Our next President, Barack Obama

Well stated

Old news for some; but wanted to pass it on anyway

Is Posse Comitatus Dead? US Troops on US Streets

October 07, 2008

In a barely noticed development, a US Army unit is now training for domestic operations under the control of US Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command. An initial news report in the Army Times newspaper last month noted that in addition to emergency response the force “may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control.” The military has since claimed the force will not be used for civil unrest, but questions remain. We speak to Army Col. Michael Boatner, future operations division chief of USNORTHCOM, and Matthew Rothschild, editor of The Progressive magazine. [includes rush transcript]


Guests:
Col. Michael Boatner, Future Operations division chief of USNORTHCOM.
Matthew Rothschild, Editor of The Progressive magazine.

Rush Transcript
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• “Invasion of the Sea-Smurfs” by Amy Goodman

AMY GOODMAN: In a barely noticed development last week, the Army stationed an active unit inside the United States. The Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Team is back from Iraq, now training for domestic operations under the control of US Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command. The unit will serve as an on-call federal response for large-scale emergencies and disasters. It’s being called the Consequence Management Response Force, CCMRF, or “sea-smurf” for short.

It’s the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to USNORTHCOM, which was itself formed in October 2002 to “provide command and control of Department of Defense homeland defense efforts.”

An initial news report in the Army Times newspaper last month noted, in addition to emergency response, the force “may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control.” The Army Times has since appended a clarification, and a September 30th press release from the Northern Command states: “This response force will not be called upon to help with law enforcement, civil disturbance or crowd control."

When Democracy Now! spoke to Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Jamie Goodpaster, a public affairs officer for NORTHCOM, she said the force would have weapons stored in containers on site, as well as access to tanks, but the decision to use weapons would be made at a far higher level, perhaps by Secretary of Defense, SECDEF.

Well, I’m joined now by two guests. Army Colonel Michael Boatner is future operations division chief of USNORTHCOM. He joins me on the phone from Colorado Springs. We’re also joined from Madison, Wisconsin by journalist and editor of The Progressive magazine, Matthew Rothschild.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Why don’t we begin with Colonel Michael Boatner? Can you explain the significance, the first time, October 1st, deployment of the troops just back from Iraq?

COL. MICHAEL BOATNER: Yes, Amy. I’d be happy to. And again, there has been some concern and some misimpressions that I would like to correct. The primary purpose of this force is to provide help to people in need in the aftermath of a WMD-like event in the homeland. It’s something that figures very prominently in the national planning scenarios under the National Response Framework, and that’s how DoD provides support in the homeland to civil authority. This capability is tailored technical life-saving support and then further logistic support for that very specific scenario. So, we designed it for that purpose.

And really, the new development is that it’s been assigned to NORTHCOM, because there’s an increasingly important requirement to ensure that they have done that technical training, that they can work together as a joint service team. These capabilities come from all of our services and from a variety of installations, and that’s not an ideal command and control environment. So we’ve been given control of these forces so that we can train them, ensure they’re responsive and direct them to participate in our exercises, so that were they called to support civil authority, those governors or local state jurisdictions that might need our help, that they would be responsive and capable in the event and also would be able to survive based on the skills that they have learned, trained and focused on.

They ultimately have weapons, heavy weapons and combat vehicles and another service capability at their home station at Fort Stewart, Georgia, but they wouldn’t bring that stuff with them. In fact, they’re prohibited from bringing it. They would bring their individual weapons, which is the standard policy for deployments in the homeland. Those would be centralized and containerized, and they could only be issued to the soldiers with the Secretary of Defense permission.

So I think, you know, that kind of wraps up our position on this. We’re proud to be able to provide this capability. It’s all about saving lives, relieving suffering, mitigating great property damage to infrastructure and things like that, and frankly, restoring public confidence in the aftermath of an event like this.

AMY GOODMAN: So the use of the weapons would only be decided by SECDEF, the Secretary of Defense. But what about the governors? The SECDEF would have—Secretary of Defense would have—would be able to preempt the governors in a decision whether these soldiers would use their weapons on US soil?

COL. MICHAEL BOATNER: No, this basically only boils down to self-defense. Any military force has the inherent right to self-defense. And if the situation was inherently dangerous, then potentially the Secretary of Defense would allow them to carry their weapons, but it would only be for self- and unit-defense. This force has got no role in a civil disturbance or civil unrest, any of those kinds of things.

