Sam Nunn/Wesley Clark: Question on Raising Kaine - "Will Wesley Clark be Obama's VP?"

Quigley's comment: Sam Nunn represents an old school which might be considered a Democratic Council of Elders. David Boren, Sam Nunn and elders from both parties recently held a conference in Oklahoma to call for Mark Warner style "across the isle" politics. But more important, the Nunn/Boren group bemoaned the narrowness of both parties in foreign policy, particularly in nuclear proliferation. This group precedes Clinton/Albright/Holbrook policy which some in this older group considered ill-informed and naive. In '98 thereabouts when Clinton took a page from the Gingrich Contract with America and pushed Congress to advance NATO to Russia's borders when Russia was considered weak and broken, some in this group including George Kennan considered it " . . . a mistake of historic proportions." General Clark was not policy maker to this but he was chief of NATO at the time so he is associated with this group of policy makers through the Clinton administration.

The only candidate to agree with Nunn/Boren (and Henry Kissinger) and to support Nunn's position on nuclear proliferation at the Oklahoma meeting last month was Barack Obama. So there is a clear generational break between these two Democratic visions of foreign policy and here and in other ways, Obama harks back to Nunn and leaps over the Clinton/Albright generation - and Hillary's point of view on this which should come as no surprise is the same as her husband's. That is probably why Obama was endorsed by Susan Eisenhower, who was at the meeting in Oklahoma and who also called together the foreign policy elders like Kennan to oppose Clinton's NATO initiative (which 90 Senators voted for) on incursion into Russia's near frontier.

Sam Nunn has been mentioned as a possible VP for Obama. An Obama Presidency will almost certainly take a different foreign policy tack than the Reagan/Clinton direction which was primary the same (Kagan/Kristol).

General Clark has been critical of Obama on many occations, starting at the Daily Kos convention last summer, about the time he went to work for the Clintons. I don't see that he had any choice but to support the Clinton camp as Bill was his Commander-in-Chief and the important work Clark did in his life was with Bill's approval and sometimes with the disapproval of the army.

In my opinion the best work General Clark ever did in his life was in opposition to the war on Iraq from '04 to June '07. He opposed the war when few other men and women of his credibility, character and distinguished personal history did. He gave the Democrats a new track and kept them on that track until the war fever had passed. Among politicians, veterans and soldiers, he carried this point of view virtually alone, like a candle cupped in his hands, for quite a long time.

That work is not finished. In one of his books and in the Amy Goodman interview he did last year, Clark called for an investigation of the roots of the war on Iraq as he had heard from friends in the Pentagon that this invasion would take place long before it had been made public. This fully needs to be investigated if America is ever to find credibility with the world again and with our new generations. It is clear that laws have been broken, crimes have been committed and they would be war crimes. This is a very delicate task and requires women and men of the utmost character. These hearings should start with Wes Clark. (And Larry Wilkerson.)

Upending Torture: Finding Equilibrium in the New America Condition

By Bernie Quigley

Shortly after it began, Wesley Clark, as a candidate for President in ‘04, demanded that the beginnings of the war on Iraq be dug up and found and publicly explored and explained before they got buried too deep. It is a good idea. Let’s have televised exploratory hearings. Let them be vast and let them last years and let them begin now.

It is an important idea, and now that senior members of the Government have admitted to torture, let’s also begin as well hearings and investigations into these and possibly other American war crimes. Because in our country, when one commits a crime there are hearings and investigations. And when those crimes involve warfare, they are war crimes.

Not to get all judgmental, but for myself, I’d like to see something a little less touchy-feely than the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Something more widespread. Something more akin to the McCarthy Hearings. Or better still, something like France’s war crime trials of the storied Vichy Swine which took TIME’s Man of the Year in 1931, Pierre Laval, and left him vomiting before a firing squad in 1945.

Here in northern New England, the newspaper editors who for the first time in the 800-year history of the English-speaking people proposed on our op-ed pages that torture be a rational tool of diplomacy, have in most places been delegated to the night desk.

