Priorities and the Snowden leaks

The Edward Snowden case is obviously a big deal. Secretary of State John Kerry is rattling the diplomatic sabres with Russia and China over it, as Spiegel Online reports in Affäre um Whistleblower Snowden: Kerry droht China und Russland 24.06.2013.

I was glad that Nancy Pelosi caught some static at Netroots Nation this weekend over Edward Snowden and the domestic spying programs.

And I take it for granted that Snowden broke the classification laws. And presumably even his most passionate admirers recognize that he did so. Snowden himself certainly seems to believe he did.

I would qualify that only to say that in our post-9/11 secrecy state, the scope of the classification laws haven't been adequately tested in the court system.

Daniel Ellsberg isn't a fan of the current domestic espionage program. And in Ellsberg: A Coup Against the Constitution 06/15/2013 he also addresses some of the real Constitutional issues involved:

But what Snowden disclosed was a confirmation of a massive domestic surveillance program unsuited to a democratic society and ultimately incompatible with it. Some of those who have regarded Snowden and his revelations with a jaundiced eye argue that we all knew that something like this was going on anyway. Gene Lyons, for instance, who has been paying close attention to this story, writes in Cyber Warfare Beats The Other Kind 06/19/2013:

Privacy in the 18th century sense vanished with the Internet, and it’s never coming back. It’s childish to think otherwise.

Yesterday my wife dropped my binoculars, knocking them out of whack. Before I figured out how to fix them I priced a new pair on Amazon. This morning, Facebook sent me an advert for Chinese-made Bushnells costing far less than the originals. By tomorrow, they’ll be back to selling me patent medicines somehow involving pretty women with preposterously large breasts. They don’t know that I suffer from maladies their "weird secrets" purport to cure, but they definitely know my age and gender.

MasterCard recently shut me down because their computer algorithm correctly deduced that a guy who spends most of his money buying cattle feed in Arkansas probably wasn’t buying a huge HDTV in Mexico City. Amazon knows that I've read all the Henning Mankell "Kurt Wallender" novels and thinks I may have a thing for Scandinavian murder mysteries.

But Amazon is following your purchases to sell you more stuff. Amazon can't put you in jail, or hold you in an isolation cell for months or years as an "enemy combatant."

If Amazon slips up and lets it slip publicly that you're ordering a lot of novels that fans of Fifty Shades of Gray are also ordering, that might be embarrassing. If you work for, say, Chick-Fil-A, it might even get you fired. But if you get fingered by the government as a Terrorist, that's a whole different set of problems. Does our whiz-bang national security bureaucracy sometimes make serious mistakes on these things? You can ask Steven Hatfill about that. (David Willman, Anthrax subject receives payout Los Angeles Times 06/28/2013)

The fact that computer technology allows a bloated, heavily privatized national security state to collect and store vast amounts of data on everybody means that privacy concerns and the need for privacy protection are more urgent, not less. There is an enormous difference Amazon annoying you with pop-up ads and the FBI or NSA trying to turn you into the next Steven Hatfill based on some flawed algorithm based on your patterns of phone calls and e-mails. One of those things has far more serious consequences for the person on the receiving end than the other.

Nor am I persuaded by the argument Pelosi and other Obama defenders are making of the massive domestic surveillance program, that it was bad under Cheney and Bush because they were doing it illegally, but Congress legalized what they doing and Obama is getting a vague warrant from a secret court and so now it's all good.


No, it's not. And whether it's legal or not also hasn't been tested adequately in court, because the Obama Administration has used the secrecy of the programs themselves to block court challenges to their legality and constitutionality.

Digby is dead right on this point (Let's open this thing up already Hullabaloo 06/21/2013):

One of the most laughable comments the NSA program supporters have been making is the one insisting that the FISA court is "transparent." It's rulings are secret as are the government's interpretations of the law and those rulings. If that's what we call due process these days, we might as well just officially institute a Star Chamber and call it a day.

After the Cheney-Bush Administration, the most urgent Constitutional task Obama had was to restore the rule of law and prosecute torture perpetrators. Instead, he's practiced a Look Forward Not Backward non-prosecution policy for high government officials who break the law on the pretense they are doing so for National Security Of The Homeland and for wealthy bankers who crashed the world financial system and rip off millions of people. He hasn't restored the rule of law, he's reinforced the trend toward blatant class justice.

And it's clear that the Obama Administration has been more aggressive than any before on pursuing whistleblowers and leakers. Marisa Taylor and Jonathan Landay give us a glimpse of how extreme it has become in Obama's crackdown views leaks as aiding enemies of U.S. McClatchy 06/20/2013:

President Barack Obama's unprecedented initiative, known as the Insider Threat Program, is sweeping in its reach. It has received scant public attention even though it extends beyond the U.S. national security bureaucracies to most federal departments and agencies nationwide, including the Peace Corps, the Social Security Administration and the Education and Agriculture departments. It emphasizes leaks of classified material, but catchall definitions of "insider threat" give agencies latitude to pursue and penalize a range of other conduct.

Government documents reviewed by McClatchy illustrate how some agencies are using that latitude to pursue unauthorized disclosures of any information, not just classified material. They also show how millions of federal employees and contractors must watch for "high-risk persons or behaviors" among co-workers and could face penalties, including criminal charges, for failing to report them. Leaks to the media are equated with espionage.

"Hammer this fact home ... leaking is tantamount to aiding the enemies of the United States," says a June 1, 2012, Defense Department strategy for the program that was obtained by McClatchy.

And far from rethinking their draconian approach, Taylor and Landay report that the Administration takes the latest revelations as evidence they need to double-down in their drive against leakers: "The Obama administration is expected to hasten the program's implementation as the government grapples with the fallout from the leaks of top secret documents by Edward Snowden."

Charlie Pierce explains some of the obvious problems with this kind of official paranoia in The Snowden Effect, Special Sunday Edition Esquire Politics Blog 06/23/2013:

You want "Nixonian"? This, right here, this is Nixonian, if Nixon had grown up in East Germany. You've got the entire federal bureaucracy looking for signs of "high-risk persons or behaviors" the way Nixon sent Fred Malek out to count the Jews. You've got created within the entire federal bureaucracy a culture of spies and informers, which will inevitably breed fear and deceit and countless acts of interoffice treachery. (Don't like your boss at the Bureau Of Land Management? Hmm, he looks like a high-risk person. Tell someone.)

Then there is problem of officially-directed but still illegal leaks of classified information for purpose of making the Administration look good.