AMY GOODMAN: Matt Rothschild, you’ve been writing about this in The Progressive magazine. What is your concern?

MATTHEW ROTHSCHILD: Well, I’m very concerned on a number of fronts about this, Amy. One, that NORTHCOM, the Northern Command, that came into being in October of 2002, when that came in, people like me were concerned that the Pentagon was going to use its forces here in the United States, and now it looks like, in fact, it is, even though on its website it says it doesn’t have units of its own. Now it’s getting a unit of its own.

And Colonel Boatner talked about this unit, what it’s trained for. Well, let’s look at what it’s trained for. This is the 3rd Infantry, 1st Brigade Combat unit that has spent three of the last five years in Iraq in counterinsurgency. It’s a war-fighting unit, was one of the first units to Baghdad. It was involved in the battle of Fallujah. And, you know, that’s what they’ve been trained to do. And now they’re bringing that training here?

On top of that, one of the commanders of this unit was boasting in the Army Times about this new package of non-lethal weapons that has been designed, and this unit itself is going be able to use, according to that original article. And in fact, the commander was saying he had even tasered himself and was boasting about tasering himself. So, why is a Pentagon unit that’s going to be possibly patrolling the streets of the United States involved in using tasers?

AMY GOODMAN: Colonel Boatner?

COL. MICHAEL BOATNER: Well, I’d like to address that. That involved a service mission and a service set of equipment that was issued for overseas deployment. Those soldiers do not have that on their equipment list for deploying in the homeland. And again, they have been involved in situations overseas. And having talked to commanders who have returned, those situations are largely nonviolent, non-kinetic. And when they do escalate, the soldiers have a lot of experience with seeing the indicators and understanding it. So, I would say that our soldiers are trustworthy. They can deploy in the homeland, and American citizens can be confident that there will be no abuses.

AMY GOODMAN: Matt Rothschild?

MATTHEW ROTHSCHILD: Well, you know, that doesn’t really satisfy me, and I don’t think it should satisfy your listeners and your audience, Amy, because, you know, our people in the field in Iraq, some of them have not behaved up to the highest standards, and a lot of police forces in the United States who have been using these tasers have used them inappropriately.

The whole question here about what the Pentagon is doing patrolling in the United States gets to the real heart of the matter, which is, do we have a democracy here? I mean, there is a law on the books called the Posse Comitatus Act and the Insurrection Act that says that the president of the United States, as commander-in-chief, cannot put the military on our streets. And this is a violation of that, it seems to me.

President Bush tried to get around this act a couple years ago in the Defense Authorization Act that he signed that got rid of some of those restrictions, and then last year, in the new Defense Authorization Act, thanks to the work of Senator Patrick Leahy and Kit Bond of Missouri, that was stripped away. And so, the President isn’t supposed to be using the military in this fashion, and though the President, true to form, appended a signing statement to that saying he’s not going to be governed by that. So, here we have a situation where the President of United States has been aggrandizing his power, and this gives him a whole brigade unit to use against US citizens here at home.

AMY GOODMAN: Colonel Michael Boatner, what about the Posse Comitatus Act, and where does that fit in when US troops are deployed on US soil?

COL. MICHAEL BOATNER: It absolutely governs in every instance. We are not allowed to help enforce the law. We don’t do that. Every time we get a request—and again, this kind of a deployment is defense support to civil authority under the National Response Framework and the Stafford Act. And we do it all the time, in response to hurricanes, floods, fires and things like that. But again, you know, if we review the requirement that comes to us from civil authority and it has any complexion of law enforcement whatsoever, it gets rejected and pushed back, because it’s not lawful.

AMY GOODMAN: Matthew Rothschild, does this satisfy you, editor of The Progressive magazine?

MATTHEW ROTHSCHILD: No, it doesn’t. One of the reasons it doesn’t is not by what Boatner was saying right there, but what President Bush has been doing. And if we looked at National Security Presidential Directive 51, that he signed on May 9th of 2007, Amy, this gives the President enormous powers to declare a catastrophic emergency and to bypass our regular system of laws, essentially, to impose a form of martial law.

And if you look at that National Security Presidential Directive, what it says, that in any incident where there is extraordinary disruption of a whole range of things, including our economy, the President can declare a catastrophic emergency. Well, we’re having these huge disturbances in our economy. President Bush could today pick up that National Security Directive 51 and say, “We’re in a catastrophic emergency. I’m going to declare martial law, and I’m going to use this combat brigade to enforce it.”

