Activists are building better media outlets, educating young people, educating old people, keeping military testing and recruiting out of schools, and discouraging the Army from building real-weapon video arcades in shopping malls. But when it comes to stopping our wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, our citizens are less clear how to go about it.

The peace movement was defunded and demobilized by the absurd belief that an election alone would make a difference, and now there is widespread desire to tell everyone that it didn’t. Certainly, it didn’t. We have a larger military budget, bases in more nations, and more troops and mercenaries on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq combined now than before the election.

We need to understand that this was entirely predictable and predicted. Those who expected something from an election alone need to be clear that such expectation was entirely – not just partially – misguided. Disappointment with a president needs to be replaced with acknowledgement of strategic error. The latter generates less despair and allows clearer thinking about strategy going forward.

There is still and will always be a role for journalists, bloggers, authors, and pundits to expose the abuses of any and all government officials, including the president. But the primary role of peace activists should have nothing to do with presidents, or with senators. We have virtually no ability to influence them. When you’re invited to discuss these wars on a television show, by all means expose what the president is doing. But asking members of an activist group to spend their time writing or calling the White House is a waste of energy that could be better used. It should be directed at the House of Representatives.

And when we look at the House, we see that the easiest way to quickly generate a large list of cosponsors is to propose bills. This pleases our closest allies in the House and impresses funders and allies in Washington, D.C. But it is not the easiest way to use the House to actually end wars. A bill with no teeth to it instructing the Pentagon to produce a plan to exit Afghanistan someday is something that one could almost imagine passing the Senate and being signed by the president. At best that process might move public opinion a bit more in the right direction. But it would further enforce in the public’s minds, and Congress’s, the idea that when and where wars are fought should be determined by the president or the Pentagon.

Passing a bill barring the spending of any money on an escalation in Afghanistan shifts the discussion to one of opposing an escalation rather than demanding withdrawal. This has led many peace groups to self-censor their demands for withdrawal. And passing such a bill through the Senate and persuading the President to sign it, or overriding a veto is a beautiful fantasy, but a far, far, far more difficult undertaking than a simpler and more direct approach.

If you want to stop funding wars, or even just the escalation of wars, the easiest way is to just not fund them. This can be done in the House alone. The Senate is not needed. The president is not needed. Rather than passing a bill stating that you won’t fund wars, and then dreaming about getting the Senate to pass it too, you can choose to not pass bills that fund the wars. If the House makes clear that it will not fund an escalated war, then the war cannot be escalated. If the House makes clear that it will not fund a continued war, then the war cannot be continued.

The process of signing congress members onto a bill against funding or a bill requiring an exit plan is not counterproductive. It nudges them in the right direction. It creates a discussion about the possibility of including such measures in funding bills. It identifies lists of congress members to target in lobbying for stronger commitments. But when these bills are all we ask for, then they are not compromises or middle-ground. They are harder to move forward when they are all we ask for. And moving them forward without a broader vision of how we actually end the wars doesn’t get us anywhere in the end.

Our primary demand must be: publicly commit to voting no on any bill that funds these wars. If unrelated measures are included in such bills, they must still be voted down and those other measures passed separately. If your representative is worried about funding a withdrawal itself, assure them that a bill to fund purely withdrawal has our support. If they are worried about abandoning foreign nations, assure them that we support diplomacy and aid. But we need them to join the list of their colleagues who have committed to voting no on bills that fund the wars. And we need them to lobby their colleagues to join them on that list.

By moving our focus to Congress we do something else useful. We allow people to protest wars who refuse to protest a president. By identifying wars with a president, we grant all future presidents the power to make wars, and we discourage participation in citizen activism by people who fantasize about the president being their friend or who think it’s not wise to protest a popular president.

Our focus on Congress should include their responsibility on Iraq as well as Afghanistan and Pakistan. Congress has now required the Pentagon to provide it with monthly reports on its progress toward fully withdrawing from Iraq by the end of 2011. When those reports are not forthcoming or do not credibly suggest progress toward that goal, congressional committees must be forced by us to subpoena Secretary of “Defense” Robert Gates. And in fact, the House Judiciary Committee must be compelled by us as soon as possible to restore the checking power of impeachment by opening an impeachment inquiry into Jay Bybee, a federal judge who, while employed by the Justice Department, signed memos purporting to legalize torture and aggressive war. At the very least, Bybee must be subpoenaed, and Congress must use the Capitol Police to enforce that subpoena rather than futilely asking the Justice Department to do it.

If Congress asserts the power to hold war criminals accountable (which, again, can be done without the Senate or the president), we will be in a far better position to deter further wars and escalations, and Congress will be in a better position to cut off funding.