Which brings me back to Secretary of State Kerry's huffing and puffing at Russia and China. If enforcing the rule of law on Edward Snowden is important enough to add a significant new grievance to our relations with those two countries, then the torture crimes of the Cheney-Bush Administration are important enough to prosecute. Not only are they far more significant in terms of the rule of law. The Torture Convention Treaty signed by St. Reagan and approved by the Senate thereby becoming the law of the land requires it. So do other American laws. And if a leak like Snowden's that brings accountability to a massive domestic surveillance program that is a real threat to democratic government - and to sane law-enforcement and defense priorities - is serious enough to prosecute, so are leaks by Administration officials designed to make it look good.

Like, for instance, the one reported on by Mark Hosenball in Exclusive: Did White House "spin" tip a covert op? Reuters 05/18/2012.

See also David Sirota's Why shouldn't David Gregory be charged with a crime? Salon for some relevant discussion of this question. Put another way, if someone violates the classification laws and regulations, that would pretty obviously be grounds for discipline or dismissal from their positions and revocation or adjustment of their classification clearances.

But unless there is clear venal motive, i.e, selling information for money, or identifiable damage to security beyond a vague classification-is-sacred assumption, it's a matter of legitimate discretion whether they should be prosecuted for a crime. But since the Obama Administration is making a practice of going after high-profile leakers like Snowden for espionage, then the wink-and-a-nod attitude toward links of classified information that support the White House's PR efforts are all the more egregious.

Also, as much as we might like to think so, the world does not revolve around American Exceptionalism. Arrogance and overreach can produce blowback, which could be part of what is going on with Russia in the Snowden case: Marcy Wheeler, Remember How Angry Russia Is about Viktor Bout Emptywheel 06/24/2013.

Tags: domestic spying, daniel ellsberg, edward snowden, obama administration

Edward Snowden and his critics

Cenk Uygur and The Young Turks have been covering the domestic espionage story.

Mass Blanket Surveillance - Obama is NOT the 'Change' We Believed In 06/07/2013:

NSA Surveillance - Does Obama Have ANY Credibility Left? 06/07/2013:

Edward Snowden: American Hero or Traitor? 06/11/2013:

Jeffrey Toobin writes that Edward Snowden Is No Hero New Yorker 06/10/2013:

What, one wonders, did Snowden think the N.S.A. did? Any marginally attentive citizen, much less N.S.A. employee or contractor, knows that the entire mission of the agency is to intercept electronic communications. Perhaps he thought that the N.S.A. operated only outside the United States; in that case, he hadn't been paying very close attention. In any event, Snowden decided that he does not "want to live in a society" that intercepts private communications. His latter-day conversion is dubious.

And what of his decision to leak the documents? Doing so was, as he more or less acknowledges, a crime. Any government employee or contractor is warned repeatedly that the unauthorized disclosure of classified information is a crime. But Snowden, apparently, was answering to a higher calling. "When you see everything you realize that some of these things are abusive," he said. "The awareness of wrongdoing builds up. There was not one morning when I woke up. It was a natural process." These were legally authorized programs; in the case of Verizon Business's phone records, Snowden certainly knew this, because he leaked the very court order that approved the continuation of the project. So he wasn't blowing the whistle on anything illegal; he was exposing something that failed to meet his own standards of propriety. The question, of course, is whether the government can function when all of its employees (and contractors) can take it upon themselves to sabotage the programs they don’t like. That’s what Snowden has done. [my emphasis]

It's not surprising that mainstream journalists would be scornful of Snowden and the stories his leaking provided. Today's journalists don't look to become stars or furthering their careers by exposing the next Watergate for finding a corruptions scandal. They aspire to be invited to the White House Coresspondents' Dinner and schmooze with the stars by kissing up to the rich and powerful.

Toobin's criticism is interesting in his lack of interest in the substance. Why, he wasn't exposing anything illegal, Toobin says. But he was committing a crime by exposing it.

Well, duh, if he were exposing something that was classified but universally agreed to be illegal, that would also be a violation of the classification laws.

But until last week's leaks on the phone call monitoring and the PRISM program, we didn't know this information about the scope what the Administration of the Nobel Peace Prize winner and Constitutional scholar Barack Obama was actually doing. Yes, we knew that extensive domestic spying had been legalized by Congress. But we did know how extensive the actual programs were.

And are they really legal? If Toobin has been giving this story with any sort of attention, he knows that the legality of it has never been vetted in a federal court in which the program was contested in an adversary procedure. The FISA court is arguably better than nothing. But it's essentially a Star Chamber court as far as its powers reach. The proceedings are secret. And attempts to uncover and challenge domestic spying programs like PRISM in legal proceedings has been frustrated by the Administration's insistence that the programs' existence is secret and the courts' willingness to accept the notion that since the government doesn't admit the programs exist, plaintiffs don't have the standing to claim they were harmed by it. And I would be surprised if former Wall Street securities attorney Eric Holder's Justice Department use the same approach to blocking any new legal challenges based on the latest revelations.

And anyone who doesn't know that both the Bush and Obama Administration have been radically short-circuiting previous standards of determining liability also hasn't been following what's in the public record about how the opinions of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). For more information, do a search of John Yoo's opinion on the legitimacy of crushing a child's testicles to persuade his parents to give information.

Part of the scandal of the Obama Administration's draconian policy toward prosecuting whistle-blowers, of which its safe to assume that any well-known national reporter like Toobin is very much aware, is that they give a pass to their own leaks. That is, those self-serving leaks that make the Administration look good in the anonymously-sourced stories they produce and are ubiquitous in the corporate press, but which are just as illegal as those made by Bradley Manning or Edward Snowden. Digby writes about one just today in A new leak. Will it be investigated too? Hullabaloo 06/11/2013.

I love Toobin's sneering at the notion that "Snowden, apparently, was answering to a higher calling." Something inconceivable to a Establishment journalist these days.

I understand some of the skepticism about Snowden's motives. And also some of the impatience with anyone acting like they're "shocked, shocked" about such government domestic spying going on.

But as matter of news value, it seems to me there's a real difference between knowing that Congress had authorized the government to go to the FISA court to ask for broad surveillance authority, and knowing what we know after last week about the actual programs of phone-record surveillance and the PRISM program of e-mail and other electronic surveillance and the fact that bizillobytes of this stuff are being stored for who knows how long?

Yeah, anyone with a little caution should have known for years not to conduct their dealings with loose wimmin in the Sudan or Saudi Arabia over their regular e-mail and phone accounts.