AMY GOODMAN: Colonel Michael Boatner?

COL. MICHAEL BOATNER: The only exception that I know of is the Insurrection Act. It’s something that is very unlikely to be invoked. In my thirty-year career, it’s only been used once, in the LA riots, and it was a widespread situation of lawlessness and violence. And the governor of the state requested that the President provide support. And that’s a completely different situation. The forces available to do that are in every service in every part of the country, and it’s completely unrelated to the—this consequence management force that we’re talking about.

AMY GOODMAN: You mentioned governors, and I was just looking at a piece by Jeff Stein—he is the national security editor of Congressional Quarterly— talking about homeland security. And he said, “Safely tucked into the $526 billion defense bill, it easily crossed the goal line on the last day of September.

“The language doesn’t just brush aside a liberal Democrat slated to take over the Judiciary Committee”—this was a piece written last year—it “runs over the backs of the governors, 22 of whom are Republicans.

“The governors had waved red flags about the measure on Aug. 1, 2007, sending letters of protest from their Washington office to the Republican chairs and ranking Democrats on the House and Senate Armed Services committees.

“No response. So they petitioned the party heads on the Hill.”

The letter, signed by every member of the National Governors Association, said, “This provision was drafted without consultation or input from governors and represents an unprecedented shift in authority from governors…to the federal government.”
Colonel Michael Boatner?

COL. MICHAEL BOATNER: That’s in the political arena. That has nothing to do with my responsibilities or what I’m—was asked to talk about here with regard to supporting civil authority in the homeland.

AMY GOODMAN: Matthew Rothschild?

MATTHEW ROTHSCHILD: Well, this gets to what Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont was so concerned about, that with NORTHCOM and with perhaps this unit—and I want to call Senator Leahy’s office today and ask him about this—you have the usurpation of the governor’s role, of the National Guard’s role, and it’s given straight to the Pentagon in some of these instances. And that’s very alarming. And that was alarming to almost every governor, if not every governor, in the country, when Bush tried to do that and around about the Posse Comitatus Act. So, I think these are real concerns.

AMY GOODMAN: Matt Rothschild, the Democratic and Republican conventions were quite amazing displays of force at every level, from the local police on to the state troopers to, well, in the Republican convention, right onto troops just back from Iraq in their Army fatigues. Did this surprise you?

MATTHEW ROTHSCHILD: It did. It surprised me also that NORTHCOM itself was involved in intelligence sharing with local police officers in St. Paul. I mean, what in the world is NORTHCOM doing looking at what some of the protesters are involved in? And you had infiltration up there, too. But what we have going on in this country is we have infiltration and spying that goes on, not only at the—well, all the way from the campus police, practically, Amy, up to the Pentagon and the National Security Agency. We’re becoming a police state here.

AMY GOODMAN: Colonel Michael Boatner, a tall order here, could you respond?

COL. MICHAEL BOATNER: Well, that’s incorrect. We did not participate in any intelligence collection. We were up there in support of the US Secret Service. We provided some explosive ordnance disposal support of the event. But I’d like to go back and say that, again, in terms of—

AMY GOODMAN: Could you explain what their—explain again what was their role there?

COL. MICHAEL BOATNER: They were just doing routine screens and scans of the area in advance of this kind of a vulnerable event. It’s pretty standard support to a national special security event.

AMY GOODMAN: And are you saying there was absolutely no intelligence sharing?

COL. MICHAEL BOATNER: That’s correct. That is correct. [inaudible] we’re very constrained—

MATTHEW ROTHSCHILD: But even that, Amy, now the Pentagon is doing sweeps of areas before, you know, a political convention? That used to be law enforcement’s job. That used to be domestic civil law enforcement job. It’s now being taken over by the Pentagon. That should concern us.

AMY GOODMAN: Why is that, Colonel Michael Boatner? Why is the Pentagon doing it, not local law enforcement?

COL. MICHAEL BOATNER: That’s because of the scale and the availability of support. DoD is the only force that has the kind of capability. I mean, we’re talking about dozens and dozens of dog detection teams. And so, for anything on this large a scale, the Secret Service comes to DoD with a standard Economy Act request for assistance.