In June, 32 congress members voted No on war funding. They should be thanked and rewarded. But they should, above all, be asked and pressured to make a commitment to join this list of members committed to voting No from here on out: http://afterdowningstreet.org/whipwars

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has said that he’d like to see another $50 billion passed in another supplemental war spending bill in the next few months. This is money to fund an escalation that we are supposed to believe has not been decided upon yet. This must be stopped. Some congress members are speaking against it. Even the Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee David Obey has suggested he might oppose this. He very much needs to be encouraged by people around the nation to not put our money where his mouth isn’t.

I just had the privilege of speaking at a rally in Portland, Maine, where an enthusiastic crowd of Mainers demanded the actions I’m proposing here. Their two congress members voted the right way in June, and they are working to win their public commitments to continue that practice and to lobby their colleagues to join them in that commitment.

Resources to help in this effort (and a place to report your results) in your congressional district can be found here. Here’s a flyer on ending the war in Vietghanistan: PDF. Here’s how to step up your activism. Here’s what’s needed instead of bombs and guns. Here’s a way to nonviolently resist.

Here’s a very useful list of top targets and multiple ways to contact them. You can help with that even if they are not your representative.

What I am proposing is not easy. It’s just the easiest path we have. It will be easier, the more of us get involved, the more of us refrain from discouraging each other with our knowledge of how hard the struggle will be, and the more of us who are willing to go beyond lobbying to nonviolently disrupting, including by sitting in our congress members’ offices and refusing to leave until they agree to leave Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. These wars, like all wars, are Congress’s wars. The blood is on their hands and they represent us.

David Swanson is the founder of afterdowningstreet.org and author of the new book Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union published by Seven Stories Press. You can order a copy and find out when tour will be in your town by visiting DavidSwanson.org.

“The secrecy surrounding the understandings was important because there is growing antipathy toward America in Pakistan, as well as a history of distrust,” Hersh writes in the November 16th issue of The New Yorker magazine.

“Many Pakistanis believe that America’s true goal is not to keep their weapons safe but to diminish or destroy the Pakistani nuclear complex,” he writes. The arsenal is a source of great pride among Pakistanis, “who view the weapons as symbols of their nation’s status and as an essential deterrent against an attack by India.”

Pakistan keeps its nuclear warheads separate from their triggers to prevent anyone from launching a warhead without at least pausing to put it together. A U.S. rapid-response team of terrorism and nonproliferation experts is stationed at the ready at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, is at the ready to fly to Pakistan if the security of any of its 80-plus nukes is threatened.

Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari “spoke with derision” in an interview about U.S. concern over the vulnerability of his country’s nuclear arsenal, Hersh said. “In your country, you feel that you have to hold the fort for us. The American people want a lot of answers for the errors of the past, and it’s very easy to spread fear. Our Army officers are not crazy, like the Taliban. They’re British-trained. Why would they slip up on nuclear security? A mutiny would never happen in Pakistan.”

Moreover, an unnamed senior Pakistani official said to have close ties to Zardari added, “you’d like control of our day-to-day deployment. But why should we give it to you? Even if there was a military coup d’etat in Pakistan, no one is going to give up total control of our nuclear weapons. Never. Why are you not afraid of India’s nuclear weapons?”

The official answered his own question with, “Because India is your friend, and the longtime policies of America and India converge. Between you and the Indians, you will fuck us in every way. The truth is that our weapons are less of a problem for the Obama Administration than finding a respectable way out of Afghanistan.”

A former senior U.S. intelligence official told Hersh the Pakistanis gave the U.S. intelligence about their warheads, some of the warheads’ locations, and their command-and-control system. However, a U.S. military spokesman for Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, “I am not aware of our receipt of any such information.”

In the July/August issue of Arms Control Today, Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, former director of the Department of Energy’s intelligence operation, warned of the “lethal proximity between terrorists, extremists, and nuclear weapons insiders” in Pakistan. “Purely in actuarial terms, there is a strong possibility that bad apples in the nuclear establishment are willing to cooperate with outsiders for personal gain or out of sympathy for their cause. Nowhere in the world is this threat greater than in Pakistan…” He added, “Anything that helps upgrade Pakistan’s nuclear security is an investment” (in America’s security).

The question of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is made more perplexing by U.S. efforts to pursue its Afghan enemies on Pakistani soil and involve that country’s military in its operations. Sultan Amir Tarar, a retired Pakistani intelligence official, told Hersh that the U.S. campaign will backfire. “The Americans are trying to rent out their war to us.” If Obama persists, he added, “there will be an uprising here, and this corrupt government will collapse.” Tarar is further quoted as saying, “The longer the war goes on, the longer it will spill over in the tribal territories, and it will lead to a revolutionary stage.”

