The failed U.S. state is deathly afraid of the anti-imperialist stand of the peoples worldwide. They are targeting the Islamic forces, in Iraq, Iran and elsewhere, because they refuse to yield to imperialist dictate and are standing for their rights to decide their own affairs. They are also targeting the anti-war movement in the U.S. People together are standing with the Iraqis on the basis of principle — that aggressive war is a crime, that bombing raids and massacres of civilians are crimes, that Iraq belongs to the Iraqis and the U.S. has no business being there, that to safeguard the troops and the world’s peoples, all U.S. troops must come home now. And all means all and now means now! Americans too are taking their stand against imperialism and its aggressive wars and putting on the agenda the necessity for an anti-war government.
The ruling circles are caught in the contradictions of their failed system. They face increasing conflict with rival powers, such as Russia and China. Their only solution is threats and use of more force, insisting that the world belongs to them and that everyone must submit to U.S. empire. Using military might, they claim authority to occupy and police the Middle East and do so in the name of “preventing foreign intervention and widescale ethnic cleansing,” as the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), a main voice of the ruling class, puts it. The U.S. rulers also face increasing conflicts within their own ranks and the growing resistance from the people and their just demand for change.
The DLC is now proposing a “Plan B” to replace President George W. Bush’s “Plan A,” and to specifically block what they call “Plan Zero,” which is immediate withdrawal and an end to the Iraq war. Their plan, accompanied by legislation just introduced by Senator Hillary Clinton, far from providing a “roadmap out of Iraq” as Clinton claims, shows the ruling class is doomed. They have no solutions but repeating failure, whether the failure of Iraq-style Vietnamization, of attempting to demonize resistance by branding it as terrorism or “jihadist,” of claiming the U.S. is preventing genocide when their occupations are all soaked in the blood of the peoples.
It is the refusal of the ruling circles to act to resolve the contradictions of their failed system by moving forward that forces them to repeatedly repeat failure. And faced with their own failure to solve any problem, they are unleashing their revenge.
The ruling circles have no where to go but backward, back to the racist claims that peoples who stand for their rights, as the Native peoples did, as the Iraqis and Palestinians are doing, are “savages” who must be defeated at all costs. Back to rule by presidential kings, back to unbridled government impunity and mass concentration camps, back to war and revenge as a way of life. These are all crimes that the people have determined have no place — never again will they dominate the world. That is the lesson of the battle against fascism, that is what imbues the determined spirit of today to go forward to the new!
It is the working class and people that provide a way out. Their plan is an anti-war plan based on principles, reflected in the demand to bring all U.S. troops home now so as to block U.S. interference and criminal wars of aggression against any nation. Their stand is to outlaw use of force in settling problems and respect the right of all peoples to determine their own affairs.
The starting point for solutions is putting the rights of the peoples, abroad and at home at the center, as that is the basis for the peace and security of all. It is empowerment of the people and their anti-war government that can move things forward. Let us organize together to make this a reality.
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Ruling Circles Attempt to Divert Public and
Continue Building Empire
The Democratic Leadership Council, (DLC) a main voice of the ruling circles as a class, recently put forward a “Plan B on Iraq.” The plan is specifically aimed at overcoming the intense fighting within the ruling circles on how to go forward with U.S. empire building, while also blocking the demand of the people for immediate withdrawal from Iraq and an end to all U.S. aggression.
Expressing the opposition within the ruling class to President George W. Bush and their concern with their loss of credibility, the DLC opposes not the war itself, but what they term President George W. Bush’s “attitude” of imposing his “my way or the highway.” They refer to the broad public opposition to the war, saying, “The American people have lost confidence in President Bush’s policies in Iraq.” Rejecting any plan for immediate withdrawal, the DLC says their plan “strikes the right balance between the unknown but potentially enormous risks of complete failure in Iraq, and the public’s strong desire to reduce the pain and losses we are already suffering there.”