AMY GOODMAN: Boatner, in the Republican Convention, these troops, just back from Fallujah—what about issues of, for example, PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder?

COL. MICHAEL BOATNER: Well, my sense is that that’s something that the services handled very well. There’s a long track record of great support in the homeland. If those soldiers were National Guard soldiers, I have no visibility of that. But for the active-duty forces, citizens can be confident that if they’re employed in the homeland, that they’ll be reliable, accountable, and take care of their families and fellow citizens in good form.

AMY GOODMAN: Last word, Matthew Rothschild? Ten seconds.

MATTHEW ROTHSCHILD: Well, this granting of the Pentagon a special unit to be involved in US patrol is something that should alarm all of us. And it’s very important to the Army. General Casey, Army chief of staff—

AMY GOODMAN: Five seconds.

MATTHEW ROTHSCHILD: —was a drill exercise for this group just last week, or just three weeks ago. It was called—

AMY GOODMAN: We leave it there. We’ve got to leave it there. Thank you to Matthew Rothschild and Colonel Michael Boatner.

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/10/7/us_army_denies_unit_will_be

McCain withheld info on POWS left behind

October 23, 2008

We speak to Pulitzer-winning journalist Sydney Schanberg about how the “war hero” candidate Sen. John McCain buried information about POWs left behind in Vietnam. Writing for The Nation magazine, Schanberg reveals that McCain “worked very hard to hide from the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who, unlike him, didn’t return home.” [includes rush transcript]

Guest:
Sydney Schanberg, Veteran journalist who has written extensively on foreign affairs. He has won several awards, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for reporting on the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. His latest article appeared in the October 6 issue of The Nation magazine. It’s about John McCain and the American prisoners of war left behind in Vietnam. It’s called Why Has John McCain Blocked Info on MIAs? . An expanded version is online at the Nation Institute website.

Rush Transcript
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JUAN GONZALEZ: John McCain’s time as a POW during the Vietnam War is back at the center of attention with the release of a 1967 interview of him while he was bedridden and imprisoned in Vietnam. The interview by reporter Francois Chalais originally aired on French television in 1968. The French national audiovisual archive posted the interview on its website Wednesday, and some of the footage was also picked up by the McCain campaign. The interview shows an emotional McCain describing how his aircraft was shot down while he was bombing Hanoi in 1967.

Well, McCain’s years as a prisoner of war and his return home as a war hero have been a central part of his political image. But there’s another part of the story that’s rarely been told, and that has to do with the POWs who were left behind in Vietnam and never released back to the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: An investigation by veteran journalist Sydney Schanberg reveals John McCain “worked very hard to hide from the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who, unlike him, didn’t return home." Schanberg’s report was published in the October 6th issue of The Nation magazine. It’s called “Why Has John McCain Blocked Info on MIAs?”

Award-winning journalist Sydney Schanberg joins us here in the firehouse studio. Welcome to Democracy Now! Well, tell us the whole story, as you understand it, Syd Schanberg.

SYDNEY SCHANBERG: Well, it’s a long and complicated story, but I’ll try to do it in brief. In 1973, we were at the—early ’73, we were at the negotiating table with the Hanoi government, and we weren’t doing very well. We bombed them in December of 1972 to try to get them to be more reasonable. That didn’t happen. They were going to stick it out and stick to their positions. And one of their positions was that they linked the prisoner issue very, very closely to the issue of reconstruction money, reparations, and they never let those two be separated.

So, when it came down to us pushing for a final version of this treaty, they refused to tell us, before we signed, how many prisoners they were returning. And we accepted that condition. It was said they would tell us after we signed. So, we signed, and they give us a list, which had 591 names on it. This astounded people in our intelligence community, because their list showed several hundred more.

And there was this back-and-forth that the American public never saw, because it took place at higher levels. Nixon wrote a letter to Pham Van Dong, the prime minister, in which he said, we have, in Laos alone, a list of 311 prisoners held alive, and you are sending back nine prisoners from Laos. Quote: “That is inconceivable.” That’s what he wrote. And it was inconceivable. But when it came time to explain to the American people whether we were getting all of our prisoners back, Nixon went to the television set and gave a national speech on television saying all of our prisoners are on their way home. He knew that was a lie.

