls: The latest from Time Magazine

Social Security - 86% opposed to cuts
Medicare - 82% opposed to cuts
Wars - 41% opposed to cuts, 55% approve of cuts
Education - 63% opposed to cuts
Health care - 68% opposed to cuts
Medicaid - 77% opposed to cuts
Non-war Defense - 50% opposed to cuts, 46% approve of cuts

Put that in your pipe and smoke it awhile........who says the American people are conservatives?

SEAWEED

USS Ohio on maneuvers in Asian-Pacific
Banner in Gangjeong village on Jeju Island

* The South Korean Navy is getting ready to make their final move on Gangjeong village now that the recent elections are over. Bulldozers are poised and the villagers swear they will put their bodies (and lives) on the line to protect the rocks, the fish, the coral, the water, and their farming land. Will keep you posted as things heat up. Lately the villagers have been connecting more with other islands where U.S. military bases are expanding such as Guam, Okinawa, and Hawaii. See more here

* I was outside today cutting up seaweed that we are using as fertilizer and mulch on our garden. It's quite amazing how many varieties of it there are. The smell made me think of the Gangjeong villagers fight against the Navy base.

* Things are also picking up here in Maine as our Veterans for Peace (VFP) crew has just over a month before the national convention takes place in Portland. I am working on my couple of things that I am responsible for. A fundraiser at Flatbread pizza in Portland to benefit the convention will be held on Tuesday, August 3 from 5-9pm. VFP will get a $$ cut on each pie sold that night. If you are around come and be part of the event.

* I sent around an article yesterday by Rick Rozoff who works on the NATO expansion issue. He reported about massive U.S. Navy maneuvers all around China, particularly U.S. submarines outfitted with hundreds of first-strike Tomahawk cruise missiles on-board. China can't be very happy about this. Imagine the howls in the U.S. if China was parking submarines and other naval ships near our coasts! One woman on my list wrote and told me to take her off the list because the article was "too long and over the top". Likely another Obama supporter who can't stand to hear anything that is discordant with her view that he is the peace prize president. I've had several such responses lately to our latest newsletter and some of my emails.