Making clear the ruling class has no plan to implement the anti-war stand of the people to bring all U.S. troops home now, the DLC claims “A rapid and complete withdrawal from Iraq is not really a Plan B: it is a ‘Plan Zero’ for liquidating the whole Iraq engagement as hopeless.” Showing their fear of growing resistance in the U.S., an earlier DLC commentary said, Bush’s planned escalation is “almost perfectly designed to polarize the parties, the Congress and the country. Indeed, the big ‘winners’ in the new Iraq debate George W. Bush has launched since Election Day are those who are calling for immediate withdrawal from Iraq.”
Their plan represents a “better way,” to protect national security and “build a domestic bipartisan consensus among those Americans who have rejected the administration’s strategy yet are still concerned about the broader struggle against Jihadist terrorism and the consequences of a complete meltdown in the Middle East.”
The plan reflects the fear of the ruling class to broadening resistance and their need to crush it by branding the resistance as terrorists. It states that “Our military and diplomatic operations should acknowledge the especially barbaric Sunni insurgent-Al Quida tactics in Iraq, which if vindicated as successful, may spread; they must be repudiated by the entire international community.”
In an effort then to overcome the current fight within the ruling circles and to restore public confidence in the failed U.S. state, the DLC plan serves to “place a reduced but significant U.S. military presence out of the sectarian crossfire, accelerate momentum for a national and regional political settlement, and deter all parties within and outside Iraq from creating a true humanitarian or strategic catastrophe.” The U.S., of course, is permitted to impose just such a catastrophe so long as its strategic geo-political interests are preserved. The DLC also emphasizes, “all the focus on deadlines [for withdrawal] obscures discussion of the need for a smaller, redeployed force with a crucially different but still urgent mission.”
The plan specifically calls for:
1) essentially a repeat of the failed “Vietnamization” policy as applied to Iraq, meaning the Iraqis have greater responsibility for internal security and any failures of it, while U.S. “conventional” forces are “slowly withdrawn,” starting immediately and ending by the first quarter of 2008. The timing, as other DLC materials have brought out, is to ensure that the 2008 election does not have the Iraq war “hanging around the neck” of whoever is elected president.
2) maintaining and increasing the use of U.S. special forces (notorious for their genocidal “black ops” and assassination squads). These are the forces for training the Iraqis and “fighting terrorists and preventing genocide.”
3) bring “moderate Sunnis” into the Iraqi government, with or without current U.S.-installed Prime Minister Nouri al-Malaki.
4) use diplomacy to “build regional and international support for stabilizing Iraq.” This would include “creation of a contact group with such key actors as Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, as well as the Arab League and Islamic Conference.” This “contact group” would “launch parallel talks with Syria and Iran.”
This is a plan to maintain U.S. domination and dictate in the region and to force others to aid the U.S. in this adventure or face military force. It indicates that the U.S. will now attempt to use potential “genocide” and “intervention by neighboring countries” as the basis to justify attacks on countries like Iran and Syria.
The pla n continues to focus on crushing resistance, including the anti-war movement inside the U.S. Any plan for immediate withdrawal is attacked in much the same manner that Bush does: “The ‘out now’ option would likely compromise U.S. security interests, trigger a full-scale civil war, invite foreign intervention, provide an unprecedented propaganda victory for Sunni Jihadists and Shi’a theocrats whose savage violence has been aimed at creating exactly this outcome.” Iraq would become a “dangerous recruitment point and training base for the international Jihadists who remain the key global threat to our, and the world’s security interests.” Echoing the claims made against the Native peoples as “savage,” the U.S. rulers seem to think this will hide their genocide and occupa tion as the source of the instability and chaos in Iraq.
The failed U.S. state is deathly afraid of the anti-imperialist stand of the Islamic forces and the growing resistance to imperialism worldwide, including within the U.S. Yet clearly they have no solutions but repeating failure, whether the failure of Vietnamization, of attempting to demonize resistance by branding it as terrorism or “jihadist,” of claiming the U.S. is preventing genocide when their occupations are all soaked in the blood of the peoples. This is a plan for more failure and more crimes against humanity. The peoples have a clear and just solution: End the War Now! All U.S. Troops Home Now! This is the path to safeguard the world’s peoples.[TOP]
No to the Diversion of “Phased Redeployment”
Hillary Clinton’s Iraq Legislation
Senator and presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton proposed legislation on the Iraq war titled, “Iraq Troop Reduction and Protection Act of 2007.” Consistent with Clinton’s pro-war stand, the legislation focuses on opposing President George W. Bush’s escalation while maintaining the Iraq occupation, using fewer troops. U.S. troops are not to come home. Instead they are to be redeployed in Iraq and the region for “training Iraqi security forces; protecting U.S. personnel and infrastructure [in Iraq] and participating in targeted counter-terrorism activities.”