Tarar believes the U.S. has to negotiate with the Afghan Taliban, even if that means direct talks with Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, Hersh reported. He noted that stepped-up fighting in the tribal areas of Pakistan could further “radicalize” that nation.

How respect for the U.S. is declining in Pakistan was reflected by a source described as “a retired senior Pakistani intelligence officer” who told Hersh, “My belief today is that it’s better to have the Americans as an enemy rather than as a friend, because you cannot be trusted. The only good thing the United States did for us was to look the other way about an atomic bomb when it suited the United States to do so.”

And in India, which has been at loggerheads with Pakistan since the 1947 partition, an official told Hersh, “They like us better in Pakistan than you Americans. I can tell you that in a public-opinion poll we, India, will beat you.”

Former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, currently living in exile in London, told Hersh that he is troubled by U.S.-controlled Predator drone attacks on targets inside Pakistan, which began in 2005. “I said to the Americans, ‘Give us the Predators.’ It was refused. I told the Americans, ‘Then just say publicly that you’re giving them to us. You keep on firing them but put Pakistan Air Force markings on them.’ That, too, was denied.”

Speaking of Predator attacks, Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai told Hersh, “What the (Pakistani) Army did not understand, and what the Americans don’t understand, is that by demolishing the house of a suspected Taliban or their supporters you are making an enemy of the whole family.”

The issue of nuclear weapon instability in Pakistan reflects on the series of historic American decisions to (a)manufacture and use atomic weapons in World War Two in the first place, and (b) to spend literally trillions of taxpayer dollars over the years to increase their numbers and lethality and (c)to help nations such as Israel, India and Pakistan to build their nuclear arsenals over the objections of the international authority. The U.S. (d) has also sold warplanes capable of carrying nuclear bombs both to hostile neighbors India and Pakistan, further increasing the possibility of their use.

Sherwood Ross formerly worked for The Chicago Daily News and other major dailies and as a columnist for wire services. He currently runs a public relations firm for “worthy causes”. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com

What’s going on here?

Well, the tube analysts are quick to say, unemployment figures are a “lagging” indicator. That is, employment generally lags the overall economy, with layoffs coming after a recession kicks in, and hiring waiting until a recovery is well underway.

But that isn’t true with a deep recession like this one, because at some point—and we’re well past that point—high and pro-longed unemployment leads to reduced demand for goods and services, and to a psychology of fear and consumer withdrawal.

Once people feel that they aren’t going to find a new job soon, and once those who still have jobs feel that their employment is not secure, they no longer buy things except what they absolutely need. And in an economy where fully 72 percent of economic activity is consumer spending, that is no longer a “lagging indicator.” High, prolonged unemployment becomes a causal factor in the economic downturn.

If people aren’t buying stuff, then companies won’t make it, which means that they stop hiring, and even lay more people off, and so unemployment becomes a downward spiral of cause and effect.

But what about the stock market rise? Why would investors think that a worse-than-expected jobs report is a good thing?

There are several explanations for this ugly phenomenon.  First of all, rising unemployment—particularly sharply rising unemployment—means that the Federal Reserve will definitely not, for the foreseeable future, raise interest rates. A rise in interest rates would hit companies hard, and always batters the stock market, and the government and the Fed don’t want to do either of those things. So investors almost always jump into the market and push stocks up when they get some signal that the Fed is going to lower, or at least hold the line on interest rates. With rates effectively set at 0, the Fed can’t lower them, but it is saying, no doubt with the bad news about unemployment in mind, that it won’t be raising them anytime soon.

But there is another reason high unemployment may excite investors.  Current layoffs are likely, for many workers, to be permanent. A recent report that productivity—work output per worker—was up at a 9.55 annual rate in the Third Quarter, is an indication that those companies that haven’t shut down operations are making or doing more with fewer workers.  That kind of thing happens in recessions, because as joblessness gets worse, those workers who still have jobs become more docile and are willing to be worked harder by management.

Of course, you get more on-the-job injuries, more stress-related illness, etc. along with that kind of speed-up, but over the shorter term, it looks good on the books if you’re cranking out more product with a lower payroll.

Of course, longer term, this is all a disaster, not just for laid-off and afraid-to-be-laid-off workers, but for the country as a whole. You can’t rebuild an economy with more than one-in-ten workers unemployed. And remember, that’s just the people who are our of a job and still looking for one; it doesn’t count those who have been out of work for so long, or who work in professions that are so gone (like construction or maybe manufacturing Saturns) that they’ve just given up looking, or those who have taken part-time jobs in ice-cream parlors or selling apples to survive but who want to be fully employed again. If you add those people into the mix (which is the way the US used to count unemployment until the 1980s), you get an unemployment rate closer to 20 percent, or one in five! And you sure can’t rebuild an economy with one in five workers unemployed.