But down the mountain; down there in the vast heartland, the actual torture buffs and advocates who wrote the stories before they went to the syndicates; the agents and fellow travelers of the Popular Front of American Fascism who have breached the faith of the American tradition as it has never been breached before have found their way out of that upper white trash journal, The National Review, to the most important newspapers and magazines in the country. And discussion of torture in venerable journals like The New York Times and the LA Times is now as common as hep-B and herpes duplex and as American as apple pie. First question to these people: Who raised you?

Perhaps we will need reeducation centers or rehabilitation centers like those set up in Southeast Asia after the war in Vietnam to reeducate communist soldiers, propagandists, prostitutes and others who lost their center to the heady and delirious fever of blood and ideology. Get them at least straight enough to be able to perform the simplest tasks of common humanity like cutting tobacco or gutting fish with humble pride and humility.

Let’s go back to the beginning: Let’s have public discussion of ideas like those openly discussed – bragged about – throughout the media leading up to the war on Iraq when most all the major columnists and journalists in this country and about 90 Senators felt for sure early in 2001 that the war in Iraq would be a cake walk won in a week. It would be the key career move and anyone who didn’t participate would be left behind.

World War II in a week. Let’s go back to the Weekly Standard crew. One of its old school talked openly about frequently sitting around the office and the whole bunch just trying to decide which country to cajole the compliant, submissive and accommodating Congress to invade first.

Are there not War Crime laws against conspiring to invade foreign countries? Shouldn’t there be? Isn’t it, like, unConstitutional? Isn’t it unConstitutional to repeal habeas corpus? Why did the repeal of habeas corpus not ring with the urgency of a suddenly lost talisman to the majority in Congress and the press? And isn’t it therefore a RICO violation or a conspiracy to advocate overthrow of the established Constitutional proceedings? Doesn’t this in fact present a bloodless coup; the substitution of a false government for the true government? Isn’t this against the law?

Let’s begin to ask these questions and let’s have soldiers like Major Tammy Duckworth, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Senator Jim Webb, Admiral Joe Sestak and General Wesley Clark start to ask these questions.

Are the instigators of these illegal issues American war criminals and to what degree are they culpable? To what degree are their fellow travelers in press and politics culpable? Should they at least be purged from our presence? Can’t they be sent some place like the Penal Colony of French New Guinea or the Galapagos Islands?

And let’s have some public and televised hearings and go way back to the beginning. Let’s bring in some of the old folkloric and vastly charming and creative radio preachers I used to listen to in the mountains of Appalachia starting in the early ‘90s and throughout who talked about the invasion of Iraq and gettin’ Saddam for years before in actually happened.

Let’s talk about Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ that our Appalachian free preachers told us we were going to help bring about by a war against Saddam.

Was this war simply millennialist religious hysteria of the kind which classically comes about at the turning of millennia? A nation-wide Jonestown to which the Congress, the press and 75% of the American people who supported the invasion drank the kool aid?

Lets get the authors of the Left Behind books to explain to us again as they did to their 100 million readers how a war in the Middle East - something way like this one - was going to bring about the end of the world and bring back Jesus. How was that going to happen again? And let’s talk to the few New York rabbis who brought concerns to The New York Times just prior to the invasion about the apparent connection between these Appalachian religious visions and convictions and the plight of the Jews in this narrative. Was not the final end-game of this fantastic maelstrom of fire and blood the final end for the Jews? How could Jews possibly support this? How could anyone?

More questions arise: Why were so few others in big places like The New York Times and Congress unconcerned about this? How could they possibly claim not to know? One of the authors of the Left Behind books worked for one of our most prominent Representatives. Were they not curious? Was appeasement and accommodation of Bush and company the dominant survival strategy for those Senators who voted for the Iraq war as it was for Marshall Petain and Pierre Laval in France in the early 1930s? Is that why Indian activist Russell Means today calls these American politicians Vichy? Were they simply cowards? Youth wants to know.

And how did our allies not know a word about this?

Weeks before the invasion I’d lobbied members of the House of Commons like Glenda Jackson about the American religious zealots encouraging this war on Iraq and she said they had not a clue about this. She would be the first to bring it to the attention of Tony Blair, she said.

And how did the urban and urbane neocons connect so swiftly with this motley group of Free Church Christian preachers in the Appalachians? What were the external networks? Churches, elected officials, press? They seem unlikely colleagues. What were their shared purposes?