Now, I don’t know what was in Nixon’s head or Kissinger’s head. Maybe they thought they could get them back later. But our position was no ransom. And so, there never was any ransom, unlike the French, who, after their defeat at Dien Bien Phu, they had many, many soldiers held back, all of whom—well, I don’t know if it’s “all of whom,” but most of whom were ransomed, privately, secretly, by back channel sources and so forth, but that’s how they got out. And we refused, and there were several ransom offers, and they were never made public. In fact, Richard Allen testified under oath—he was the National Security Adviser in the Reagan administration, and he testified under oath, behind closed doors, again, not seen by the American public, that prisoners—that there was a ransom offer in early 1972 and that nothing was done about it. And on and on and on.

AMY GOODMAN: But you say that a meeting was held between Reagan, Vice President George H.W. Bush, CIA Director William Casey, Allen, as well, the National Security Adviser, to discuss this issue of the ransom to get some of these, you estimate what, over 1,200 American prisoners?

SYDNEY SCHANBERG: Yeah. Well, the principal—the real reason why we know about that meeting is that a Secret Service officer, who was doing some wiring for some sensory equipment that he was setting up in the White House, overheard the conversation and was horrified by it, because they were obviously not going to do anything about this. And nobody knew at that time that there were—you know, most of America thought everybody had come home.

And, in fact, the thing that I should probably have mentioned first is that there was this story that the whole thing was a myth, a hoax, a right-wing hoax. And liberals chose to believe that. Or they were—you can say they were misled and accepted it. You know, we live in an area of mythology. We’ve been lied to regularly. We now see that we’ve been—we were lied to, even to a greater degree, about the Iraq war than anybody ever imagined or anybody thought that it was capable of the White House. And most people who respond, for example, to my story—I mean, a lot of people—with “This can’t be. This just can’t be. We would know about it by now. Or we would”—you know, the truth is that there is—I wouldn’t—I can’t write this, because I can’t prove it, but there are reports which have a strong level of belief from Laotians that they have talked to right now, men who are still there alive thirty-five years later.

JUAN GONZALEZ: But now, what about—because, obviously, after Nixon and Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter came in. What have the Democrats done on this issue at all? Or did they ignore it, as well?

SYDNEY SCHANBERG: The Democrats ignored it. It was not, first of all, high on their priorities. And secondly, to dig into this, Juan, they would have to disrupt the entire government establishment, before and after whatever presidency it was. In other words, every national security adviser, from Nixon on—this has gone across seven presidencies. Every president, every national security adviser, every secretary of state probably knows about this.

Now, two secretaries of defense testified at committee hearings, in the open, on television, under oath, that men were left behind. That was done in 1992. The press never touched it. That’s another piece of the story. The mainstream press ran away from this story. What was the reason? Well, they were being accused of having lost Vietnam. In other words, they wrote—the Republicans or the conservatives were saying, “You lost Vietnam,” like who lost China in years previous.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And John McCain’s role in all this?

SYDNEY SCHANBERG: John McCain’s role is harder to divine the reasons for. But John McCain—there has always been talk, and there’s evidence to suggest that there is truth in this, but it’s in his head, and only he and his psychiatrist, if he has one, know, that he—his reasons are that if the North—if the Vietnamese were to release all the information they have on him, the full text of his confessions, how he lived the details, because there have been stories, again, just rumors, that he was provided with a woman companion, and all kinds of things like that, which are—can’t be considered as fact, because they’ve never been confirmed, and very, very difficult, if not impossible, to confirm.

And there have even been rumors that he had an agreement, an understanding with the Vietnamese, that he would do everything to get their nation recognized in the international network and get them—our diplomatic relations, ours, the United States, relations restored, which he did, if they would never release his information. None of his military records have ever been released, and there’s been no pressure to do so. And that’s just his military records, where he was a sort of a screw-up pilot, crashing three planes while not on combat duty, but just in training. And everybody knows that, everybody who ever worked with him. And they don’t consider that dishonorable, but they also say that if he hadn’t been the son of the Rear Admiral, who was Commander-in-Chief, Pacific, his—you know, his father, John Sidney McCain II—that he would have been bounced.

AMY GOODMAN: Syd Schanberg is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, won the Pulitzer for his coverage of Cambodia. The film Killing Field is based on his work there. Tell us about the Senate POW committee that John McCain served on and the sister of a missing airman who came forward, Dolores Alfond, her testimony and what happened.