That’s what makes all the happy talk in the news and in Washington about the recession being over because last quarter showed a 3.5 percent annualized jump in the so-called Gross Domestic Product so ridiculous.

Most of that rise was the result of government subsidies to car-buyers and first-time house buyers. It was a one-shot stimulus that pushed forward spending, but it was no indication of a recovering economy, just a spasm of spending using taxpayer money.

Furthermore, an excellent article in Businessweek by Michael Mandel noted that fully one-percent of that GDP gain was the result of a failure by government economists to account for a collapse in corporate spending on research and development and on training and retaining intellectual assets (a complicated way of saying that engineers, scientists and technology workers were being laid off at a higher rate than other workers, and much R&D work was being shipped overseas for good), So really the “growth” of GDP in the third Quarter should have been at a 2.5 precent rate, and even that was largely government pump priming, not recovered economic activity.

The truth is, we’re falling deeper into recession, and apparently, according to the October unemployment figures, at an accelerating rate. And there is no indication that the Obama Administration or the Democratic Congress are planning any significant jobs-creation program.  They seem to be happy with this.

So quick, run out and buy some stock! It’s the American thing to do.  Probably not a bad idea either, since those dollars you are using will keep sinking in value as long as the Fed is constrained from jacking up interest rates.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net

But Weiner did not ask Pelosi to include in her bill the Kucinich Amendment to allow states to create single-payer. Pelosi made clear that President Obama opposes that, and used the bogus excuse that providing everyone with comprehensive free healthcare would deprive them of the right to pay ever increasing rates for uncertain health “insurance.”

The removal of the Weiner vote undoubtedly helps the effort to force some of the 57 congress members who wrote to Pelosi in July keep their word. They said they would not support a bill without a public option tied to Medicare rates. If even 40 of them keep their word, the current bill will fail. And we will have a second round, in which we can push for single-payer and achieve at least a better result than the rotten corpse of a bill being voted on this weekend.

If we could have had a second round AND a strong but failing vote for national single-payer, that would have been better. But the single-payer vote was going to be used as cover for voting for a bad bill. Depriving conniving congress critters of that cover is decidedly a good thing, assuming healthcare advocates can come to terms with it and not rip each other’s throats out.

If congress members in favor of real helthcare reform were able to work with each other, or if activists were, other possibilities would open up. And if we have a round 2 in which advocates for a public option admit that single-payer would be better and include single-payer in all of their discussions as the ideal that Americans actually prefer, wonderful things might become possible. But unless single-payer advocates admit that winning in one state would be a good thing, rather than a loss of purity, we may not save any lives. Our most likely path to national single-payer is to get it in a state first.

And we could still facilitate that if we all got together and forced the conference committe to put the Kucinich Amendment back in, or if we forced House members to insist on voting No on Saturday unless the Kucinich Amendment is put back in.

*****

UPDATE: Congressman Henry Waxman has his own twisted logic:

Chairman Waxman’s Statement on Rep. Weiner’s Single-Payer Amendment

WASHINGTON, DC — Today Chairman Henry A. Waxman released the following statement in response to Rep. Anthony Weiner’s decision not to offer a single-payer amendment to the House Democratic health care legislation:

“Rep. Anthony Weiner has been one of the most tireless and effective advocates for health care reform. His decision not to offer his amendment on the floor was a difficult one for him, and for supporters of the measure. I believe Rep. Weiner’s choice will be enormously helpful in passing the health care reform package. His step is a correct and courageous one. I thank Rep. Weiner for it, and look forward to working with him closely. Rep. Weiner deserves a great deal of credit for helping to make quality, affordable health care more available to millions of Americans.”

“I’m talking of people being raped with broken bottles,” Murray said. “I’m talking of people having their children tortured in front of them until they sign a confession. I’m talking of people being boiled alive. And the intelligence from these torture sessions was being received by the CIA, and was being passed on.”

Exit polls showed that many Obama voters sat out this election in New Jersey and Virginia, with turnout low in both races. In part that was because of local conditions, of course. In Virginia, Democrat R. Creigh Deeds ran as a conservative, and was attacked by the Republican candidate, former state attorney general Robert McDonnell, as a tax-happy liberal. With liberal voters in Virginia unenthusiastic about Deeds, and Republicans revved up, the loss was a foregone conclusion, even with Obama making two visits to campaign for Deeds, and with the national Democratic Party pumping in $6 million in campaign funding.

In New Jersey, incumbent Democrat John Corzine was wildly unpopular for raising taxes, so that even with Democrats holding an almost 2:1 registration advantage in the state (half of all voters are unaffiliated), he too had no enthusiastic backing from his former base. No amount of money poured in by the former Goldman Sachs chief executive could overcome the negative views of his record as governor.