Let’s go back to the tapes of The Newshour with Jim Lehrer weeks before the invasion and look a second time into the eyes and smiles the camaraderie and excitement that the country’s most prominent journalists shared with the most common of agitators, political propagandists and outright thugs, each egging on the other to their Great Moment which they were comparing to the invasion of Normandy.

Let’s go to the deeply involved journalists; the coat carriers at The New York Times who were raising the call to throw France off the UN Security Council and quickly stick India in there, so’s to use a few millions of its minions as American Ghurkhas to hold territory in its new wars abroad in a new America century; and the top Washington Post reporter who advocated invasion of Iraq on the front pages every day for her own agenda - to get the Muslim women to be rid of their burkas and dress like her – the Priestess who accompanied the Conquistador; let’s go to the most famous of TV reporters cheering them on into Baghdad from a Humvee and telling the camera " . . . I think they’re greeting us," while the Iraqi people were throwing him the finger.

Let’s get to the bottom. Who was promoted to the highest perches of newspaper and media posts on the phony Mission Accomplished day and why? How much experience did they have? Compare the backgrounds of these new and present editors to the tradition; to an old editor like, say, Wayne King long of the NYTs, who took 20 years in the trenches and a Pulitzer Prize won in Detroit riots to get to the same position. What kind of newspaper experience did these new people have besides supporting the invasion that led them to such high positions? Why are they still there?

Who early proposed torture in the press and why now have they advanced to major media? Are they not American terrorists? Can they not be imprisoned or exiled? And if we are going to suspend the Constitution, cannot Bob Dylan’s folkloric Mr. Jones, surmised to be the archetypal and anonymous cowardly journalist and editor with neither face nor character, storied in song and generational folk lore for knowing something is happening but not knowing what it is, cannot Mr. Jones be banished outright and purged from the village?

Who were, who are, the central advocates? Who are the American Ayatollahs? Let’s talk to them all. Let’s have everybody watch and hear their explanations.

And while we have them there let’s ask them why they made so little fuss at the dropping of habeas corpus. Let’s ask them why at each and every turn these past few years only so very few like the venerable Robert C. Byrd and that Gray Champion, Ted Kennedy, and a few others like Senator Russ Feingold and Wes Clark spoke up.

Let’s ask the lawmakers why legislation to quit smoking or to ban transfats brings fire to their minds, but torture and habeas corpus are not that burning as issues for them.

But first of all let’s ask them this: Did you watch the Super Bowl? Did you rise and swell at the magnificent vision of the Declaration of Independence being read by Americans of every shape, contrast and color? Did you awaken to Russell Crowe’s primal American vision of perfection leading the artist’s heart, the troubadour’s intuition and the athlete’s gift - The Beatles and Jack Kennedy and Neil Armstrong and Jimi Hendrix and Satchmo and Randy Moss and Eli and Plaxico - to the moon and beyond?

Do you share in this sacred trust? Do you consider yourself to be part of this participation mystique? Do you consider yourself to be one of us?

Kosovo’s Problem: Frank Zappa is Dead

By Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network, 2/18/08

Issues of time lag were written about best perhaps by Kafka, who came from the darkest place and lived in the shadow of the castle. Kafka’s characters want to bring back the ancient time – the torturer in the short story In the Penal Colony, Wilhelm II and George Bush – when time has passed them by. France, living in its own shadow, has a tendency. It finally gets onto the rising Ronald Reagan era – building big, useless Airbus planes that nobody wants and electing Sarko – just as the Reagan Era has fallen into twilight.

But Kafka would find a true home in Kosovo. The region is vortex to Europe’s Four Grandfathers: Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox and Islam. And ancestral Jews as well. And they all hate each other.

But I blame the trouble today on Frank Zappa. He trumped the Black Madonna and even Joseph Stalin’s dark charm.

Youth wants to know: Who the hell is Frank Zappa? Just another God that Failed; a charming and witty troubadour who once compared his masculine aspect – which Canadians call a tool – with a Harley-Davidson (“ . . . you kick it to start.”).