But it seems to me these revelations of the actual current programs raise some important issues: about privacy concerns; whether the feds are sensibly focusing their anti-terrorism efforts; how seriously Congress is taking its oversight function; how valid are the Administration's efforts to block legal challenges to these programs on the grounds that their existence is secret; and, what the risks are to stockpiling so much data with a minuscule likelihood of being related to real law-enforcement or defense concerns.

It's also not clear to me that the content people voluntarily reveal on public forums like Facebook is so much more subject to abuse than, say, the phone records. The earlier NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake claims that the phone "metadata" is actually more valuable for investigators - and therefore also more open to abuse - than the contents of the phone calls. In a Scientific American Online interview with Dina Fine Maron, he says (Former NSA Whistleblower Sheds Light on the Science of Surveillance 06/11/2013):

The distinction here is metadata versus content. It’s like when you get physical snail mail, it has a certain shape, weight and type of envelope, and an address and a return address and a stamp and usually a date and routing numbers. And it’s going to a particular mailbox at a particular address—that’s all metadata. The content is what it’s inside the envelope. In a digital space the metadata is always associated with content. The content would be the actual phone call—the conversation. The fact is the metadata is far more valuable to them because it gives them an index of everything. If they want to, the data is available and the capability exists to store it, then later they can access the content as well with a warrant. You can learn a tremendous amount about people by looking at the metadata…phone records include location information. At that level you can track them as well and know who they speak with, the time of day and all of that. By definition a phone number is always associated with somebody or some business—believe me, subscribers all have names. Think of the White Pages; the White Pages equal metadata. If I store that, that gives the government a phenomenal power in secret to track all kinds of information about a person without going to content.

Chauncey DeVega (PRISM and Altruism: Is Edward Snowden Too Perfect a Hero and Public Servant? WARN 06/11/2013) is also cautious about crediting Snowden so quickly with mainly public-spirited motives. But, he writes:

Ultimately, the man Edward Snowden should matter less than the facts and information he shared. We do not live in a perfect world. As such, the messenger will be scrutinized at least as much as the policies he chose to bring out of the shadows and into the public light. ... PRISM is bigger than any personal failings of the messenger.

Charlie Pierce is dubious about Edward Snowden and his theatrical self-portrayal. But in The Snowden Effect Esquire Politics Blog 06/10/2013, he writes:

... there are issues beyond Edward Snowden, and whatever comes next, and these are issues worthy of an open and national debate, and they should be examined in the light of day.

First of all, it's past time to re-examine everything that was done in such a panic after 9/11. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was warning us about the NSA and secrecy three decades ago. Jim Bamford has made his living writing about the NSA. These problems are not new. This re-evaluation especially includes the Patriot Act, which keeps getting renewed by a Congress which long ago abdicated its oversight role in intelligence as thoroughly as it has abdicated its War Powers. (Senator Mark Udall is all over this, and good for him.) The answer, "Well, we stopped a bunch of attacks we can't tell you about" ought not the be adequate any longer. Second, it's time for the president to differentiate, clearly, himself from his predecessor. What did he do that you haven't? What have you done that he didn't? The attempt to pry these revelations loose from the history that led to the programs that are now being revealed guarantees that the discussion will slide into commonplace political argument, which will get us approximately nowhere in discussing the real problem, which is the place of privacy in a democracy that insists on surveilling itself to death. If this whole thing comes down to Obama-is-better-than-Bush vs. Obama-is-history's-greatest-monster,and there's too much of both right now, then the opportunity goes a'glimmering. ...

Unfortunately, the real test will come after the next terrorist attack that succeeds. It seems as though the surveillance stepped up in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing. I don't recall anyone warning about that in the immediate aftermath. If you want to see what effect, if any, Edward Snowden's revelations have had on the country, and on what it's doing to itself, look for it there. I would almost guarantee you that you won't like what you see. Fear is the new normal. I lived through the Church Committee hearings. That was the last time the secret state-within-a-state was revealed to this extent, and that was by an empowered congressional committee. Business as usual opened again in 1980. We are not the country we say we are. What we are arguing about is the distance between the two. [my emphasis]

This is part of why I like Andrew Bacevich's use of "the Long War" to include both the Cold War and the ongoing War on Terrorism. Excessive fear was a hallmark of the Cold War. And most Americans now voting have spent most of their lives learning the rituals of fear that characterized it. I wrote here a couple of years ago (John Steinbeck on war and the Second World War (1 of 3) 07/14/2011):

John Steinbeck published a collection of his newspaper articles as a war correspondent during the Second World War under the title Once There Was a War (1958). The title reflects the position he takes in the Introduction, in which he looks back on the war as though it were a kind of fairy tale or dream.

But not a dream of the Good War, as it is now revered in the general American culture. Steinbeck understood the war and its purposes. He wasn't taking some isolationist position that the US should not have been part of the war. Nor was he arguing that the war aims weren't good or that the defeat of Hitler Germany and militarist Japan were unworthy results.

What he means is more like the following. I first read this Introduction years ago. And re-reading it now, I was surprised at how I found something on almost every page that I remembered and that made a particular impression on me. But this portion, which gives a sense of the title, is what stuck with me the most:

For what they are worth, or for what they may recapture, here they are, period pieces, fairy tales, half-meaningless memories of a time and of attitudes which have gone forever from the world, a sad and jocular recording of a little part of a war I saw and do not believe, unreal with trumped-up pageantry, so that it stand in the mind like the battle pictures of Crécy and Bunker Hill and Gettysburg. And, although all war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal, still there was in these memory-wars some gallantry, some bravery, some kindliness. A man got killed, surely, or maimed, but, living, he did not carry crippled seed as a gift to his children.

Now for many years we have suckled on fear and fear alone, and there is no good product of fear. Its children are cruelty and deceit and suspicion germinating in our darkness. And just as surely as we are poisoning the air with our test bombs, so are we poisoned in our souls by fear, faceless, stupid sarcomic terror. [my emphasis]

Biologists and anthropologists would quarrel with a literal assertion that fear produces "no good product." After all, the famous fight-or-flight reaction presumably offered humanity some comparative advantage over millennia of natural selection. (By "sarcomic," Steinbeck apparently meant "cancerous."

But the kind of generalized, sometimes hysterical fear of the early Cold War period about which he was commenting in 1958 does yield the kinds of results Steinbeck describes, "Its children are cruelty and deceit and suspicion germinating in our darkness."

Tags: domestic spying, daniel ellsberg, edward snowden, obama administration

Ellsberg on Snowden

We don't have to guess what Daniel Ellsberg thinks about Edward Snowden's whistleblogwer leaks. He tells us himself in Edward Snowden: saving us from the United Stasi of America The Guardian 06/10/2013:

In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden's release of NSA material – and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago. Snowden's whistleblowing gives us the possibility to roll back a key part of what has amounted to an "executive coup" against the US constitution.