Redeployment is the general military term not for bringing troops home, but for deployment to combat missions elsewhere. While the specifics for redeployment and “targeted” terrorism activities are not provided in Clinton’s legislation, they likely would include more troops for the war in Afghanistan, targeting Iran and Syria and whatever is needed, as Clinton regularly emphasizes, to “stand by our friend and our ally Israel.” Israel, which continues to massacre and basically imprison the Palestinians, waged war against the Lebanese, and threatens nuclear war against Iran, is, according to Clinton, “a beacon of democracy in the region.”
Clinton calls for capping the number of troops in Iraq at the January 1, 2007 level and for a “phased redeployment of troops out of Iraq beginning in 90 days.” She also calls for the troops to have “the body armor and training they need” before being sent to Iraq. Both are clearly an effort to mollify the anti-war movement that has directly targeted Clinton, while also seeking to gain support from within Congress for this direction.
Representatives, such as John Murtha, in the House, are also attempting to use the level of troop training, equipment and rest between combat rotations to force a “slow withdrawal.” Clinton needs to get Congressional forces like Murtha on board as part of her effort to prove she can be a champion for the ruling circles and thus president. This also requires that she make headway in efforts to divert the anti-war movement from its aim to end the war and all aggressive U.S. wars now. Murtha has wider support in the movement, as someone who called for an end to the war more than a year ago and continues to do so, saying there can be no military solution in Iraq. He also, however, calls for redeployment, saying “The [plan] which I advocate, is to end the occupation of Iraq, redeploy and re-strengthen our military and turn Iraq over to the Iraqis.” It will be important to see how the legislative battles play out in Congress, while the movement organizes to persist in its aim of ending the war now and bringing all U.S. troops home now.
Clinton also attempts to play on the broad opposition to President Bush. Her legislation stipulates that if the “phased redeployment” does not begin in 90 days from passage of the law, the Congressional authorization for use of force in Iraq would end. It does not elaborate what would occur if, as Vice-President Dick Cheney has asserted, whatever Congress does “will not stop” Bush. What is clear is that this open “tit for tat” blackmail within the ruling circles poses dangers to the people — at what point will blackmail go to open revenge and assassination within their own ranks?
That the ruling circles are already unleashing their revenge against the Iraqis for resisting occupation, a revenge that now also includes those they put in power, is clear. Clinton’s legislation blames the Iraqis for the crimes of the occupation and sets the following conditions on the Iraqi government: to have security forces “free of sectarian and militia influences” (meaning all resistance is crushed); that the Iraqis provide the security the U.S. has failed to provide; that the Iraqi government “provide an equitable distribution of the oil revenues of Iraq;” and that “there is significant progress made in political accommodation among the ethnic and sectarian groups in Iraq.” The president is to “certify” this “progress.” If the Iraqis fail, or if Congress disagrees with the President’s certification, again comes the blackmail, this time in the form of “cutting off funds” to the Iraqi government. In this manner revenge and blackmail are not only being codified into law, but U.S. interference and dictate in the internal affairs of foreign governments are also being codified.
The U.S. has no right to decide Iraq’s affairs or anyone else’s. Its responsibility is to withdraw all U.S. troops and end use of force as its policy.
Clinton’s legislation also attempts to extend this interference and force others to submit to it, by requiring the convening of an international conference. The conference is to “ensure that funds pledged for Iraq are forthcoming,” and that the international community and Iraq’s neighbors are “more actively involved,” in determining Iraq’s affairs. As the legislation puts it, “promoting a durable political settlement among Iraqis,” while at the same time “reducing regional interference in the internal affairs of Iraq.”