They were called Velvet Revolutionaries and other things elegant and fey for a place where neighbors stoned each other to death. But they listened to Frank Zappa and Lou Reed who was even hipper and they were the darlings of an age that was unbearably light. They were featured on NPR and championed by the English Department. When the ancient regimes on the edge of Russia were suddenly cut loose from Stalin’s post-war grip, it was widely thought to be because of Frank Zappa.

To recall the first wave, there was a rush of entrepreneurs from Europe and America sent in to get them on track. What they wanted, it was said, was not Trotsky and Lenin. They wanted America. And not just Jefferson and Lincoln. They wanted Michael Jackson and Calvin Klein.

The neocon model – Gingrich and McCain’s current advisers Kaplan and Kristol - - appeared to make sense. There were a lot of Poles, Czechs, Serbs, Latvians and what not in America, no? Let’s hook up with them. Forget the Chinese hordes. This would be the basis of a new American global empire; the Project for a New American Century. The new diplomatic dogma had a simple plan; it was that we, the Americans, would find a dissident in every desert and swamp in the world that had one and send in the troops. Now that the Iron Curtain had fallen, there were a whole group of them over near Austria somewhere.

And these places would become American pseudo-states like Guam and Puerto Rico; Poland, Czech Republic and hey, all of Islam. But some of the less big visionaries; the poets, weaklings, pig dogs, even some at the NYTs – reflected modestly that to actually hold territory one needed more than an Air Force. One needed soldiers, and to hold a bunch of territory one needed proletariat. You couldn’t fight these global wars with undocumented Mexican day workers. And the U.S. had no proletariat.

Not a problem. It was actually suggested; it was actually imagined by these people, that India could supply a few million of its extra hordes and fight for Frank, Michael and Cal, much as the Gurkhas fought for England. All you had to do was throw those sissy French manboys off the Security Council and put India there. This was a plan.

Congress really got into it (it was the end of time, one Pentagon bodhisattva proclaimed). In 1996, everyone in the world wanted to be an American and George Soros, a rich guy, made the point that everyone in the world was a kind of American; everyone was a kind of an American by different degree. So Clinton took the Gingrich playbook and adopted Kosovo’s fledgling liberation movement. Bombing the beast chilled it for awhile and NATO – Don Cherry’s Euro-wimps – was sent in to keep the peace. But today, Peter Finn of the Washington Post reports that their only job is guarding things like Serb monasteries which are now surrounded by massive new walls to shield elderly nuns from being stoned to death by passing ethnic Albanians.

Youth wants to know: Who’s Newt Gingrich?

Kind of made you wonder, in a land where Orthodox Christians have traditionally hated Jews and Muslins have hated Christians and visa versa; indeed, where everyone hates one another, how long Frank Zappa, Cal Klein and Michael Jackson would hold on as god-kings. Soon, all the Frank Zappa guys might be stoning the Michael Jackson guys.

In Kosovo today they are waving American flags. They are yelling, “We love you Bill Clinton.” It was indeed Clinton and Al Gore who, when the Soviets fell, pressed into Holy Roman Empire and promised to line the edge of Russia with nuclear weapons. It was called “a mistake of historic proportions,” by George Kennan and the best foreign policy minds of the day. Even Jesse Helms, my old Senator in North Carolina, had to ask if America was willing to commit troops, alienate Russia and start a new round of nuclear proliferation for such small and relatively insignificant stakes.

Much as they cited Zappa as the true revolution, he was only, in the end, a modest comedian. And these were not really revolutions. In a revolution, the mice kill the cat and take over. Here, the cat simply died.

But like that charming children’s song from Sesame Street, the cat came back. And today the dollar is crashing while the ruble is soaring. And from then to now the same neocon playbook that sent NATO to Russia’s edge has sunk into the sand in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In the late ‘90s in Kosovo, America challenged Russia, advancing the geopolitical playbook written at Yalta to the peak of its vision. Kosovo today is either an end-game of Yalta or the beginning of World War III.

I think the first. I doubt the neocons will be able to egg on loyal and decent Southern Baptists to fight another war for them as they did in Iraq. It worked in the Middle East because there was that Armageddon thing; there was the git Saddam thing which played big in my old neighborhood back in Tobaccoville, NC; there was that jump start the Second Coming of Christ in the Holy Land thing and there was 9/11. It might well have been much of it a millennialist fever; an end-of-the-world delusion like those which classically occur at the end of thousand-year periods; a Jonestown in big, and 75% of the American drank the kool-aid.