But despite the lackluster candidates in both Virginia and New Jersey, I think it’s safe to say that there was also clear evidence that the losses, and the margins of the losses—huge in Virginia’s case, and significant in normally safely Democratic New Jersey—provide evidence that the Obama presidency, and the prevailing Democratic strategy of minimalist legislative initiatives on health care reform, global warming etc., expanded and unending war in Afghanistan, support for Wall Street and neglect of the one-in-five Americans who are unemployed or underemployed, are a political disaster in the making for Democrats in general and Obama in particular.

The president came into office on a wave of populist enthusiasm and high expectations for the “change” candidate Obama promised. No change has been forthcoming now for over nine months, and with the president now past the first-year anniversary of his historic election victory, the latest election results suggest that his presidency could already be headed for the rocks.

Next year, we will see all seats in the House, and a third of the seats in the Senate up for grabs. Typically, a president’s party loses seats in that election even when things are going well. When things are not going well, the losses can be significant.

Obama had a chance, coming into Washington after a big rout of Republicans last year, to set out an agenda of major progressive change. He could have called for expanding Medicare to cover all Americans. Instead he handed health reform over to Congress and immediately put out the word that he was open to compromise with Republicans, thus dooming reform from the outset.  He could have announced a thorough review of America’s two wars, and then set in motion a withdrawal form both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Instead he dithered on Iraq, and added troops in Afghanistan, assuring that both these disasters inherited from the Bush/Cheney administration became his own disasters, which will now drag on through his whole term.  He could have declared a global climate emergency, and announced a job-creating crash program to develop renewable energy in the US and to make the US a leader in renewable energy R&D. Instead, he did almost nothing in this critical area.

As for the economic crisis, he could have taken a progressive stand against the abuses of Wall Street, ordered a criminal investigation of the banking class, broken up the big banks and established a new regulatory system to put an end to the era of casino capitalism. Instead, he put the bankers in charge of Treasury and poured trillions of dollars into the largest banks, allowing them to grow even bigger and more predatory.

Voters, their collective assets shrunken over the year by $14 trillion, understandably are left wondering how, aside from better verbal skills, this president differs from the last one. As for the Democratic Congress, with Democrats pretending that nothing can be done unless they have not just 60 seats in Congress, but perhaps 70 or 75 (enough to be able to survive the inevitable defection of conservative members of the party), they can’t do anything of consequence—a claim that only is true if, as is the case, the party’s leadership and the president are unwilling to punish those who break rank.

If Democratic and progressive independent voters feel the same way about Obama and the Democratic Congress next fall, it will be curtains for the Democrats and for Obama’s presidency, such as it is.

And you know what? It won’t matter much if that happens, because what we’re seeing is that having Obama in the White House, and Democrats “in control” of Congress doesn’t get you much in the way of progressive change.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net

Photo by John Soares via Chomsky.info

Political activist Noam Chomsky says that although President Obama views the Iraq invasion merely as “a mistake” or “strategic blunder,” it is, in fact, a “major crime” designed to enable America to control the Middle East oil reserves.

“It’s [“strategic blunder"] probably what the German general staff was telling Hitler after Stalingrad,” Chomsky quipped, referring to the big Nazi defeat by the Soviet army in 1943.

“There is basically no significant change in the fundamental traditional conception that if we can control Middle East energy resources, then we can control the world,” he added.

In a lecture at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London Oct. 27th, Chomsky warned against expecting significant foreign policy changes from Obama, according to a report by Mamoon Alabbasi published on MWCNews.net. Alabbasi is an editor at Middle East Online.

“As Obama came into office, (former Secretary of State) Condoleezza Rice predicted he would follow the policies of Bush’s second term, and that is pretty much what happened, apart from a different rhetorical style,” Chomsky said.

Chomsky said the U.S. operates under the “Mafia principle,” explaining “the Godfather does not tolerate ‘successful defiance’” and must be stamped out “so that others understand that disobedience is not an option.”

Despite pressure on the U.S. to withdraw from Iraq, Alabbasi reported, Chomsky said the U.S. continues to seek a long-term presence in the country and the huge U.S. embassy in Baghdad is to be expanded under Obama.

“As late as November, 2007, the U.S. was still insisting that the ‘Status of Forces Agreement’ allow for an indefinite U.S. military presence and privileged access to Iraq’s resources by U.S. investors,” Chomsky added. “Well, they didn’t get that on paper at least. They had to back down,” Alabbasi quotes him as saying.

Chomsky said Middle East oil reserves are understood to be “a stupendous source of strategic power” and “one of the greatest material prizes in world history.”