Since 9/11, there has been, at first secretly but increasingly openly, a revocation of the bill of rights for which this country fought over 200 years ago. In particular, the fourth and fifth amendments of the US constitution, which safeguard citizens from unwarranted intrusion by the government into their private lives, have been virtually suspended.

MOX News provides video of Ellsberg talking to CNN on this topic, Daniel Ellsberg "I Think They Have Everything And That Is The Recipe For A TYRANNY In This Country!" 06/09/2013:

And it apparently isn't the headline writer who came up with the "United Stasi of America" phrase:

The fact that congressional leaders were "briefed" on this and went along with it, without any open debate, hearings, staff analysis, or any real chance for effective dissent, only shows how broken the system of checks and balances is in this country.

Obviously, the United States is not now a police state. But given the extent of this invasion of people's privacy, we do have the full electronic and legislative infrastructure of such a state. If, for instance, there was now a war that led to a large-scale anti-war movement – like the one we had against the war in Vietnam – or, more likely, if we suffered one more attack on the scale of 9/11, I fear for our democracy. These powers are extremely dangerous. ...

That is what Snowden has exposed, with official, secret documents. The NSA, FBI and CIA have, with the new digital technology, surveillance powers over our own citizens that the Stasi – the secret police in the former "democratic republic" of East Germany – could scarcely have dreamed of. Snowden reveals that the so-called intelligence community has become the United Stasi of America. ...

Snowden did what he did because he recognised the NSA's surveillance programs for what they are: dangerous, unconstitutional activity. This wholesale invasion of Americans' and foreign citizens' privacy does not contribute to our security; it puts in danger the very liberties we're trying to protect. [my emphasis]

Although I think if the police-state potential of this thing were fully activated, it would look less like the Stasi than the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission. We have homegrown precedents for this.

Dan Ellsberg knows far more what he's talking about in these things than most of us do.

I'm not myself quite ready to take Snowden's explanation of his motivations at face value. Not that I've seen anything that makes me think otherwise. I'm just withholding judgment on that aspect.

Tags: domestic spying, daniel ellsberg, edward snowden, obama administration

Snowden and Ellsberg: historical parallels?

Charlie Pierce in Facebook comments of 06/09/2013 on a posting by Dave Zirin dislikes comparison of NSA PRISM program leaker Edward Snowden: "Defecting to China? Leaping into the arms of the butchers of Tianamen [sic] Square. Sorry, Dave. Ellsberg stuck around. Manning stuck around. They took their lumps. I have very little sympathy, and even no respect. ... my point in all of this is that Ellsberg and Manning are different than this guy because they were willing -- and, in Ellsberg's case, eager -- to go to trial. The comparison is inapt."

In my previous post, I quoted Snowden's comments about how he fears he could be vulnerable in Hong Kong. Which does make you wonder why he arranged to be there when he went public with being the leaker. This comment he makes in the Guardian article is also odd: "On May 20, he boarded a flight to Hong Kong, where he has remained ever since. He chose the city because 'they have a spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent', and because he believed that it was one of the few places in the world that both could and would resist the dictates of the US government." (Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill and Laura Poitras, Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations The Guardian 06/09/2013) But China isn't exactly known for its rollicking press freedom.

It also strikes me that this will make it easy for Snowden's critics to suggest/insinuate/accuse that he's acting on China's behalf against the US or something along those lines. I don't see any reason to assume that myself.

I'm not ready to see Snowden as a hero at this point, though I do think of Daniel Ellsberg that way. And while I would guess that Ellsberg will praise Snowden's leak, I would be cautious about comparing the two events directly.

But times are different now than 1970. The Obama Administration's legal policy against leakers is far more drastic than that of the Nixon Administration. And where the American corporate media in 1970 could reasonably be expected to take a sympathetic interest in the revelations, today it would be safer to expect hostility. Ellberg could also have a reasonable expectation that at least some prominent political leaders would take a somewhat sympathetic attitude toward his revelations. In this case, the attitudes the leaker could expect are more like this: Sen. Feinstein wants Glenn Greenwald prosecuted (Eric Loomis LG&M 06/09/2013), Greenwald being one of the journalists who broke the story.

As far as the historical comparison goes, the Pentagon Papers were a retroactive study of policies of primarily the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations on the Vietnam War. Snowden revealed an ongoing domestic espionage program, and I'm glad he did. But there is a more obvious logic in arguing that the PRISM leak compromised a current national security operation, though I haven't seen any evidence that makes me think it did. There was always an odd element to the Nixon Administration's extreme response to the Ellsberg/Pentagon Papers case, because anything embarrassing in the report applied mainly to previous Democratic Administrations.

This is a report from The Real News on last week's domestic espionage revelations, Obama Defends "Big Brother" Powers 06/07/2013:

Tags: domestic spying, daniel ellsberg, edward snowden, obama administration

The Vietnam War stalemate machine

Paul Rosenberg looks at George McGovern and his opposition to the Vietnam War in George McGovern: The road not taken Aljazeera English 10/25/2012.

What particularly caught my attention about this article was a reference he makes to Robert Mann's A Grand Delusion: America's Descent Into Vietnam:

With the release of LBJ's White House tapes, it became clear why McGovern's private entreaties had no effect: LBJ did not need to be convinced that the Vietnam War was bad policy. He already knew and believed that himself, but he believed even more that he'd be impeached if he failed to fight.

Mann's book clearly established the origins of Johnson's thinking: How the Democrat's dramatic -though brief - loss of the Senate in the wake of the Korean War, elevated Johnson to Minority Leader, making him the point man responsible for regaining the majority. There were many more actors than two in Mann's book. But the contrast between these two is most instructive. Both men knew what was right, and both men did what seemed politically expedient for a time.

I haven't read Mann's book yet, so I don't know what may be distinctive about his findings.

But the fact that Presidents, including Johnson, feared very bad political repercussions if they didn't press forward with policies they knew to be bad policy in the larger scheme of things isn't a new analysis. The longest chapter in Daniel Ellsberg 1972 book Papers on The War was titled, "The Quagmire Myth and The Stalemate Machine." There he shows that Presidents from Truman through Johnson made decisions on the Vietnam War that were aimed at preventing immediate military disaster and the bad domestic political repercussions they expected that would involve. He argued in the introduction to the book, quoting a 1969 memo of his own, "that the long-run goal four Presidents [Truman, Ike, JFK, LBJ] had chosen to pursue in Indochina - the permanent exclusion of the Indochinese Communist party from open politics, and ultimately its destruction as an organization - had always been beyond their reach. What was always likely to result from their efforts was what had happened: defeat in the North, stalemate in the South."