The translation for this contradictory plan to “promote” and “reduce” foreign interference is made by the Democratic Leadership Council, which elaborates the specifics. A “contact group” that includes “such key actors as Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, as well as the Arab League and Islamic Conference,” would be formed to “promote” U.S. dictate and continued interference. This group then would have talks with Iran and Syria. If these two countries refuse to submit, then other action would be taken to “reduce” interference.
Taken as a whole, the legislation is an effort not only to continue U.S. occupation and interference in Iraq and the region, but also to make such interference and dictate “legal.” Laws that sanction crimes cannot be legal or even considered laws. They are a cover for crimes, just as Clinton’s legislation is a cover for her pro-war, pro-imperialist stand and ambitions.[TOP]
Massive Funding for the Failed Course of
War and Aggression
The Fiscal Year 2008 federal budget, which takes effect October 1, 2007, is $2.9 trillion. It continues broad and massive government attacks on social programs serving tens of millions of people while dramatically increasing funding for more wars, repression, and aggression.
The Bush budget greatly increases funding for the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan; the size of the Army, Marines, and Special Operations forces; and a host of major military procurement programs. Bush not only wants 92,000 additional troops over the next five years but also a massive “civilian corps” to serve and support the military.
The budget includes $481.4 billion for the Department of Defense, more than 25 percent above the Cold War average, a 62 percent increase over 2001, and an 11 percent increase ($49 billion) over the current funding levels for the Pentagon. U.S. military spending is larger than military spending by all of the other nations in the world combined. The Navy gets $140 billion in public funds, the Army $128.6 billion and the Air Force $110.7 billion.
When combined with a separate “Global War on Terror” supplemental request for $93.4 billion for fiscal year 2007 and $141.7 billion for 2008, the total military spending proposal soars to $716.5 billion, the highest military outlay in real terms since World War II. Congress has already approved more than $500 billion in supplemental funding for genocide in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Requests for systems like the F-22 fighter ($4.6 billion), the V-22 Osprey ($2.6 billion), the CVN-21 aircraft carrier ($3.1 billion), the SSN-774 Virginia attack submarine ($2.7 billion), the Trident D-5 Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missile ($1.2 billion), 12 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters ($6.1 billion), 20 F-22A “Raptor” fighters ($4.6 billion), and Ballistic Missile Defense ($10.8 billion) are just a few examples of weapons systems proposed and provided for in the budget. “Missile defense” continues to receive more funding than any other weapons program in the annual Pentagon budget. The total also does not include $1.1 billion for the SBIRS-High satellite program. Pentagon officials said the budget included no cancellations of major weapons systems.
The war budget is far larger than the combined totals on domestic funding for all social and infrastructure programs. The war budget, and the anti-social offensive, imposed by governments to feed the military and financial monopolies, also includes cutting $66 billion for Medicare, the healthcare plan for the elderly, and $12 billion for Medicaid, which covers children, the working poor and other impoverished families and individuals. Half of people receiving Medicare earn below $20,000 a year and 90 percent suffer from at least one chronic illness. In addition, nearly 50 million Americans have no healthcare coverage.
The 2008 budget also cuts both Head Start and Special Education funding by 6 percent compared to fiscal year 2006 and reduces funding by more than 40 percent for the Low-income Energy Assistance Program.
At a February 7 hearing of the House Armed Services Committee, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Peter Pace made clear that the U.S. is planning for more wars and aggression abroad. Gates referred to the “threats... faced by our nation in the future,” while Pace stressed that the “current heavy demand for ground, sea, and air capabilities is not likely to dissipate in the immediate future.”
Pace highlighted the establishment of a unified Africa Command and the proposed increase in the size of Special Operations forces, specially trained troops that engage in deadly covert — “black ops”— actions. Pace noted that, in addition to Afghanistan and Iraq, these units “deploy to approximately forty other countries around the world.”
He also rattled off a list of “threats and challenges” around the world, including Iran, north Korea, China, Pakistan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Venezuela, Cuba, and all of Latin America and Africa — regions that together are home to roughly a third of the world’s population.
