Military self-delusion on the U.S. Constitution

  Several former U.S. defense secretaries and retired generals recently published an open letter about the current political environment in America. The letter stated, among other things: “Military officers swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution, not an oath of fealty to an individual or to an office.”

  That’s just pure nonsense and self-delusion. Oh, sure, technically it’s true that military officers swear such an oath, but they don’t follow it. Instead, they faithfully and blindly follow the orders of the president, which means, as a practical matter, that their oath is one of fealty to the president, not to the Constitution.

Why the US won’t be able to shirk moral responsibility in leaving Afghanistan

  The majority of the remaining American troops in Afghanistan were withdrawn recently, with the rest due to leave by the end of August 2021. This withdrawal marks the end of nearly 20 years of American military presence in Afghanistan.

  Support for the withdrawal is widespread in the United States, with the majority of Americans – regardless of political affiliation – in favor of ending American military operations in Afghanistan. The war has been, and would continue to be, costly, both in financial terms and in terms of American lives.

  But the present regime in Afghanistan is unstable, and some experts estimate that it may collapse within the year. If it does so, the resulting power gap would likely be filled by the Taliban, whose history of human rights abuses include violence against women and children.

How I survived nine minutes of Dick Cheney

  Editor’s note: This article first appeared in the August 2002 edition of the Capital City Free Press.

Monday, July 22, 2002

3:07 pm

  I tried to get out of it. Given that my employer, The Montgomery Independent, had published a lengthy prelude to this event last week, I don't see why I am baking in the mid-summer Alabama heat waiting for the man they call Dick Cheney. I've been told this man runs the great nation we live in but still only gets second billing for it. Poor guy.

Who are the real friends of the troops?

  Ever since the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, it has been an article of faith that Americans should thank the troops for their service in those two countries.

  Yet, with the exception of libertarians and a few leftists, the fact is that during the two decades of death, injury, suffering, destruction, and out of control federal spending and debt that threatens to send the government into bankruptcy, the overwhelming majority of Americans never openly demanded that the U.S. government bring the troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq.

Justifying the 17-year war

  When I first learned about the Thirty Years War in a history class in college, I was both fascinated and amazed. How in the world could a war go on for 30 years? That just seemed incomprehensible to me.

  Not anymore. The U.S. war on Afghanistan has now been going on for 17 years. And if the American people follow the advice of Michael E. O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, it’s a virtual certainty that the United States will easily surpass the Thirty Years War and, maybe, the Hundred Years War, which needless to say, also amazed and fascinated me when I learned about its existence.

Kavanaugh’s credibility chasm

  Amid a crisis in Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination process, new reports suggest that President Trump’s nominee may have been personally involved in a public relations effort to shift blame for sexual assault allegations made against him onto another specific individual with unsubstantiated speculation from an ally. This alone would demonstrate a deep breach of integrity and credibility and would be disqualifying in itself for a position on the highest court in the land. Unfortunately, it also aligns with an entire career using dishonest tactics and statements to advance his personal ambition.

Jacob G. Hornberger: Isolationism and open borders

  In an implicit rebuke of President Trump, former President Bush delivered a speech last week in which he warned against “isolationism sentiments.”

  Isolationist sentiments? Is he kidding? Don’t make me laugh. Trump has made it very clear that he is firmly committed to continuing the forever wars that Bush launched in Afghanistan and Iraq more than 15 years ago and Bush’s perpetual “war on terrorism,” which he used to justify the adoption of such totalitarian powers as indefinite detention, torture, and assassination.

Jacob G. Hornberger: Constantly shifting array of official enemies

  After George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq ended up producing ISIS, which was quickly made into a new official enemy of the United States, I am sure that there were lots of Americans saying to themselves, “Oh my gosh, another official enemy. But once we vanquish this one, it will finally be over. We will finally have peace, tranquility, and prosperity.”

  Those people were living a pipe dream. Now that ISIS has been vanquished, is the Pentagon bringing the troops home? Is there going to be a ticker-tape military parade in New York City? Is George W. Bush going to do a painting entitled “Mission Accomplished”?

David B. Muhlhausen: Bring back PART: The case for evidence-based fiscal discipline

  Though tax revenues are at all-time highs, Washington continues to spend hundreds of billions of dollars more than it collects every year. As a result, the federal government now carries an enormous amount of debt: more than $19.5 trillion. It now owes more than our nation produces (i.e., debt far exceeds Gross National Product).

  Clearly, Washington needs to reel in its out-of-control spending. To do that, policymakers should fund only those programs that actually work and defund programs that don’t.

Jacob G. Hornberger: 9/11 evil did not cancel pre-9/11 evil

  Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, President Bush and other U.S. officials declared that the attackers were motivated by hatred for America’s freedom and values. It was a lie, one of the biggest ever told by U.S. officials. The truth was that the attackers were motivated by anger and rage over pre-9/11 U.S. government interventionism in the Middle East, especially the large number of people, including children, that the U.S. military and the CIA had been knowingly and intentionally killing in Iraq prior to 9/11.