Ellsberg discussed six decisive decision-making points:

• Truman's decision in 1950 to subsidize the French colonial war in Indochina
• Eisenhower's choice in 1954 to forego direct American military intervention accompanied by a progressively hardening defense of South Vietnamese strongman Ngô Đình Diệm (0901-1963)
• Kennedy's decision in 1961 to send military advisers to support Diem's South Vietnamese military effort
• Kennedy's ill-fated 1963 decision to back the overthrow of Diem, which resulted in Diem's assassination
• Johnson's decision in 1964 to bomb North Vietnam after the infamous Tonkin Gulf incident
• Johnson's decision in 1965 to undertake massive, continuing bombing and "to accept open-ended ground force commitment" to preserve a non-Communist South Vietnam

As 1950 opened, Mao Zedong's Communists had taken full power in China, with the exception of the island of Taiwan. A full-blown Red Scare was already under way even before Sen. Joseph McCarthy announced his still-undisclosed alleged list of Communists in the State Department in Wheeling, West Virginia, of February 9, 1950. Ellsberg quotes from that speech of the alcoholic Senator who managed to produce a great deal of political malpractice over the next four years, "How can we account for our present situation ulesss we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man."

No, that stuff didn't start with Glenn Beck.

McCarthy claimed in a Senate speech of March 30, 1950, "It was not Chinese democracy under Mao that conquered China, as Acheson, Lattimore, Jessup and Hanson contend. Soviet Russia conquered China and an important ally of the conquerors was this small left-wing element in our Department of State." Not matter how slim the probability of "winning," there was little debate within the

McCarthy was sleazier and more dishonest than most. But there was bipartisan consensus on much of this attitude, and not just from Dixiecrats, either. Ellsberg quotes Congressman John F. Kennedy in a speech of January 25, 1949:

Mr. Speaker, over this weekend we have learned the extent of the disaster that has befallen China and the United States. The impressibility for the failure of our foreign policy in the Far East rests squarely with the White House and the Department of State.

The continued insistence that aid would not be forthcoming unless a coalition government with the Communists was formed was a crippling blow to the National Government.

So concerned were our diplomats and their advisers, the Lattimores and the Fairbanks, with the imperfection of the democratic system in China after twenty years of war and the tales of corruption in high places that they lost sight of our tremendous stake in a non-Communist China.

Our policy, in the words of the Premier of the National Government, Sun Fo, of vacillation, uncertainty, and confusion has reaped the whirlwind.

This House must now assume the responsibility of preventing the onrushing tide of Communism from engulfing all of Asia. [my emphasis]

The Kennedys were generally on friendly terms with Joe McCarthy, but that's another story.

Obviously, the ability of foreign policy opinion-makers to inflate threats and scare the hoo-hoo out of themselves and the public also didn't begin with the planes that crashed into the Twin Towers on 09/11/2001. As Ellsberg wrote, "Fear of McCarthy's and McCarthyism's power at the polls may always have been overdrawn, even in 1950-52, and still more3 so today. ... From one point of view, of course, what matters in explaining the behavior of Congressmen and officials is what they believe their risks to be, and what risks they are willing to take." On the other hand, looking at things from the perspective of 2012 when the Republican Party sounds more every day like the White Citizens Council circa 1960, it would be hard to say that those fears were entirely irrational.

This was the ugly, panicky, poisoned political context in which the Truman Administration decided to extend $10 million of aid to South Vietnam in May, 1950, at a time when $10 million was serious money. Ellberg wrote:

No matter how slim the probability of "winning," there was little debate within the government as to whether the open-ended direct aid policy we commenced in May, 1950, with a first installment of $10 million, was worthwhile. It could - and did - buy a stalemate; and the alternative was to add the Democrats' "loss" of Indochina to their "loss" of China. that was enough to know. To postpone the loss of Tonkin [Vietnam] beyond the tenure of the Truman Administration evidently seemed worth more than the several billion dollars - and the French and Vietnamese lives - that it cost. [my emphasis]

As an example from the Kennedy Administration, he cites a much quoted article by Kenneth O'Donnell, "LJB and the Kennedys" from Life magazine 08/07/1970. It is usually referenced in connection with Kennedy's second-term intentions with regard to Vietnam. But Ellsberg cites it in the context of Kennedy's judgment of the McCarthyist political danger he perceived was involved:

The President told Mansfield that he had been having serious second thoughts about [Sen. Mike] Mansfield's argument and that he now agreed with the Senator's thinking on the need for a complete military withdrawal from Vietnam.

"But I can't do it until 1965-after I'm reelected," Kennedy told Mansfield.

President Kennedy felt, and Mansfield agreed with him, that if he announced a total withdrawal of American military personnel from Vietnam before the 1964 election, there would be a wild conservative outcry against returning him to the Presidency for a second term.

After Mansfield left the office, the President told me that he had made up his mind that after his reelection he would take the risk of unpopularity and make a complete withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam. "In 1965, I'll be damned everywhere as a Communist appeaser. But I don't care. If I tried to pull out completely now, we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands, but I can do it after I'm reelected. So we had better make damned sure that I am reelected." [my emphasis]

Kennedy had a more realistic-minded view on foreign policy than he had shown as a Congressman in 1949. As Ellsberg noted, "Mansfield was subsequently quoted in interviews as confirming in substance this report."

Ellsberg didn't elaborate as much on what Johnson's particular political fears were on the Vietnam War. But he made it clear that he saw LBJ continuing the previous pattern:

In brief: A decade before what [Arthur] Schlesinger[, Jr.] calls Kennedy's "low-level crisis" in South Vietnam, the right wing of the Republican Party tattooed on the skins of politicians and bureaucrats alike some vivid impression of what could happen to a liberal administration that chanced to be in office the day a red flag rose over Saigon. ...

Many of the paradoxical features of U.S. escalating decisions as seen from the inside - the "discrepancies" between chosen policies, on the one hand, and internal predictions, recommendations, and long-term aims on the other - can thus be seen to reflect conflict between domestic political requirements on outcomes and domestic political constraints on means.

He adds in a footnote that he is "not saying that only calculations of domestic political interest enter or determine these decisions; nor would I deny that such calculations, themselves, may reflect class or corporate interests."