But, outside the Pole, Czech, and other lobbyists and their agents in Congress, the specifics don’t really hold much of a grip on the broader American imagination on its wandering path. I think it was Chris, the young hood in Tony Soprano’s gang, who showed a kind of diffident interest when Czechs started coming to New Jersey at the fall of communism. Like most new immigrant groups, they formed their own economic under-culture and one of them, Emile (who Chris called “E-mail”), wanted to join Tony’s gang. He graciously explained how Czechs had just risen up in revolution and cast off the Soviet boot. Chris asked: “What’s a Czech? That’s a kind of Polak, right?”

Somebody tell them in Kosovo: Bill Clinton is no longer the President. Frank Zappa is dead.

Notes on orthodoxy . . .

Ganesh is pictured standing on or above a rat and likewise Shiva stomping on a dwarf. The rat and dwarf represent the evolutionary body; the reflex path of human and animal life – the human can find awakening to the cosmic and leave the rat behind. The Christian likewise finds himself “born again” to the cosmic and rising out of the everyday unenlightened body, rising to the cosmic through the Christ. They rise out of nature. But Buddhism starts from alienation in the social order and comes after a long tradition of Hindu orthodoxy. Perhaps it is that as William James says the enlightened moment comes as a flash venture and is sustained by orthodoxy building walls around but killing the spark. Buddha said that when he first became enlightened he felt that he shared something “with the animals.” He left the artificial life of the calcified institutions of borrowed and inauthentic inherited “Enlightenments” behind to find himself first back to nature. From there he advanced again to the cosmic in a second awakening, but the first requirement was to leave the official orthodox culture bereft of spirit behind. So we have it is Japanese zen that all of the public social order is a conspiracy of “language and logic” which must be left behind to find enlightenment. This is in the Christ as well as he rose in opposition to the Pharisees who had banished the shamans and intuitives to written codification and law, creating the same structured orthodoxy, making it impossible to find the “father we cannot see” – the Self in the Vedic texts. For years I complained that the communion was an extension of the animal sacrifice of the pagans and that is what Christ yelled about and was in opposition to at the “money lenders in the Temple.” The King James version presents an anti-Semitic picture of Jews as money lenders in this episode at at time of a rising indegeneous trade class but the point of the story was not in that they were selling (blue laws), but in what they were selling: they were selling animals for the purpose of live sacrifice in the Temple and that is what Christ was railing about (See Tolstoy’s translation in The Gospel in Brief). So the substitution of pseudo-sacrifice or substitute sacrifice by the early Christian churches as a management strategy to engage and absorb the pagan cycle is virtually in opposition to the Christ’s direction. But it is fascinating; it travels the heart through space/time to the ancestors through the ages in a singular act; better if performed in Latin as it actualizes a koan mechanism, shifting consciousness to the Right Side of the brain. Tolstoy’s late writing incidentally, is excellent reading for people in their descent particularly those who were raised Christian, like Tolstoy. It offers a potential path back to the Gate.

For more see Entering Aquarius.

War Crimes Trials for Mr. Jones

By Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network on 2/8/2008

Because something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

- Bob Dylan, Ballad of a Thin Man, 1965

Shortly before he disappeared into the dark night Wesley Clark demanded that the beginnings of the war on Iraq be dug up and found and publicly explained before they got buried too deep. It is a good idea. Let’s have televised exploratory hearings. Let them be vast and let them last years and let them begin now.

It is an important idea, and now that the Government has admitted to torture, let’s also begin as well hearings and investigations into American war crimes. Not to get all judgmental, but for myself, I’d like to see something a little less touchy-feely than the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and something more akin to the McCarthy Hearings. Or better still, something like France’s war crime trials of the legendary and folkloric Vichy Swine which took TIME’s Man of the Year in 1931, Pierre Laval, and left him vomiting before a firing squad in 1945.