Some of these billions will be directed to escalate repression at home, where the distinction between civilian authority and military authority is being rapidly eroded and more aspects of life, including education, healthcare, and local police forces are becoming more militarized. In this vein, Bush’s budget includes money to hire 3,000 more Border Patrol agents and build hundreds of more miles of fence — the notorious wall of death — along the U.S. Mexico border. No doubt funds will also be used to escalate domestic spying, profiling, and military “exercises” by the Pentagon.
Since Bush announced his budget plan, resistance from anti-war groups, anti-poverty groups, social justice groups, civil rights, community organizations and many more has been growing. Anti-war groups are currently preparing for another demonstration in Washington, D.C. on March 17, with the Pentagon a main target and the main demand to End All War Funding Now![TOP]
As Bush Demands $100 Billion More
Billions and Billions of Dollars Just Disappear in Iraq
Show me the money, or at least some receipts scribbled on the backs of old envelopes and grocery bags.
During the week of February 5, we were treated to the spectacle of the former U.S. civilian overlord of Iraq, Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III, squirming in the hot seat as he attempted with little success to explain what he did with 363 tons of newly printed, shrink-wrapped $100 bills he had flown to Baghdad. That is $12 billion in cold, hard American cash, and no one, especially Bremer, seems to know where it went. Bremer testified on Capitol Hill, February 6, before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on waste, fraud and abuse dealing with Iraqi reconstruction. Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq, is at right.
It may be an urban legend, but the late Senator Everett Dirksen, the Illinois Republican, is widely quoted as saying: “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you are talking real money.” If he did not say it, he should have.
Bremer, who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his role in totally screwing up the first two years of the Iraq Occupation, said that a lot of the cash was delivered to ministries of the Iraqi government to meet payrolls that were patently fraudulent.
The Department of Defense’s special inspector general for Iraq, Stuart Bowen, (also present at the hearing) said that a 2005 audit he conducted found that in some ministries the payroll was padded with up to 90 percent “ghost employees” — people who did not really work there or perhaps did not really exist.
Bremer said that he decided to provide the money to meet those payrolls, even though he knew they were bogus, for fear of starting riots and demonstrations among the Iraqis, real and imagined. After all, the former czar told the representatives, it was not really our money anyway. It was Iraqi money — oil earnings and bank accounts seized from Saddam Hussein’s government — that we were holding in trust.
I can think of no period in American history when we sat idly by while $12 billion just disappeared, poof, without a paper trail; without heads rolling; without someone going to prison.
And all this was happening at a time in the war when American soldiers and Marines were going without properly armored vehicles, without lifesaving body armor and even without some of the weapons they needed.
What does it take for the American people’s gag reflex to kick in? When do we begin to realize that this is only the tip of an iceberg of fraud, waste, abuse and corruption perpetrated on a monumental scale by the Bush administration, its buddies among the military contractors and their handmaidens on Capitol Hill?
The cost of this war is swiftly building toward a trillion dollars. How much of that was siphoned off by crooked and incompetent contractors, greedy defense corporations and Iraqi crooks in a government that we created and installed?
No one in the congressional hearing has yet asked Bremer or the inspector general how much of that $12 billion in cash was handed out to American contractors in Baghdad, although that question begs to be asked and answered. […]
We have wasted $600 billion on a war that we are losing, day by bloody day, at a time when our president presents a federal budget that cuts Medicare to find billions more for that war. The Decider boasts that if we do things his way, America’s wealthiest individuals will not have to pay even one dollar more in taxes.
Meanwhile, the people’s representatives, on both sides of the aisle, round up the contributions they need for re-election by putting themselves in the pockets of the very robber barons they are supposed to be investigating, interrogating and policing.
Perhaps we should let a no-bid cost-plus contract to Halliburton to construct large additions to the country club federal prisons to accommodate a population explosion in the years ahead. Or, for convenience sake, maybe we could just add a prison wing to the $500 million George W. Bush Presidential Library at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
Joseph L. Galloway, military columnist, called by General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, “The finest combat correspondent of our generation — a soldier’s reporter and a soldier’s friend.” McClatchy Newspapers, February 8, 2007[TOP]
House’s Non-Binding Resolution on Iraq
The House held a four-day debate on a non-binding resolution on Iraq. The resolution is limited to opposing President George W. Bush’s plan to send 21,500 more combat troops to Iraq. It also implies, without stating directly, that war funding will continue. This is done by saying Congress will continue to “support and protect” troops in Iraq.