I should add here that Ellsberg's chapter that I've been citing is, from a poli-sci geek viewpoint, a brilliant piece of analysis, not only of the Vietnam-related decision-making itself but also of the institutional pressures for just-good-enough solutions to difficult problems. I'm impressed with that every time I go back to it.

In Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (1976), Doris Kearns [Goodwin] quotes from what she represents as verbatim notes of his extensive post-Presidential interviews with Johnson on the subject of his domestic political calculations on the Vietnam War:

Oh, I could see it coming all right. History provided too many cases where the sound of the bugle put an immediate end to the hopes and dreams of the best reformers: the Spanish-American War drowned the populist spirit; World War I ended Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom; World War II brought the New Deal to a close. Once the war began, then all those conservatives in the Congress would use it as a weapon against the Great Society. You see, they'd never wanted to help the poor or the Negroes in the first place. But they were having a hard time figuring out how to make their opposition sound noble in a time of great prosperity. But the war. Oh, they'd use it to say they were against my programs, not because they were against the poor-why, they were as generous and as charitable as the best of Americans - but because the war had to come first. First, we had to beat those Godless Communists and then we could worry about the homeless Americans. And the generals. Oh, they'd love the war, too. It's hard to be a military hero without a war. Heroes need battles and bombs and bullets in order to be heroic. That's why I am suspicious of the military. They're always so narrow in their appraisal of everything. They see everything in military terms. Oh, I could see it coming. And I didn't like the smell of it. I didn't like anything about it, but I think the situation in South Vietnam bothered me most. They never seemed able to get themselves together down there. Always fighting with one another. Bad. Bad.

Yet everything I knew about history told me that if I got out of Vietnam and let Ho Chi Minh run through the streets of Saigon, then I'd be doing exactly what Chamberlain did in World War II. I'd be giving a big fat reward to aggression. And I knew that if we let Communist aggression succeed in taking over South Vietnam, there would follow in this country an endless national debate-a mean and destructive debate - that would shatter my Presidency, kill my administration, and damage our democracy. I knew that Harry Truman and Dean Acheson had lost their effectiveness from the day that the Communists took over in China. I believed that the loss of China had played a large role in the rise of Joe McCarthy. And I knew that all these problems, taken together, were chickenshit compared with what might happen if we lost Vietnam.

"For this time there would be Robert Kennedy out in front leading the fight against me, telling everyone that I had betrayed John Kennedy's commitment to South Vietnam. That I had let a democracy fall into the hands of the Communists. That I was a coward. An unmanly man. A man without a spine. Oh, I could see it coming all right. Every night when I fell asleep I would see myself tied to the ground in the middle of a long, open space. In the distance, I could hear the voices of thousands of people. They were all shouting at me and running toward me: 'Coward! Traitor! Weakling!' They kept coming closer. They began throwing stones. At exactly that moment I would generally wake up ... terribly shaken. [my emphasis]

Kearns explained of this passage:

Did Lyndon Johnson believe all this? Yes ... some of the time. Was it true? Some of it; and the rest was not simply pure illusion. For even Johnson's most grotesque exaggerations were always constructed on some fragment of reality, so that they could never be totally disproven by factual evidence or unanswerable logic alone, only by rejecting his judgment for one more reasonable, more consonant with the known facts.

Johnson's description of the nature of the challenge in Vietnam was, of course, a product of his unique personal qualities. But it is important to remember that many others shared this view, although they would not have expressed it with such color or hyperbole. And they, like Johnson, derived their convictions from historical experience. [my emphasis]

Tags: daniel ellsberg, lyndon johnson, vietnam war

Daniel Ellsberg on the Sibel Edmonds allegations on nuclear proliferation

Daniel Ellsberg is calling attention to the allegations of Sibel Edmonds about proliferation activities being carried on by some US officials in conjuction with foreign agents of various powers, in Covering Up the Coverage - The American Media's Complicit Failure to Investigate and Report on the Sibel Edmonds Case Brad Blog 01/20/08. He refers the reader to stories from the Sunday Times of London:

For sale: West’s deadly nuclear secrets by Chris Gourlay, Jonathan Calvert, Joe Lauria 01/06/08

FBI denies file exposing nuclear secrets theft by Chris Gourlay, Jonathan Calvert and Joe Lauria 01/20/08

I've heard about Edmonds and her allegations but I can't claim to be very familiar with the story or have any strong opinion about its credibility. But I do know that Ellsberg is a serious and well-informed guy. He may be wrong, but I don't think he would be calling attention to her story in this way for frivolous reasons.

Despite its prestigious past, the Times of London is a Rupert Murdoch property. And they have been known to flog some shaky stories. They've reported a number of times, for example, on Israeli plans to bomb Iran soon. And so far those stories haven't panned out. To the point that I've started automatically discounting the latest version of it whenever it appears in the Times.

Ellsberg urges the Establishment press in the US, which apparently has ignored the story entirely, as well as Congressional committees to dig into this story:

It's not that "the cover-up is always worse than the crime": that favorite media mantra is itself a cover story. The criminal cover-up by the FBI revealed by Edmonds and the Times' documents is, as often the case, to conceal extremely serious crimes endangering our security, and to protect the official perpetrators. But if "freedom of the press is mainly for the people who own presses," it is time for those owners to stop using that freedom to help conceal official wrongdoing. And the people who own computers should be using them to light a fire under the owners of presses and television networks.

In support of the official cover-up, various American journalists in the last weeks have reportedly received calls from "intelligence sources" hinting that "what Sibel Edmonds stumbled onto" is not a rogue operation by American officials and Congressmen working to their own advantage --- as believed by Edmonds and some other former or active FBI officials --- but a sensitive covert operation authorized at high levels. If there is any truth to that, we clearly have another prize candidate --- giving us, as blowback, the Pakistani Bomb and nuclear sales --- in the category of "worst covert operation in U.S. history," rivaling such contenders as the Bay of Pigs, Iran-Contra, and the secret CIA torture camps abroad.

From what I know about the history of CIA covert ops, Ellsberg is on the mark in the following comment:

Many, if not most, covert operations deserve to be disclosed by a free press. They are often covert not only because they are illegal but because they are wildly ill-conceived and reckless. "Sensitive" and "covert" are often synonyms for "half-assed," "idiotic," and "dangerous to national security," as well as "criminal." All of these would apply to the pattern of activities revealed by Edmonds if it were truly presidentially authorized, as is being whispered. Such activities persist, covertly, to the point of national disaster because the press neglects what our First Amendment was precisely intended to protect and encourage it to do: expose wrongdoing by officials. (my emphasis)

Official secrecy, law-breaking and incompetence are a trio often found in close company.