Here in northern New England the newspaper editors who for the first time in the 800-year history of the English-speaking people proposed on our op-ed pages that torture be a rational tool of diplomacy, have at least in some places been delegated to the night desk. But down the mountain; down there in the vast heartland, the actual torture buffs and advocates; agents and fellow travelers of the Popular Front of American Fascism have found their way out of that elite white trash journal, the National Review to the most important newspapers and magazines in the country. And discussion of torture in these venerable journals is now as common as hep-B and herpes duplex and as American as apple pie. First question to these people: Who raised you?

Perhaps we will need reeducation centers like those set up in Southeast Asia to reeducate communist soldiers, propagandists, prostitutes and others who lost their center in the heady and delirious mix of blood and ideology. Get them straight enough to be able to perform simple tasks like cutting tobacco or gutting fish with pride and humility.

Let’s go back to the beginning: Let’s have public discussion of ideas like those openly discussed – bragged about – throughout the media when most all the major columnists and journalist in this country and at least 90 Senators felt for sure early in 2001 that the war in Iraq would be a cake walk won in a week. It would be the key career move and anyone who didn’t participate would be left behind. Let’s go back to the Weekly Standard crew. One of its old school talked openly about sitting around the office and the whole bunch just trying to decide which country to cajole the compliant, submissive and decadent Congress of Peeps to invade first.

Are there not War Crime laws against conspiring to mass murder? Shouldn’t there be? Isn’t it, like, unConstitutional? Isn’t it unConstitutional to repeal habeas corpus? Why did the repeal of habeas corpus not ring with the urgency of a suddenly lost sacred talisman to the majority in Congress and in the press? And isn’t it therefore a RICO violation or a conspiracy to advocate overthrow of the Constitutional government? Are these people American war criminals and to what degree are they culpable? Should they at least be purged from our presence? Can’t they be sent some place like the Penal Colony of French New Guinea or the Galapagos Islands?

Let’s go back to the tapes of The Newshour with Jim Lehrer a week before the invasion and watch in the eyes and smiles the camaraderie and excitement the country’s most prominent journalists shared with the most common of war criminals, each egging on the other to their Great Moment which they were comparing to the invasion of Normandy.

Let’s go to the deeply involved journalist; the coat carriers at the NYTs; the top WaPost reporter who advocated invasion to get the Muslim women to be rid of the burkas and dress like her – the Priestess who accompanied the Conquistador – and to the most famous of TV reporters cheering on the way into Baghdad from a Humvee and telling the camera “ . . . I think their waving,” while the Iraqi people were throwing him the finger.

Let’s get to the bottom. Who was promoted to the highest perches of newspaper and media posts on the phony “Mission Accomplished” day and why? And why are they still there?

Who early proposed torture in the press and why are they now writing for major media? Are they not American terrorists? Can they not be imprisoned or exiled? And if we are going to suspend the Constitution, cannot Mr. Jones, anonymous and cowardly journalist and editor, storied in song and generational folk lore for knowing something is happening but not knowing what it is, with neither face nor character; cannot he be banished outright and purged from the village? Who are the central advocates? Who are the Ayatollahs?

Let’s talk to them. Let’s have everybody watch the explanation.

Let’s talk to all of them and Colin Powell who lied outright and let’s have Alan Dershowitz explain to us again as he did last year how the Clintons’ position on torture was (is?) much the same as his. And while we have them there let’s ask them why they made so little fuss at the dropping of habeas corpus. Let’s ask them why at each and every turn only Barack Obama and Ron Paul spoke up.

And let’s ask them why they are so intent on getting people to quit smoking or transfats, but torture is not that big of an issue for them.

But first of all let’s ask them this: Did you watch the Super Bowl? Did you rise and swell at the magnificent vision of the Declaration of Independence being read by Americans of every shape, contrast and color? Did you awaken to Russell Crowe’s primal and sacred American vision of perfection leading the artist’s heart, and the troubadour’s and the athlete’s; the avatar’s and the politician’s - The Beatles and Jack Kennedy and Neil Armstrong and Jimi Hendrix and Satchmo and Randy Moss and Eli and Plaxico - to the moon and beyond? Do you consider yourself to be part of this sacred trust? Do you consider yourself part of this participation mystique? Do you consider yourself to be one of us?