SYDNEY SCHANBERG: Well, the committee was formed because there was a resurgence of interest by POW families, and they were pressing very hard, “We want to know the truth.” They had been worked over by the government. They hadn’t been shown the files that the government had on their missing men, and they had been taken on a merry-go-round and lied to and all that sort of thing, because now, you see, the government—once you tell a lie that big and you start to cover it up, as the years pass, you’ve really got to continue to cover it up, because all of those people that I mentioned—you know, national security advisers, presidents—would lose their reputations if one could look at them and say, “You knew about this, and you did nothing.” And that is exactly what happened.

But, in any case, the committee—when the committee was formed, I must acknowledge that I had this naive opinion that they were really going to do something and dig in and get to the bottom of this story. And I had been poking at this story for a long time, but not really immersing myself in it. And so, for a few months I really thought that’s what they were doing. They were going for files and so forth. But then it became quite clear that they really weren’t looking for anything and that they were cooperating with the intelligence community and the Defense Department to accept the non-provision of files. Every time they asked for something, they were told, “Oh, we’ll give you everything,” and they gave them nothing. In fact, the CIA Directorate of Operations has never released anything significant. If you got into their files—and the DIA has a place where they keep their special stuff, and that’s called Hotel California, for some reason I don’t know. It’s a vault, and nobody has ever—nobody on this committee ever got near it. And the staff began to rebel.

McCain came on the committee. First, he asked to be chairman, and that wasn’t—that didn’t happen. Then he insisted upon being on the committee, and apparently in order to control what information was released. Kerry had this great desire to normalize relations with Hanoi. And so, both of them were really on—it was the same eventual goal, but from a different track. McCain had something to hide, and Kerry had this other goal.

And I don’t know what he was thinking, perhaps that since most of these men, by 1992, which was the basic year of this committee, may be dead. That’s what intelligence tells us; doesn’t say they’re all dead, but they became useless after a while. Since we didn’t give ransoms, we didn’t accept the ransom idea, those men became useless as leverage for bargaining. That is why the Vietnamese held them. That’s why they held the French soldiers. And it’s been a tradition. You know, there were Korean soldiers—our soldiers in Korea held back, and so forth. So that was what happened to the committee. Kerry and McCain pushed it along, revealing nothing and ending up with an executive summary, the report—the executive summary of the reports, that only a small number could have been left behind.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, there have been other independent efforts by some Americans to try to continue to ferret out this story. Didn’t Ross Perot at one point try to bankroll some effort to try to find the missing POWs?

SYDNEY SCHANBERG: Ross Perot had a lot of information about men held in Laos. That’s—Laos is considered really the center of this, because the Vietnamese probably have not got anybody alive on their territory, so that they can legitimately say there’s nobody in Vietnam, there’s no prisoners being held in Vietnam. But Laos is a place where you can’t move around through that entire country. In fact, our military units that search for bones, crash sites and so forth of soldiers who were shot down, airmen, are not allowed to go to certain areas of Laos. And the American public isn’t told that either. And those areas are where those prisoners were held. Anyway, the end result was that the indifferent press, the lack of a constituency for this issue—the only constituency for this issue are some veterans and the families of the POWs, so there’s no political pressure on anybody.

AMY GOODMAN: Syd Schanberg, in this hearing, you have this sister of the missing airman, Captain Victor Apodaca.

SYDNEY SCHANBERG: Right, Dolores Alfond.

AMY GOODMAN: She asks about why information hasn’t been released on the classified program known as PAVE SPIKE, the electronic sensors designed to pick up enemy troops movements.

SYDNEY SCHANBERG: Right, yes. You asked about that, and I digressed.

AMY GOODMAN: And what—how McCain responded to her when she demanded information. He was the most powerful member of this committee, being himself—

SYDNEY SCHANBERG: A POW. Well, PAVE SPIKE was an instrument that we would drop from planes that would monitor motion, which meant soldiers up and down the Ho Chi Minh Trail bringing supplies to the war from North Vietnam. But it also had another function. Soldiers, airmen were trained in how to use this thing, and then they could punch in their coded locator number, which was a classified thing. And at one point, twenty names, twenty locator numbers, all separate, were punched into these spikes that fell in the ground.