Tags: daniel ellsberg, sibel edmonds

More on Babara Lee's meeting on the Iraq War

A few additional thoughts from the Barbara Lee Townhall meeting on the Iraq War.

I learned a new phrase, at least one new to me: "street heat", referring to pressure from public opinion and from activists in particular. "Street" hear means people, voters, constituents, in much the way the English phrases "street cred" or "Arab street" use the word.

Barbara Lee and Daniel Ellsberg both emphasized how important it is that Congress also take a stand against the Cheney-Bush administration launching a preventive war against Iran. In the military appropriations bill that the House passed last week with its anti-Iraq War provisions, a specific prohibition against using funds to launch a war on Iran without Congressional approval was removed with the agreement of the Democratic leadership, a decision on their part that Ellsberg called "execrable".

But he also seemed to think that getting a veto-proof (two-thirds) vote for a measure banning an attack on Iran without Congressional approval was a feasible goal already. He didn't really elaborate on that, but his assumption seemed to be that there is substantial sentiment among Republicans for such an action. I haven't seen it yet.

Barbara Lee's official Web site has quite a bit of information on her positions on the Iraq War. For instance, her Statement on the Passage of the Iraq Accountability Act of 03/23/07, with video:

As we begin the fifth year of the occupation of Iraq, it is clear that the President has staked his legacy on an unnecessary war that his administration has botched at every turn. By refusing to take responsibility for their failed policy in Iraq, the administration has effectively forced Congress to intervene to bring it to a responsible end.

Speaker Pelosi, Chairman Obey, Jim Clyburn and the Democratic leadership deserve credit for recognizing this and for doing something that the Republican Congress refused to do for the last four years, namely to confront the Bush administration over their failed policy in Iraq and to commit to bringing that policy to a responsible end. That is a very important step.

As someone who opposed this war from the beginning, I have voted against every single penny for this war and found myself today in the difficult position of having to choose between voting against funding for the war or for establishing timelines to end it.

While as a matter of conscience I cast my vote against the funding, I hope that this passage of this bill marks the beginning of the end of the Iraq war, but the real fight still lies ahead. Congress will continue to have to confront the issue of this war and occupation, and I am committed to continuing to push to fully fund the safe withdrawal of our troops from Iraq at the earliest practicable date and for timelines for withdrawal that are backed up by the appropriations power that the Constitution grants to Congress. (my emphasis)

I guess I can say on this issue, "Barbara Lee speaks for me" in more than one sense, since she's my Congressional Representative and I've voted for her several times now. Someone asked in the meeting is she ever plans on running for President. She replied, "I'm not going to answer that question." Then she added with a grin, "But thanks for the question".

Two of the antiwar measures which are top priorities for her right now include:

HR508 (Bring the Troops Home and Iraq Sovereignty Restoration Act of 2007):

Congress declares that it is the policy of the United States--

(1) to end the occupation of Iraq on the basis of the findings specified in section 101;

(2) to accelerate the training and equipping of the military and security forces of the Government of Iraq;

(3) to pursue security and stability in Iraq through diplomacy;

(4) to help preserve the territorial integrity of Iraq as a nation state;

(5) to take all appropriate measures to account for any missing members of the United States Armed Forces or United States citizens in Iraq; and

(6) to turn over all internal security activities and military operations in Iraq to the elected Government of Iraq not later than the end of the six-month period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act.

HR 770 (Iran Nuclear Nonproliferation Act):

To prohibit the use of funds to carry out any covert action for the purpose of causing regime change in Iran or to carry out any military action against Iran in the absence of an imminent threat, in accordance with international law and constitutional and statutory requirements for congressional authorization.

I wasn't able to locate the text of these bills on her Web site. You can go to the search page for www.Thomas.gov and search for the bill with HR specified before the number and see the full text.

It's always interesting to me to see the coverage in the newspapers of local stories on events at which I was present, e.g., Sean Penn, Rep. Lee rally against Iraq war by Carolyn Jones and Cecilia M. Vega San Francisco Chronicle 03/25/07; Actor joins anti-war gathering: Sean Penn takes part in rally against Iraq conflict held in Oakland by William Brand and Erik Nelson Oakland Tribune 03/25/2007.

The Chronicle print edition featured the first of the photo that appears at the upper left of the one on the Web version, the one that has Sean Penn looking like Leon Trotsky rallying the masses. The one of him and Barbara Lee bowing their heads and observing a moment of silence for those who have lost their lives in the Iraq War was more characteristic of the mood of the meeting and of Sean Penn's speech.

Neither Penn nor Rep. Barbara Lee, the Oakland Democrat who has opposed the war since before it began four years ago, offered much in the way of specifics for ending the conflict, and they were largely preaching to the choir. The enthusiastic and occasionally boisterous crowd of 800 or so crammed into the Grand Lake Theater wildly cheered as Penn excoriated President Bush.

"You and your smarmy pundits - and the smarmy pundits you have in your pocket - can take your war and shove it," Penn said. "Let's unite not only in stopping this war, but in holding this administration accountable."

Actually, I wouldn't say the crowd ever "wildly cheered", although there were a number of standing ovations, the most enthusiastic one probably being when Daniel Ellsberg took the stage. The crowd was enthusiastic. But if Jones and Vega thought what they heard yesterday was wild cheering, I wonder what they would make of the home crowd at an Oakland Raiders game!

I think they got this part right:

Penn reiterated a point often made by opponents of the war when he said he supports the troops but opposes the war.

"Let's make this crystal clear: We do support our troops, but not the exploitation of them and their families," he said. "The money that's spent on this war would be better spent on building levees in New Orleans and health care in Africa and care for our veterans. Iraq is not our toilet. It's a country of human beings whose lives that were once oppressed by Saddam are now in 'Dante's Inferno.' "

I didn't take detailed notes in the meeting. But I'm pretty sure they abridged this quote:

"We can't afford to spend one more dime or lose one more American or Iraqi life on this illegal and unwinnable war," Lee told the crowd.

As I recall, she said at that point that the war was "illegal, immoral, unwinnable" and something to the effect of having been started based on lies, as I recall.

Their report on the march and rally afterward includes this "My Name Is Liza Kavelage" moment:

"The only thing this government needs is for the people to be silent and then they can do whatever they want," said Joan MacIntyre, a 74-year-old great-grandmother from Oakland.

MacIntyre, like many who attended Saturday's events, was no stranger to war protests. She has marched in numerous rallies since the Iraq war started in March 2003 and was arrested Monday during a San Francisco protest. It was her 41st arrest, she boasted proudly.

"At least I can hold my head up and say that I tried," she said.

