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I don’t think I was alone in finding Barack Obama’s nuclear change of heart a little odd, and more than a little hypocritical. Let’s skip back to December, and his Nobel Peace Prize address. Which, incidentally, made him one of the few prize winners to argue for war in his acceptance speech: “To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism – it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason”. When it comes to waging war, reason will apparently only take you so far. Presumably after that it’s intuition, or maybe divine inspiration – we need only look back to the former President for that, courtesy of the Independent UK.
But I digress. The important thing here is Obama’s policy towards nuclear weapons, which incidentally was the reason he was awarded the Nobel in the first place. Here he is again: “One urgent example is the effort to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, and to seek a world without them. I am committed to upholding this treaty. And I am working with President Medvedev to reduce America and Russia’s nuclear stockpiles.” That was December 2009. Hence the double-take when he announced in the latest budget that the agency responsible for the US’ nuclear weapons stockpile would receive a 13.4% increase from the previous fiscal year, totalling $11.2 billion. Granted, some of that would go towards controlling and securing existing nuclear warheads, but then there’s also “plans to go to full production of the refurbished Navy W-76 Trident submarine warhead, to refurbish the B-61 bomb, and to study options for maintaining the W-78, the warhead in the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile.”
Coincidentally, in the same month that this nuclear leap was taken, one of the lone survivors of both of the 1945 atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Tsutomo Yamaguchi, died aged 93. Amazingly, he was within the designated ground zero area (3km from the blast) for both. The students of the Stanford Graphic Novel Project have chosen his incredible testimony as the basis for their graphic novel, and the first few pages were excitedly written on Monday. To get a sense of the unbelievably apocalyptic level of destruction in Hiroshima and Nagasaki when the bombs dropped, check out this recent NPR podcast with the author of Last Train from Hiroshima, a collection of survivor testimonies.
In other news, the Independent World Report is running my Diego Garcia comic in their latest issue, but you can check it out here. And there’s only a week to get your pre-orders for the Honduran coup comic in! See the widget to the right and spread the word.
Panel 2: For disputes on the legality of the coup and Zelaya’s supposed infraction of the Honduran Constitution, see the first part of the graphic history as well as the legal evidence here.
Panel 3: Go here for a list of such principles outlined by the Inter-Parliamentary Union in Geneva.
You can still pre-order your own 32p hard copy comic of the Honduran Coup here – $5 plus shipping (US – $2, rest of the world $4)
Belated good news from the Obama camp that they will be challenging the acquittal of the Blackwater mercenaries responsible for the Nisour Square massacre of 16 September 2007. For those of you unfamiliar with Blackwater, essentially they’re a private mercenary army for hire, employed as go-to guys by the US government but apparently not bound by its legal or ethical codes. Means less litigation down the line for human rights violations incurred in the field, right? (In the interests of national security, of course). Well it did until now.
Jeremy Scahill has been covering their nefarious involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, summed up in his excellent book, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. His latest piece for the Nation on the verdict tells the story of the brave man who brought the case against the company after his young son was killed in the massacre. All he wants is an apology, but Blackwater would rather he took the hush money.
Today’s quote comes courtesy of teflon Tony Blair, all the way over in London. No, he’s not talking about forgetting to pay for his TV licence. He’s at the Chilcot Inquiry and he’s talking about forgetting to fact-check the intelligence dossier that convinced him we needed to invade Iraq. Despite gems like these (taken from the Daily Torygraph, I confess) surfacing online today in all the main papers, the headlines make out that he’s a man of decisive action, “not Bush’s poodle” – as if the internecine power dynamic between the two stooges was more important than whether the pair of them should be tried as war criminals. Other heinous admissions dressed up in diplomatic-speak include: “A second resolution was obviously going to make life a lot easier, politically and in every respect” – good to see his reverence for the UN as little more than a rubber-stamp for making life easier.
For more of the same, then why not check out this secret Downing Street Memo from July 2002 (later republished in the Sunday Times), in which Mssrs Blair, Campbell, the Attorney General and John Scarlett (then head of “Intelligence”) all talk more candidly about how they and the US can get the Iraq show on the road, evidence on not:
Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.
Then there’s the small matter of Attorney General Lord Goldsmith, who wrote Blair a full letter in 2002 outlining the illegality of an Iraq invasion, stating that: there were only three justifications: self-defence, which he did not accept because he did not accept the new US doctrine of expanded pre-emption; averting a humanitarian crisis, which justified the no-fly zones but would not justify war; and UN authorisation, which would require a new resolution.
Blair’s reaction was not only to ignore him (obviously), but to gag and bar him from the Cabinet. Then deny everything. The Daily Mail (hey, at least the sources have some standing) had the full scoop here. Read a blow-by-blow account of Goldsmith’s turn on the stand at Chilcot here.
Before I kick things off, become a fan of the newborn Archcomix Facebook Fan page here and get more updates than you can shake a digitized stick at. Now, onwards. Heroes of the week – In West Virginia, Protestors associated with Climate Ground Zero and Mountain Justice have managed to halt blasting on Coal River Mountain for the last week by staging a three-person tree-sit. David Aaron Smith, 23, Amber Nitchman, 19 and Eric Blevins, 28 are on platforms approximately 60 feet up two tulip poplar trees and one oak tree. They are located next to where Massey Energy is blasting to build an access road to the Brushy Fork Impoundment on its Bee Tree Strip Mine. One of them came down two days ago suffering from the cold, although the incessant horn blaring and siren wailing of vindictive Massey energy workers to prevent them from sleeping might have also had something to do with it.Today is National Coal Ash day of action so inform yerselves by watching this video, or reading my comic about Mountain Top Removal (pasted below). Please share this post with others via the buttons at the bottom too.
