Books & Liturature

• Don't blame the textbooks -- which can be surprisingly good. Teachers aren't encouraged to bring it up.
• Don't Thank Me for My Service.

Jonathan Zimmerman, Salon

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(Credit: Reuters/Goran Tomasevic/Uros Zunic via Shutterstock/Salon)

Tuesday, March 19, 2013 | Upon the 10th anniversary of America’s war in Iraq, a critical question with serious ramifications has been little explored: What are our children being taught in schools about the conflict, as it passes from “current events” into history?

To answer this question, one obvious place to start is school textbooks. I looked at several of them, and was happily surprised. The books present a fairly complex and balanced view of the war in Iraq, avoiding the falsehoods and sugarcoating that has so often marred American history instruction. But textbooks only tell part of the story. 

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Related:

Don't Thank Me for My Service, Camillo Mac Bica, Truthout <g>

• Instead, demand an immediate end to the corporate takeover of our "democracy" and to the undue influence of the military-industrial-Congressional complex. Demand sanity in Pentagon spending and a reallocation of finite resources to people-focused programs such as health care, education and jobs rather than to killing and destruction.
• Bill Moyers | What It’s Like to Go to War
• War is A Racket Redeux

• Manning will surely pay with many years - perhaps his entire life - in prison. But we too will pay. The war against Bradley Manning is a war against us all. 
• Bradley Manning's fight for justice

Chris Hedges, TruthDig

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AP/Patrick Semansky, File 

March 3, 2013 | I was in a military courtroom at Fort Meade in Maryland on Thursday as Pfc. Bradley Manning admitted giving classified government documents to WikiLeaks. The hundreds of thousands of leaked documents exposed U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as government misconduct. A statement that Manning made to the court was a powerful and moving treatise on the importance of placing conscience above personal safety, the necessity of sacrificing careers and liberty for the public good, and the moral imperative of carrying out acts of defiance. Manning will surely pay with many years—perhaps his entire life—in prison. But we too will pay. The war against Bradley Manning is a war against us all.

This trial is not simply the prosecution of a 25-year-old soldier who had the temerity to report to the outside world the indiscriminate slaughter, war crimes, torture and abuse that are carried out by our government and our occupation forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is a concerted effort by the security and surveillance state to extinguish what is left of a free press, one that has the constitutional right to expose crimes by those in power. The lonely individuals who take personal risks so that the public can know the truth—the Daniel Ellsbergs, the Ron Ridenhours <http://www.ridenhour.org/about_ron.html>, the Deep Throats and the Bradley Mannings—are from now on to be charged with “aiding the enemy.” All those within the system who publicly reveal facts that challenge the official narrative will be imprisoned, as was John Kiriakou, the former CIA analyst who for exposing the U.S. government’s use of torture began serving a 30-month prison term the day Manning read his statement. There is a word for states that create these kinds of information vacuums: totalitarian.

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Related:

Bradley Manning's fight for justice, Courage to Resist / Bradley Manning Support Network

• Updates from Ft. Meade
• Recent rulings from the Fort Meade pre-trial hearings
• Trial delayed until June
• In the Matter of Bradley Manning

• A majority of Americans now believes the Iraq War was a mistake, but memories fade. Most 18-29-year-olds say sending U.S. troops to Vietnam was not a mistake. 
• 10 Years Later and I’m Still Protesting War

Robert Scheer, TruthDig

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A war memorial in Santa Barbara, Calif., calls attention to American soldiers killed in Iraq. AP/Ric Francis

Mar 19, 2013 | It is a staple of our widely trumpeted Judeo-Christian heritage that the acknowledgment of sin is a prelude to redemption. So how is it that there is no palpable sense of soul searching associated with the 10th anniversary of a war based on officially concocted lies and a policy of torture? It is because the presumption of a unique American claim to an original and enduring innocence perseveres, no matter the death and destruction.

Indeed, some of our most celebrated publicists defined moral deceit as virtue in justifying the Iraq War. “As far as I am concerned, we do not need to find any weapons of mass destruction to justify this war,” New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote in April 2003, when U.N. inspectors had clearly established that the proclaimed basis for invading Iraq was a lie. “Mr. Bush doesn’t owe the world any explanation for missing chemical weapons (even if it turns out that the White House hyped this issue).” 

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10 Years Later and I’m Still Protesting War, Col. Ann Wright, TruthDig

Mar 19, 2013 |Ten years ago, I resigned my post in opposition to President George W. Bush’s war on Iraq. I had worked in the U.S. government for most of my life, first in the Army and Army Reserves, retiring as a colonel, and then as a diplomat. I served in U.S. embassies in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone and Micronesia. I helped reopen the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, in December 2001.

• The March 1 st sequester budget cuts are yet another product of crises manufactured by the ultra-conservative wing of the Republican Party. These Tea Party extremists have one objective: crush the federal government. Motivated by a strange brew of Old Testament Christianity and Ayn Rand's "Objectivism" they're a lethal force within the GOP -- Anarchists.
• Matt Taibbi | Sequester Makes Me Want to Strangle Both Sides
• Ralph Nader | Why Are Democrats So Defeatist?

Bob Burnett, opednews.com

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3/1/2013 | The March 1 sequester budget cuts are yet another product of crises manufactured by the ultra-conservative wing of the Republican Party.  These Tea Party extremists have one objective: crush the federal government.  Motivated by a strange brew of Old Testament Christianity and Ayn Rand's "Objectivism" they're a lethal force within the GOP -- Anarchists. 

In August of 2011, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives forced a phony debt-ceiling crisis.  In order to raise the ceiling, and to push the matter off the political calendar until after the elections, President Obama signed the "Budget Control Act of 2011," which said that if Congress failed to approve a ten-year budget reduction of $1.2 trillion, automatic cuts would kick in.  The initial cuts, $85 billion, apply to "discretionary" spending and are divided between reductions to defense ($43 billion), domestic ($30 billion), and mandatory spending ($12 billion) such as cuts to Medicare providers -- Social Security and Medicaid are protected. 

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Related:

Matt Taibbi | Sequester Makes Me Want to Strangle Both Sides, Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

• There are so many variables that neither side can possibly know the true outcome of a failure to make a deal – which means the only certainty is that what we're watching is irresponsibility on an epic scale. 
• Book Excerpt | "Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free" 
• The Ignorance Caucus

Why Are Democrats So Defeatist? Ralph Nader, Nation

Their failure to dislodge Speaker John Boehner and majority leader Eric Cantor assures that President Obama and congressional Democrats will get very little done for the next two years.