Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Impeach George W. Bush -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Thomas M. who wrote (19442)	2/8/2003 12:46:36 PM
From: MSI	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93284

Thanks - Chalmers Johnson spoke the week after 9/11 about "Blowback" on CSPAN. I was grateful to know at least one national channel could carry explicit criticism of the military/intel corruption even during a virtual national media blackout on such links. I'll certainly be looking forward to his "The Sorrows of Empire: How the Americans Lost Their Country", which will include 9/11 aftermath. As a professor and former naval officer, his criticism of the current "Chickenhawk" cabal hits home. This is also one of the national-service issues I've been advocating & I'm pleased to see CJ addresses the same issue: "In the 1960s, service in the Armed Forces was an obligation of citizenship for all able-bodied males (I was a naval officer on active duty from 1953 to 1955). This has not been the case since 1973. The advance of militarism has produced a huge organisation of careerist officers and enlisted unfortunates, young people who see service as a way out of one or another poverty-stricken ghetto. Even more important, not all American militarists wear uniforms. Partly as a reaction to the defeat in Vietnam, partly as a result of the Reagan Presidency, the United States now has a cadre of neoconservative war-lovers. These are today's 'chicken hawks', men and women with an abstract knowledge of war who have never come under attack of any sort. They are enthusiasts for the notion that the United States has become a New Rome, a colossus unconstrained by any values, loyalties or ideals of international law. When the Supreme Court appointed George W. Bush President, they came to power. The President himself avoided combat during the Vietnam War by wangling a commission as a second lieutenant in the Texas Air National Guard, then failing to report for duty between May 1972 and May 1973. Vice-President Dick Cheney has said that he 'had other priorities in the 1960s than military service' (very probably the 58,202 people whose names are inscribed on the Vietnam War Memorial also had 'other priorities'). Neither the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, nor the Chairman of the Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle, has ever worn a uniform. The Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, had a university deferment at Princeton during the Korean War (he later joined the peacetime Navy). The Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, Douglas Feith, and Cheney's influential Chief of Staff, Lewis Libby, are both innocent of garrison life. Although many veteran warlords - people such as Brent Scowcroft, Colin Powell, Norman Schwarzkopf and Anthony Zinni - question the Pentagon's current Middle East plan, I fear the culture of the present Government has become extremely hostile to the kind of courage shown by Ellsberg."