Concerning Iran, Chomsky said the U.S. acted to overthrow its parliamentary democracy in 1953 “to retain control of Iranian resources” and when the Iranians reasserted themselves in 1979, the U.S. acted “to support Saddam Hussein’s merciless invasion” of that country.

“The torture of Iran continued without a break and still does, with sanctions and other means,” Chomsky said. According to Alabbasi, Chomsky “mocked the idea” presented by mainstream media that a nuclear-armed Iran might attack nuclear-armed Israel. Iranian leaders would have to have a “fanatic death wish” to attack Israel, which reportedly has 200 nuclear weapons or more.

“The chance of Iran launching a missile attack, nuclear or not, is about at the level of an asteroid hitting the earth,” Chomsky said. He said the presence of U.S. anti-missile weapons in Israel are really meant for preparing a possible attack on Iran, not for self-defense, as they are often presented.

Chomsky is professor emeritus of linguistics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Sherwood Ross formerly worked for The Chicago Daily News and other major dailies and as a columnist for wire services. He currently runs a public relations firm for “worthy causes”. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com

And it appears that reapproval may be about to happen – evidently with a green light from the Obama Administration and over strong objections from human rights and civil liberties groups.

Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee passed the USA Patriot Act Extension Act of 2009. The bill makes only minor changes to the original Patriot Act and was further watered down by amendments adopted during the Committee’s deliberations.

“The Senate Judiciary Committee had the opportunity to pass legislation to rein in a bill that has become a symbol of out-of-control government invasions of your privacy. They failed — approving a bill that does little to curtail the sweeping powers embedded in the Patriot Act,” said the American Civil Liberties Union.

The Committee’s actions were driven by “short-term and political considerations,” Chip Pitts, president of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, told us. The Committee ignored “the need for a more sensible long-term, reasoned, rule-of-law approach,” he said.

Now, civil libertarians are looking to the House of Representatives, where the Judiciary Committee has already begun to consider the measure. Both chambers must produce versions of the legislation, after which differences will be reconciled by a bicameral conference committee.

The three sections of the law due to expire next month are:

The “National Security Letter (NSL)” provision. The FBI uses NSLs to compel Internet service providers, libraries, banks, and credit reporting companies to turn over sensitive information about their customers and patrons. Using this data, the government can compile vast dossiers about innocent people. Government reports confirm that upwards of 50,000 of these secret record demands go out each year. In response to an ACLU lawsuit (Doe v. Holder), the Second Circuit Court of Appeal struck down as unconstitutional the part of the NSL law that gives the FBI the power to prohibit NSL recipients from telling anyone that the government has secretly requested customer Internet records.

The “Material Support” Statute. This provision criminalizes providing “material support” to terrorists, defined as providing any tangible or intangible good, service or advice to a terrorist or designated group. As amended by the Patriot Act and other laws since September 11, this section criminalizes a wide array of activities, regardless of whether they actually or intentionally further terrorist goals or organizations. Federal courts have struck portions of the statute as unconstitutional and a number of cases have been dismissed or ended in mistrial.

The FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Amendments Act of 2008. Last summer, Congress amended the law to permit the government to conduct warrantless and suspicion-less dragnet collection of U.S. residents’ international telephone calls and e-mails.

Now the civil liberties community is stepping up lobbying efforts to ensure that the legislation that emerges from the House Judiciary Committee contains more protections for privacy and other civil liberties.  Such legislation has been introduced in the House by three powerful Congressmen: John Conyers of Michigan, Jerrold Nadler of New York, and Robert Scott of Virginia.

Their proposed amendments Act would create more civil liberties protections for many of the Patriot Act powers, including restricting the gag order attached to receiving a subpoena known as a national security letter (NSL), terminating the never-used “lone wolf” surveillance power, and limiting the use of NSLs to collect information on suspected terrorists or spies instead of innocent Americans.

However, the proposed new legislation leaves intact the Patriot Act’s so-called “material support” provision, permitting prosecution of those who work with or for charities that give humanitarian aid in good faith to war-torn countries.

The actions of the Senate committee have left human rights advocates and many legal scholars perplexed because the Committee chairman, Senator Patrick Leahy, Democratic of Vermont, is considered one of the most liberal members of the Senate, and its members include such other high-profile progressives as Al Franken of Minnesota, Russ D. Feingold of Wisconsin, Chuck Schumer of New York, Dick J. Durbin of Illinois, and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.

Asked to explain their votes, Chip Pitts of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee said “the secret and hypocritical lobbying by the Obama administration against reforms – while publicly stating receptiveness to them — was undoubtedly a huge if lamentable factor.”