Representative Walter Jones, Republican of North Carolina, is a co-sponsor of the resolution. Estimates of the number of Republicans expected to vote for it, ranged from 15 to 60.
The resolution did not go to committee and no alternatives from the Republicans were permitted. Instead the resolution came straight to the floor for debate. Each member of the House was given five minutes to speak.
On Friday, February 16, the resolution was passed, 246-182. Seventeen of 201 Republicans voted for the resolution along with all the Democrats. The Senate may debate the same resolution on Saturday.
While House leaders say the resolution is a “first step,” so far none of the bills calling for withdrawal of the troops have even made it out of committee and it remains unclear if any will. According to Democratic Party officials, a “slow” approach, that does not cut war funding, does not end the war and is directed mainly at discrediting President Bush, is underway.
Below is the text of the House Iraq non-binding resolution:
Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), that —
(1) Congress and the American people will continue to support and protect the members of the United States Armed Forces who are serving or who have served bravely and honorably in Iraq; and
(2) Congress disapproves of the decision of President George W. Bush announced on Jan. 10, 2007, to deploy more than 20,000 additional United States combat troops to Iraq.”
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Mistrial at Court-martial a Victory for Watada
How Lt. Watada and GI Resistance Movement Beat the Army
Last week in the Army court martial of First Lieutenant Ehren K. Watada, the first officer to publicly refuse to fight in Iraq, military judge Lieutenant Colonel John Head orchestrated a legal mulligan. The prosecution had just rested a poorly argued case before the jurors. [They, with the judges urging, then asked for a mistrial and got it]. This “do over” proclamation appeared to offer the government a chance to get their act together and try again in the spring. However, given the likelihood that the entire case against Lt. Watada will eventually be dismissed due to the constitutional protection against double jeopardy, the question is why?
Lt. Watada never had a chance to take the stand in his own defense. Yet, on the basis of the prosecution’s case alone, there appeared little hope for the Army that they would win a conviction on either of the two “conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman” charges. These stemmed from two of Lt. Watada’s numerous public statements in opposition to the illegal Iraq war and the conduct of the Bush administration in selling the war.
What if the most vocal active duty opponent to the Iraq war were to be acquitted of making “unbecoming” statements? This would send a clear message to all of the troops now in the middle of an unpopular occupation war that public political speech is allowable — or at least legally defendable. This alone may have given the judge pause.
The principle “crime” Lt. Watada stood trial for was “missing movement” to Iraq with the Fort Lewis-based First Stryker Brigade. Even with a number of military jurors apparently open minded toward Lt. Watada’s stand, it is more than likely he would have been convicted of this charge. Although “intent” was not an element of the missing movement charge, the prosecution itself entered into evidence that Lt. Watada was intending to resist an illegal war, and refusing an illegal order to deploy in the process, by way of charging him for “unbecoming” speech. While the defense was barred from presenting this kind of evidence, the prosecution did it for them. Ironically, the prosecution did this well enough to throw the entire outcome into question.
In military court martials, following the guilt phase of the trial, a separate mini-trial of sorts immediately follows to decide on punishment. During this phase, the defense has greater latitude in types of evidence that can be admitted.
Even if convicted of missing movement, the jury as selected seemed willing to take into account Lt. Watada’s clearly articulated and consistent beliefs in sentencing. A likely outcome of the trial, had the judge allowed it to continue, might have been six months or less in the stockade. The Army clearly wanted the maximum two years allowable for missing movement, given they initially charged Lt. Watada with “crimes” totaling more than six years in prison.
In December 2005, Navy sailor Pablo Paredes was convicted of publicly refusing to ship out to the Persian Gulf region from San Diego. However, Petty Officer Paredes was eventually sentenced to no prison time or discharge after the judge declared Paredes’ belief that the Iraq war was illegal was “reasonable.” As I sat in the Fort Lewis court room last week, I began to wonder if something similar was about to unfold.