Brand and Nelson give a longer quote from Sean Penn:

"You have broken our country; you have broken our hearts. The needless blood on your hands ... is drowning the freedom, the security and the dream that America might have been, once healed up from Sept. 11, 2001," Penn said.

"But now we are encouraged to self-censor any words that might be perceived as inflammatory, if our belief is that we should stop this war today. We cower as you point your fingers telling us to support our troops — well, you and the smarmy pundits in your pocket — those who bathe in the moisture of your blood-soaked underwear can take that noise and shove it, because we will be snowed no more."

Penn, who lives in Marin County, told the audience, "Let's fight this president and put him in f—ing jail."

Not to nitpick, but I did write down that last sentence seconds later, because I wanted to use it in the blog post I made yesterday. And I got it as, "Let's show the world we can fire this administration and put them in [Cheney]ing jail!"

They estimated the crowd at 600. I couldn't really argue with either of their number or the Chronicle's, because I'm frankly terrible at estimating the size of a crowd that I'm part of. The Chron's reporters also apparently left before Daniel Ellsberg showed up. Brand and Nelson write:

Another speaker at the Grand Lake was Daniel Ellsberg, a longtime Kensington resident, who won fame when, in 1971, he leaked a top secret study of the Vietnam War showing the missteps and deception of the American government. Ellsberg, whom Lee called to the podium from the audience, suggested the Democratic majority launch an investigation of Bush misconduct in the war leading to a motion for impeachment.

"Congress cannot let these two years ago pass without defining what Bush, (Vice President Dick) Cheney and others have done as high crimes and misdemeanors," Ellsberg said to a burst of applause from the highly partisan audience.

They also reported this from the rally afterward:

Alan Howe, 55, rode his bicycle to the demonstration to vent his frustration with his fellow evangelical Christians, including Bush, who have supported the war.

"He says he's a brother in faith, but I don't see how he's applying that," said Howe, a former Baptist pastor who is now a senior librarian at the Oakland Public Library.

But Howe wasn't always anti-war. He said he was a hawkish conservative on the Vietnam War until shortly after the secret U.S. invasion of Cambodia in 1970. He attended a similar rally in Santa Barbara, where he was a student at the Christian-oriented Westmont College. "I remember hearing an Episcopal priest speak and thinking, if half of what he's saying is true, I can't support the war."

Tags: antiwar movement, barbara lee, daniel ellsberg, hr508, hr770, iraq war, sean penn

Town meeting on the Iraq War - March 24

Antiwar leaflet, Oakland Center for Peace and Justice March 2007

As a resident of California's 9th Congressional district, my Congressional Representative is Barbara Lee, I'm proud to say. She was in the district for a constituent meeting on March 24, a meeting focused on the Iraq War and billed as a "Townhall on Iraq". It was held in the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland, an independent theater whose owner often features liberal political slogans on his marquee along with the movie titles.

Barbara Lee spoke, of course, and there were also presentations by several guest speakers: Sean Penn, the actor, antiwar activist (and Madonna's ex); Shawn McNeil, an Iraq War Marine veteran and activist with Veterans Against the Iraq War; Stephanie Martinez, a 16-year-old high school student in Oakland who volunteers for the Martin Luther King, Jr. Freedom Center; Betty Cox, a painter and teacher who has been active supporting war resister Lt. Aaron Watada; and, Martha Winnacker of Military Families Speak Out, whose son fought in Iraq as a Marine.

Late in the two-hour meeting (which started late so was really more like 1 1/2 hours), the moderator recognized Daniel Ellsberg, who had just come in and sat down in the audience. So he was invited to come up and speak, as well.

Not surprisingly, a lot of the discussion was about last week antiwar vote in the House. Barbara is one of the leaders of the 70-member House Out of Iraq Caucus, and she and five other caucus members voted against the Pelosi compromise that passed Friday. She explained that she has always voted against any funding bill that would provide funds to continue the Iraq War.

But she and other speakers were careful to point out that Friday's antiwar vote was a important moment for the antiwar movement, not least because it represented a recognition by the House major of the need for some kind of timelines for withdrawal. There was some criticism of the House Democratic leadership for not allowing a vote on Barbara's proposal for full US troop withdrawal by the end of 2007. But Winnancker and Ellsberg both praised her for encouraging enough members of the Out of Iraq Caucus to vote for the Pelosi measure to get it passed in the House.

I was impressed with the level of seriousness among the speakers and from Barbara herself about getting the US out of the Iraq War as soon as possible. And also by the realistic and practical attitude about the House vote last week. Ellsberg spoke mostly about that vote and said that he would have found Barbara's position on that vote very difficult, but he emphasized that the measure that was passed was important in putting the House on the record against continuing the war. And that it was definitely better than the Bush plan of continuing the war for "50 more years".

But he also stressed that the position of the Out of Iraq Caucus is substantively different than the Pelosi bill that did pass, not just because the compromise's timeline extends to 2008. The Pelosi compromise included various exceptions to the troop pullout, like "support" troops, for example.

Everyone also recognized that Bush was veto this particular bill and no one was really predicting what would happen in the next round. First, the Senate has to act and then it goes to a conference committee to be put into final form. Ellsberg noted that, realistically, some funding bill would pass without the pullout timelines included.

There were several impeachment activists in the audience who periodically help up "Impeach" signs. Barbara noted at the end that Rep. Dennis Kucinich has "opened a discussion" on impeachment, implying that she was very open to the notion. Ellsberg made a strong point that the Congress needed to start an impeachment investigation. He said it was important for Congress to go on record before the end of this administration that the administration's actions should be considered "high crimes and misdemeanors", the Constitutional standard for impeachment of the President.

Sean Penn was also emphatic about the need to recognize the criminal nature of the administration's actions in the Iraq War. He mentioned the media blathering on the occasion of Gerald Ford's death about how his pardon of Nixon was so great for national healing. But, he asked, when we look at today's situation, is it really such a good thing that the deterrent effect of the law was blocked in Nixon's case?

He also said, "Let's show the world we can fire this administration and put them in [Cheney]ing jail!" That was quite an applause line, and Barbara herself clearly appreciated it.

Barbara ended the meeting with an impassioned plea for adequate health care for veterans.

There was a march afterward to the Oakland City Hall that I didn't attend. Unfortunately, that wasn't as well publicized as the constituent meeting itself. More speeches and artistic performances were planned at City Hall.

Antiwar leaflet, Oakland Center for Peace and Justice March 2007

Tags: antiwar movement, barbara lee, daniel ellsberg, iraq war, sean penn