Jacob G. Hornberger: What if ISIS were to win?

  For the past few years, the American people have been exhorted by the U.S. national-security state to be obsessed with ISIS, the brutal organization that is fighting to achieve political power in Iraq, Syria, and Libya, the three countries that, not coincidentally, have been targets of regime change by the U.S. national-security state.

  Today, ISIS is constantly on the minds of millions of Americans. “We have to stop ISIS!” the battlecry goes. “We have to stop them from winning.”

  So, today, more than 10 years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, there are almost 5,000 U.S. troops back in Iraq. Their mission? To stop ISIS from winning in Iraq.

Steve Flowers: Inside the Statehouse: A tough mountain to climb for eventual GOP nominee

  The 2016 presidential election has not only begun, it is well under way. Running for president is now a lengthy process that spans the entire four-year presidential term. The race essentially begins the day a president is sworn into office. Aspirants begin jockeying for the brass ring of American politics the next day and the marathon begins. It becomes exponentially more intriguing when there is no incumbent in the fray as will be the case in 2016.

Jacob G. Hornberger: The chaos of the “War on Terrorism” spreads to Syria

  It had to happen. It was always inevitable that the U.S. government’s much-vaunted “war on terrorism” would devolve into absolute chaos, especially by attracting authoritarian and totalitarian regimes into the “war on terrorism” maelstrom.

  Ever since President George W. Bush declared his much-ballyhooed “war on terrorism,” we have seen authoritarian and totalitarian regimes infringe on or destroy the civil liberties of their citizenry, citing the “war on terrorism” as their justification. Bashing down people’s doors in warrantless searches, arbitrary arrests, indefinite detention, torture, assassination. The war on terrorism has become a dictator’s best friend. Hey, if the U.S. government is doing it, why not every other regime in the world, including the dictatorial ones?

Jacob G. Hornberger: WMD blowback in Iraq

  According to a New York Times article last week, the Islamic State has employed WMDs against Iraqi police officers. The specific WMD used is chlorine gas. According to reports, ISIS forces set off an explosion that released the gas, causing injuries to 11 Iraqi police officers.

  Alistair Baskey, a spokesman for the National Security Council, observed:

     The use of chlorine as a chemical weapon is an abhorrent act. These recent allegations underscore the importance of our work to eliminate chemical weapons in this violate region.”

David L. Hudson, Jr.: Qualified immunity protects Secret Service agents

  A recent unanimous decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in favor of two Secret Service agents shows the power of the qualified-immunity doctrine.

  The high court ruled in Wood v. Moss that the agents were entitled to qualified immunity when they moved protesters an additional block further away than supporters of former President George W. Bush were allowed to gather in Jacksonville, Ore., in October 2004.

Hank Sanders: Senate Sketches #1407: The power of one vote

  The power of one vote. So many of us think that we have just one vote but we have many votes. However, since this one vote syndrome is so prevalent, I want to share various examples of the power of one vote.

  Did you know that Adolph Hitler became head of the Nazi Party and thereby the leader of Germany by just one vote? If just one person had voted differently or one additional person had voted, we would not have had World War II. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers would not have died on bloody battlefields. Millions would not have died in concentration camps. Just one vote a few years earlier damaged the entire world. That’s the power of one vote.

Harry Stein: Pfizer’s tax-dodging bid for AstraZeneca shows need to tighten U.S. tax rules

  American drug maker Pfizer is attempting to acquire AstraZeneca, the United Kingdom’s second-largest pharmaceutical company. If successful, Pfizer would avoid paying billions of dollars in U.S. taxes by becoming a U.K.-based corporation, and Pfizer executives have made these tax benefits a central element of their pitch to AstraZeneca. This corporate maneuver, in which a U.S. corporation becomes a foreign corporation for tax purposes, is called a corporate inversion. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have fought back against corporate inversions for years, and they could be stopped if Congress were to strengthen laws passed 10 years ago.

David G. Bronner: America's infrastructure

  Recently it was revealed that snipers took out 17 of 20 large transformers in about 20 minutes at a Silicon Valley PG&E substation last April, requiring 27 days and $16 million to repair. The California attack on the PG&E substation is considered "the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving our power grid that has ever occurred," according to the former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulation Commission (FERC).

Jacob G. Hornberger: Nice job, conservatives!

  When Barack Obama was elected president, the chickens came home to roost above the sordid nest that conservatives made for us after the 9/11 attacks. It was after those attacks that conservatives, quivering and quaking in their shoes over the thought that the terrorists were coming to get us, traded away the freedom of the American people to the federal government in the hope of gaining safety and security from the terrorists.

James Jay Carafano: PRISM is essential to U.S. security in War Against Terrorism

  "Our intelligence professionals must be able to find out who the terrorists are talking to, what they are saying, and what they're planning," said the president. "The lives of countless Americans depend on our ability to monitor these communications."

  He added that he would cancel his planned trip to Africa unless assured Congress would support the counterterrorism surveillance program.