He also cited the recent arrests of Najibullah Zazi and others, noting that  Leahy said that in light of these incidents, “this is no time to weaken or undermine the tools that law enforcement relies on to protect America.”

Zazi has been charged with conspiring to bomb targets in the U.S. He allegedly traveled last year to Pakistan, where the FBI charges that he attended terrorist training camps.

“In sum, short-term and political considerations driven by dramatic events once again dramatically affected the need for a more sensible long-term, reasoned, rule-of-law approach, ” Pitts told us, adding, “In the eight years since passage of the original Patriot Act, it’s become clear that the escalating political competition to appear tough on terror (and avoid being accused of being ‘soft on terror’) brings perceived electoral benefits with few costs, with vital but fragile civil liberties being easily sacrificed.

“Even nominal and sometimes actual civil liberties advocates have become more used to the ‘new normal’, seemingly forgetting the less visible but vital benefits of the liberties themselves – including for genuine and effective security, let alone for successful, prosperous, creative, dynamic open societies as opposed to closed societies like the former East Germany that used such approaches to their detriment.”

“The persistent myths and claims that the Patriot Act hasn’t been abused are simply ludicrous after the documentation by (civil liberties groups), regarding the torrent of abuse that has happened since 9/11,” Pitts told us.

Prior to the Judiciary Committee markups, the ACLU and other civil liberties groups had endorsed the JUSTICE Act, an alternative bill that would heavily reform not only the Patriot Act but other overly broad surveillance laws.

Amendments that were offered but failed by voice vote included an amendment by Senator Durbin to curb the abuse of the National Security Letter (NSL) statute and another offered by Senator Feingold to allow the “lone wolf” provision to expire (this never-used provision targets individuals who are not connected to terrorist groups). An amendment also failed that would make it more difficult for recipients to challenge the gag order that comes with receiving an NSL.

However, two amendments offered Senator Feingold were included in the final bill. In one, the Department of Justice would be ordered to discard any illegally obtained information received in response to an NSL. In the second, the government would have to notify suspects of “sneak and peek” searches within seven days instead of the 30 days currently required by the statute. “Sneak and peek” searches allow the government to search a home without notifying the resident immediately.

The five men featured in the video were all held at Guantánamo for years without any meaningful opportunity to challenge their detention. They were denied their due process rights, which might have established the lack of evidence against them much earlier and spared them years of torture, abuse and imprisonment. The men were eventually released, and as they explain in the video, are now attempting to put their lives back together.

“I experienced sadness in a state that I have never had, cruelty in a depth that I’d never seen in my life,” Omar Deghayes tells the camera. He had graduated from law school in England and was studying the legal system in Afghanistan when he was captured and sent to Guantánamo for nearly six years. “You will not leave a similar person anymore. You will leave as broken, physically broken, psychologically broken.”

Ruhal Ahmed and Shafiq Rasul grew up together in England. They went to Pakistan for a friend’s wedding and took a short trip to neighboring Afghanistan where they were captured. It would be two and a half years before they could go home.

“Guantánamo Bay was hell for us,” Shafiq says. But Ruhal says their friendship helped them survive the brutal experience: “Anything that happened to me I could relate to somebody that was very close to me. Being friends from a young age – who else would you want in that kind of situation?”

Back home in England, Shafiq and Ruhal say the American leaders who allowed the injustices of Guantánamo should be held accountable. But they do not hold a grudge against the American people.

“The drinks we drink, Coca Cola – it’s American. We still drink it,” Ruhal says. “We still go to the movies. So we don’t hate Americans as American people.”

Omar says he feels the same way, but he wants Americans to know exactly what happened at Guantánamo: “I want the people themselves, the people in America, the good people – which I met many of – to realize what ugly things were done to others in their names.”

It was a war that started out because the US didn’t want the Commies to win a battle in the so-called Cold War, and even though it was on the farthest side of the world, in a poor nation of peasants, even though they had been struggling to throw off colonialism for years and we had simply become the new colonists, no president dared to admit the obvious–we had no business being there, and all the killing and dying had no point.

Afghanistan is the same thing all over again. We “got in” surreptitiously for the same reason. Russia had helped organize a coup to take over what passed for a “central government” and had found itself mired in a brutal war of occupation, and the US had begun, back in the ’70s, organizing and providing arms to the forces fighting the Russians, not because Afghanistan–a country even more remote and meaningless in terms of US interests or security than Vietnam–had any importance but because it was a way to “stick it to” the Russians in the waning days of the Cold War. But things have a way of coming back to bite you, and the folks we armed turned out not to like us very much either.