And she got up, and she said, “What about this? Who were these men? What happened to them?” And she was told that it was classified and so forth. But he responded by saying, “How dare you challenge my patriotism?” He twists lot of things during the life of this committee into “How dare you challenge my patriotism?” And he’s, of course, done that throughout his campaign for the presidency. And he began to scream. His face grew pink and then darker pink. He was pounding on the desk. She began to cry. I mean, she hesitated. She reached into her purse, took out a handkerchief and began to dab her eyes, finally composed herself. She said, “I’m not challenging your patriotism. I’m asking you to keep this committee alive and keep digging for information and give us the information.” And he just stood up at that point, and he was almost about to explode, spun around and raced out of the committee room. And—

AMY GOODMAN: And they never declassified the information.

SYDNEY SCHANBERG: No, it’s never been declassified. It’s one of the first things I would ask for if I thought there was, you know—it’s all—it’s been asked for, it’s been denied. If you could have—if I could have my druthers, that’s one of the first things I would want to look at.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, you say McCain was also instrumental in amending the Missing Service Personnel Act, which was strengthened in ’95 by POW advocates to include criminal penalties against any government official who knowingly and willfully withholds from the file of a missing person any information relating to their disappearance or status of a missing person.

SYDNEY SCHANBERG: Yes. He managed to dilute all the legislation that had said every public official in the United States federal government has to reveal to the public and to the family all information about POWs, who may be—who are missing and unaccounted for and may be alive, to the families and to the public. And he took out all of the punishment information from those laws. There was no—you could do it and get away with it, in other words, and the cover-up could continue. And so, he explained that by saying, uncompellingly, that he did it because he said you could never get anybody to work in the POW—in the Defense Department’s POW office if you had these penalties, if you made it a felony with a big fine. So, he was saying that he wanted to allow this cover-up to continue. I mean, that’s all it did.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there. Syd Schanberg’s piece appears in The Nation magazine. He is the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who’s written extensively on Vietnam, won the prize for his coverage of Cambodia.

SYDNEY SCHANBERG: Can I add one thing? The Nation printed an abbreviated version. The full version of the piece is found on the Nation Institute website, which is nationinstitute.org.

AMY GOODMAN: And we’ll link to that at democracynow.org. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. Tomorrow, we will bring you the victims of Agent Orange and why they’ve come to the United States, suing the US government and the companies that made Agent Orange.

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/10/23/report_mccain_suppressed_info_on_fellow

RFK, Jr on Rachel Maddow Show about your vote

Steal Back Your Vote! from Greg Palast on Vimeo.

Obama gets his laughs, also...funny stuff.

McCain gets laughs at Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation dinner

So right-on!! Palin and McCain are hate-mongers

In a few weeks it will be Halloween

I love going to the cemeteries. They are interesting just to stroll around in and look at the history. This is one of many pictures I recently took at the old cemetery here in town. It can be a little creepy at times, I suppose, but I do enjoy the atmosphere.

Rep. Sherman says Congress threatened with Martial law if bailout bill not passed

In memory of Malcolm

It was a very sad day, September 15th. Our cat, Malcolm, needed to be put to sleep.

His mother, Spooky, and his sister, Timber, had gone before him and he lived several months past fourteen years of age. After the death of his sister, he acquired cataracts in both eyes and his bad hip became more pronounced. He was the runt of the bunch and Joe used to carry him in his shirt pocket. He grew to be the biggest one, though. Malcolm was gentle and sweet and funny. When he was really little, we came home to find him running through the apartment with a cigarette butt between his lips; when we followed him we discovered he had taken a number of butts and placed them in a pile under the kitchen table, along with one of my fingernail files.

He would get the ‘midnight crazies’ and run from the bedroom to the patio railing and back again, stopping just long enough to give you a look like ‘catch me if you can’. He enjoyed driving me nuts when I didn’t pay attention to him by jumping up on the coffee table and plopping down right in front of my view to the television. He used to sleep at the foot of the bed until he was the only cat around and then, he would sleep next to me with his head on my pillow and covered up. I loved that; I miss that now.

Malcolm loved to eat treats and Joe began calling him ‘Kitty Pig’ and ‘Moose’ because of it.

Now that all the cats are gone, the apartment seems so lonely and strange. We miss them all tremendously and will carry them in our hearts forever and forever. There really isn’t anything quite like the love of an animal that shares your journey through life. I only hope we were good enough ‘guardians’ for them.

See ya later, dear and treasured friends. Thank you all for being a part of our lives and enriching it so immensely.