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Legendary leftist historian activist Howard Zinn also gets a special mention after suffering a fatal heart attack yesterday. Here’s a good interview with him by way of an introduction. Of course, there’s always his seminal A People’s History of the US (later adapted into a graphic novel) too.
Given the less than chirpy tone of the last rant, I’ll kick things off with an optimistic bang: news from Japan that the much-maligned military base planned for Okinawa has suffered a ‘setback’, to use US military parlance. In standard english, that means there are now too many people bitterly opposed to it to be conveniently ignored and forgotten about. Think peace in Iraq (we’ll get to that in a second) and you’ll see what I mean.
At last the groundswell of feeling against Uncle Sam’s maniacal militarism has finally found its spokesperson in the form of Susumu Inamine, the newly-elected mayor of Nago, Okinawa, who plans to revoke the 2006 US-Japan agreement that would move the majority of US troops (some 25,000+) currently based in Futenma, Okinawa to his hometown. Whose population is around 60,000. As if the prospective dash of cosmopolitanism wasn’t alluring enough, Nago is also turning down the opportunity to have a US helicopter crash land on its university campus, or servicemen rape its schoolgirls – once in 1995 and again in 2008. The move is a major spanner in the works for the US, who only want to leapfrog onto the undoubtedly far more pliant island of Guam by 2014 anyway. Oh wait, the locals are against a base there too. Don’t they know anything about national security?
The other glimmer of hope comes from the very man who once symbolized hope to millions, el presidente Obama. Speaking out against the indefensibly bad move from the Supreme Court last week to open the sluice gate on corporate contributions to the US electoral process, Barack raged: “[this] opens the floodgates for an unlimited amount of special interest money in our democracy…This ruling strikes at our democracy itself”. Let’s hope no one reminds him that he has half of Wall Street kicking around in his cabinet. For an educational (and infuriating) way to waste away an afternoon, check out opensecrets.org and trace the flow of green to the white house. It’s not often that I (or anyone) looks to the UK as the paradigm of political process, but at least we have caps on campaign spending.
And now, the bad news. Apparently there aren’t enough accountants in Iraq, and the US-backed reconstruction effort, spearheaded by US firm Dyncorps, is hemorrhaging cash to the tune of $2.5bn lost expenses in training the iraqi police force. Once the moneymen get there, someone point them towards Afghanistan, where -yep, you guessed it- Dyncorps is also in charge of getting things up and running.
Coming soon: tomorrow’s inauguration in Honduras of conservative, coup-supporting President Porfirio Lobo, who takes office after the bloodiest months in his country’s recent history. Fear not, the last installment of the Honduran Coup: the graphic history is on my drawing board as I type. And for that Friday feeling, be sure to check out the sweat patches on Tony ‘Teflon’ Blair as the non-stick ex-PM tells us all how he and Dubya saved us from Saddam at the Iraq Inquiry this Friday.
PS Feel free to share/digg/tweet etc this and any comic from www.archcomix.com, there’s more than enough bile to go around.
Brace yourselves, this is going to be a long one to reflect what an ugly week it’s been in US-related politics. First up, here’s the latest part of the School of the Americas piece – skip back 3 steps to get to the beginning and find out more about SOA/WHINSEC and their illustrious graduates’ violent pasts.
As the estimated number of dead in Haiti rises past the 200,000 mark, several news reports (Democracy Now!, The Guardian and Al Jazeera for starters) are describing the US’s apparent takeover of the main airport at Port-au-Prince. Convoys carrying aid, medical supplies and water are being re-directed to make way for a worrying number of US troops, who are being deployed ‘to ensure security’. Yes Magazine had a great quote from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who, after declaring her expectation that the Haitian government would pass an emergency decree – including things like the right to impose curfews – said, “The decree would give the government an enormous amount of authority, which in practice they would delegate to us”. Of course they would.
Naomi Klein leads the charge for transparency to prevent Haiti from succumbing to the free market agenda that New Orleans did in the aftermath of Katrina. Here’s a checklist of suggested actions sent by Rep. Paul Teller on September 13, 2005 – let’s hope they don’t start happening in Port-au-Prince. One other chilling similarity with Katrina is the already conspicuous presence of Blackwater-esque private mercenary forces, operating under the philanthropically-tinged moniker International Peace Operations Association. For an altogether more upfront description of their services in Haiti, checkout this webpage hosted by a similar private outfit called All Pro Legal Investigations – under the ‘Personal Protection’ header they’ll even deal with ‘worker unrest’ and ‘high-threat terminations’. What more could an International Peacekeeping force want? Jeremy Scahill has the whole scoop over at the Nation.
The bad news then came home, not only with the loss of the Massachusetts Senate seat for the Democrats, but also yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling that curbing corporate donations to electoral campaigns is unconstitutional. Why? Because it infringes on the said corporations’ first amendment rights to free speech. I’m sure that’s exactly what Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he said, “the end of democracy will occur when government falls into the hands of the lending institutions and moneyed incorporations.” See corporate watch for more info.
Lastly, one piece of good news to try and even up the balance. The online human rights and social justice magazine Independent World Report will publish my 4-page piece on Diego Garcia in their next issue.
Here’s the rest of the first page of the School of the Americas comic, which will be featured as the centrefold spread in the next issue of Presente! As the death toll continues to rise in Haiti, check out this episode of Democracy Now! below on how the crippled country and its hamstrung government is coping with the biggest natural disaster in two centuries.