Judge Lt. Col. John Head may have been thinking the same thing. While cloaking his actions in complex and bizarre rulings, Judge Head seemed to have made the following decision: It would be in the military’s best interests to attempt retrial at a later date, after the prosecution got its act together. Judge Head may have anticipated the chance that higher courts would toss the case altogether based on the constitutional prohibition against double jeopardy. In his haste, Judge Head may have underestimated the clear nature of double jeopardy (prosecuting someone twice for the same charges) applying to future proceedings.
Double jeopardy does not apply to defendants who cause or request a mistrial, but it certainly does when the government requests a mistrial for their own benefit, over the objections of the defense, as in this case.
If Judge Head’s judgment was clouded that day, it was certainly for good reason. His court room is not usually the focus of national and international media. He has probably never had a defense lawyer challenge his dubious actions and correct him on matters of court martial procedures. The defendant usually does not have a thousand supporters rallying at the fort gates, and tens of thousands more writing letters and holding vigils. And the prosecution’s subpoenas are not usually condemned by the nation’s largest journalistic freedom advocacy organizations. In fact, it was the “stipulation of facts” agreement written by the prosecution in order to side-step the controversy of subpoenas of journalists that played an important role in Judge Head’s mistrial.
Would Judge Head have staged the mistrial even if double jeopardy was certain? I believe, beyond a doubt, “probably.” Under national and international attention, Lt. Watada and the GI resistance movement would have claimed a significant legal and unqualified moral victory had Lt. Watada been sentenced to a few months in jail. A few months in jail for standing up to the entire weight of the U.S. military by articulating his beliefs to millions globally and, of course, not deploying to a brutal, endless occupation war for empire. Indeed, many service persons would be tempted to make such a deal.
Now we need to compel the Army to accept Lt. Watada’s resignation sooner rather than later. In the end, the military will spin our victory as, “a lucky bum who beat a wrap on a technicality.” They will tell any troops considering a similar course of action, “Do not count on being so lucky.” With more than a thousand active duty troops having recently signed a public “appeal for redress” to congress demanding that they end the war in Iraq now, it might be too late.[TOP]
Demand Army Drop All Charges
Against Lt. Watada!
The military was hoping to court martial war resister Lieutenant Watada on February 5 and send him to prison as an example. Instead, the military judge forced a mistrial, partially out of fear of Lt. Watada putting the war on trial. Your letters and phone calls today may make a significant difference.
The constitutional prohibition on double jeopardy (meaning they can only try someone once) makes a second court martial unlikely, according to Lt. Watada’s attorney Eric Sietz and many other legal experts.
However, the Army claims they will attempt to court martial Lt. Watada again. The next step is to pressure Fort Lewis Commanding Lieutenant General James Dubik, who has the power to drop all charges and let Lt. Watada out of the Army, to do so. Lt. Watada has now completed his initial service agreement. A letter writing and phone calling campaign will complement the efforts of Lt. Watada’s legal efforts.
Write a Letter or Call
When writing, please consider a handwritten letter on stationary (if available) posted via express or priority mail for additional impact and timely delivery. Lt. General Dubik has the authority to decide what the Army will do next about Lt.Watada’s case. Use your own words and add your own reasons, but please include this suggested message:
Lt. Gen. James M. Dubik,
I urge you to drop all charges against Lt. Watada and to respect the constitutional prohibition on double jeopardy by not attempting to court martial him again. I also urge you to allow Lt. Watada to resign; he has now completed his initial service agreement with the Army.
Sincerely, ____________________
Commanding General
Fort Lewis and I Corps
Lt. Gen. James M. Dubik
Bldg 2025 Stop 1
Fort Lewis WA 98433
Make a phone call:
Lt. Gen. Dubik can be reached via his aide at 253-967-0022, and/or through the Ft. Lewis switchboard at 253-967-1110. Be aware that aides at these numbers often refer callers they recognize as “Lt. Watada supporters” to the Fort Lewis Public Affairs Office at 206-967-7166. Please, in your own words, include the suggested letter message above.
Do not delay and take action today.
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