So when we helped set up the foreign fighters–mostly Arab volunteers–in Afghanistan, we set up a force of people who saw us, in their home countries, as the oppressor and backer of vile and corrupt regimes back home. It was only a matter of time before they began turning their attentions to us. When 9-11 happened, we went after these people in Afghanistan, and the government of the Taliban, which we had formerly helped to power. In short order, what we managed to do was substitute ourselves for the Russians.

What are we fighting for in Afghanistan? Don’t ask me. I don’t give a damn. And neither do most Americans. For a while, Afghanistan was the “good war” in many Americans’ minds, because they bought the lie that conquering Afghanistan was necessary to defend the US from terrorism. Of course that was silly. Terrorists don’t need countries. They are as mobile as a nuclear submarine or a flu virus.

But once you put large numbers of troops in a foreign country and have them storming around shooting up the place, and once you start bombing the crap out of villages and killing people indiscriminately, you create a new situation where you become the occupier. So here we are, fighting another war that makes no sense, has no purpose, and has no end. Good war? Necessary war? What a joke!

What are we fighting for in Afghanistan? Don’t ask us. We don’t give a damn. And yet President Obama is now on track to add more troops–maybe 20,000, maybe 40,000. Hell his general on the ground, Gen. Stanley McCrystal, is asking for as much as 80,000, which would put the total up to what it is in Iraq, where we’re still bogged down in an occupation quagmire.

That’s where Kenny Rogers song “The Gambler” comes in. “You’ve got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, know when to walk away, know when to run.”

We had a chance to walk away from Afghanistan back in 2001. The Al Qaeda forces had been routed, the Taliban government had collapsed, and people in much of the country of Afghanistan, who had been largely spared any violence during the American attacks, were largely grateful at having the yoke of fundamentalism lifted off their backs. But the US didn’t leave. A low-level war continued.

More and more innocent people were killed, or arrested and stuffed into a concentration camp and torture hell-hole at Bagram Airbase outside Kabul, or shipped off to the other hell-holes in Guantanamo Bay or other CIA secret sites. And the Taliban were able to regroup and reposition themselves as saviors of the nation. Now the US is cast as the occupier. We can’t just “walk away” anymore. We have to “fold ‘em” and “run.”

Will Obama have the sense of a gambler with a bad hand? So far the signs are not good that he will. We are now in the position of having 70,000 US troops, soon to be closer to 100,000 troops, fighting, killing and dying in a country run by a corrupt, vote-stealing leader whose brother has long been known to be a leading profiteer in the global opium/heroin trade, in which Afghanistan has become the world leader (80-90 percent of the market) and, according to the New York Times, for eight years and counting a paid CIA asset in charge of a nation-wide death squad that is working on contract for The Agency. Polls show that most Afghanis, understandably, want the US out of their country. Wouldn’t you?

A hand doesn’t get much worse than that.

It’s time to fold and run.

If we don’t get the hell out of Afghanistan, then we’ll all be singing Country Joe’s song, but with modified lyrics (which I just premiered at a solo performance at a fund-raising dinner last week in Philadelphia for the local chapter of Veterans for Peace):

Come on all you young women and men,

Uncle Sam needs your help again.

He’s got himself into a terrible jam,

Way off yonder in Afghanistan.

You ain’t got a job, so pick up a gun!

We’re gonna have a whole lotta fun!

All you folks in the National Guard,

You won’t be protecting your back yard.

We may have floods and hurricanes here,

But you’ll be dodging bullets in the desert there.

But if that’s not what you signed up for,

We’ll send you there a few times more!

General McCrystal, jump right in!

Your big chance has come again.

The VC whupped us back in ‘74,

But now you can show some Muslims what-for,

And maybe even earn you a medal or three,

Sittin’ at your desk in DC.

Chorus:

Oh it’s one, two, three what are we fightin’ for?

Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn.

Next stop’s Afghanistan.

And it’s five, six, seven, open up the Pearly Gates.

Ain’t no time to wonder why.

Whoopee! We’re all bound to die!

Come on mothers, here’s the plan,

Send your son off to Afghanistan.

Come on fathers, it’s all cool,

Send a daughter off to Ka-Bool.

And if they die, they come home free,

And nobody has to see.

chorus

Okay Wall Street, here’s the deal:

Middle East oil is yours to steal.

Afghani blood, American too, is being shed now

Just for you!

And you can charge whatever you dare,

Cuz Washington don’t care.

chorus

Bush and Obama, you’ve done your best,

You’ve made the Middle East into one sweet mess!

But that’s okay, there’s still a plan:

To divert attention just bomb Iran!

And if that seems a bit unwise,

Well hell, you’ve got the Nobel Prize!

Chorus:

And it’s one, two, three, what are we fightin’ for?

Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn,

Next stop’s…

Pakistan?

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net