Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Nixon - Kissinger Cover-Up of American POWs in Vietnam?
These facts are known.
In the Paris Peace Accords ending the U.S. War against Vietnam, the U.S. promised reparations to Vietnam. Vietnam promised assistance in determining the fate of all American MIAs.
There was a separate signed agreement by Nixon, and negotiations in Hanoi with Kissinger, that the American reparations would be $4.75 billion dollars over five years.
On April 1, 1973 less than 600 American POWs returned to the United States released by North Vietnam.
The United States never paid the reparations agreed to.
Since 1973 North Vietnam has given limited support to determining the fate of MIA's, pointing to the letter signed by Nixon promising $4.75 billion dollars.
There have been persistent reports of more POWs in Vietnam and Laos never returned to the United States.
Watergate occurred and Nixon resigned in 1974. In 1975 South Vietnam was conquered and reunited with North Vietnam.
Now to the recent allegations in An Enormous Crime.
North Vietnam had received advice from Fidel Castro in Cuba who had received ransom money for the Bay of Pigs prisoners. The $4.75 billion dollars was supposed to be the ransom for the American POWs in Vietnam. North Vietnam released around half the POWs and was to release the rest upon the payment of the money. Nixon was fighting for his political life as the POWs were being released and felt he could not get money from Congress. Nixon and Kissinger just declared that was all the prisoners, the war was over. The official cover-up begins.
Vietnam, uncertain how to respond, simply told each visiting delegation from the United States and made repeated contacts through third parties that it had more information on MIAs in return for the agreed to $4.75 billion dollars. The United States never responded to these offers and Cheney offered an explanation years later - if it was ever believed that the United States government left men behind after a war it would destroy the U.S. military, break the bond of trust between soldiers and their government.
The accusation in the book is that Nixon, Kissinger, Ford, Cheney and a long series of high-level Washington officials have known about hundreds of American POWs held in Vietnam and as a matter of policy have repeatedly destroyed the evidence to keep this from coming out.
Rep. Bill Hendon and MIA activist Elizabeth Stewart have lots of documents and some other information including satellite photos to make their case.
Without my having read the book, it suffers from one major flaw. If Vietnam had hundreds of Americans it had not turned over it is totally illogical and unbelievable they would not have used them to put more public pressure on the United States to honor its agreement to provide billions of dollars in aid as Nixon had agreed to. While frightened of United State viciousness and military might and Nixon at the time, in the decades since it has had numerous opportunities to do so.
There is a difference between Vietnam claiming it has more information on MIAs and it holding hundreds of POWs, this is often conflated in the arguments by the authors.
There is another minor flaw, Republicans Hendon and Stewert are counting on the "honorable" Dubya to do the right thing and send a high level team or person to Vietnam to make the deal. If their story is true, the allegations of Republican dishonor and deceit would be very bad for the GOP and they would try to avoid this. Democratic officials have plausible deniability as to the extent of their knowledge. If high-level Democrats have known about this it makes for even fewer people wanting for this to come out. Besides, after reading two biographies and being otherwise well informed on the Bush's I have never known the person occupying the Oval Office now to ever have done an honorable thing if a dishonorable choice was available.
I have no doubt that a few American POWs could be in Southeast Asia. Some could be held by Laotian groups. Perhaps a few held by Viet Cong in jungles and tunnels that were remote from the North Vietnamese when the deal was arranged. Perhaps some POWs brainwashed or otherwise who had provided aid to the Vietnamese and might feel ashamed or frightened to return to the United States. North Korea had perfected techniques in the Korean war that had spread rapidly to other communist countries and later to the Western secret services like the CIA who admired their effectiveness.
I have no doubt Nixon and other officials like Cheney are dishonorable enough to do this but the principle claim of hundreds of American POWs still in Vietnam is unbelievable. It is a sad fact that had the reparations been paid we would know more about the MIAs and this leverage may have delayed the eventual takeover of South Vietnam by the North, one of the Nixon-Kissinger reasons for the five-year reparations deal.
This was discussed on Coast to Coast AM last night.
Valeries Plame was covert when outed
In 2004, President Bush promised to fire anyone in his Administration that was involved in the leak. Karl Rove was one of the two sources columnist Robert Novak used when he revealed Plame's identity. Bush has yet to follow through and fire Rove. Cheney and Novak have also yet to be charged with treason for outing a covert CIA agent who had taken numerous covert trips abroad on missions in the five years preceeding her outing. Her latest missions were believed to be preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons grade material.
Right wing media and blog sites have never apologized for supporting her outers and that continues to this day. They would have to admit they were repeatedly and consistently wrong on yet another issue and have supported traitors. Several guests, primarily Fred Rustmann and Reuel Marc Gerecht and Victoria Toensing but also others, on Fox News had also repeatedly told false stories about her status when they were in no position to know. Cokie Roberts on more mainstream shows also repeated that she was not covert but later backtracked.
Get the real story, avoid Fox News and other right wing propaganda outfits without doing independent fact checking. Studies have shown that Fox News viewers are the most ignorant and misinformed on basic top news stories.
Orwell rolls in his grave
Britain is in the process of upgrading its widespread public surveillance cameras to nannycams with loudspeakers so citizens can be scolded if they do something wrong while being monitored. See Niven's Copseyes in Anarchy Parks for a near prediction of this in 1972.
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
‘Put Everything’ Behind Escalation So We Can Bomb Iran and Syria"
Wrong repeatedly and consistently for almost five years, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol and fellow neoconservative Frederick Kagan advocate more war, more war, more war. Frederick Kagan, despite never serving in the military but being a military historian, is believed to be the major developer of Bush's current escalation policy in Iraq.
"The Myth of the Rational Voter"
The New York Times has a short article on the new book by a libertarian economist looking at democracy.
Here was my earlier link from In These Times.
William agrees with my earlier post here - what incentive do experts, and economists, have to be right?
Bryan Caplan seems to have one idea "bad policy is good politics because it's popular" and analyzes everything from US elections to the rise of Hugo Chavez with it. He pre-assumes his Libertarian economic policies are correct. That is debatable.
A supporter once called out, “Governor Stevenson, all thinking people are for you!” And Adlai Stevenson answered, “That’s not enough. I need a majority.”
Amazon $29.95, not cheap.
Is this book making a bit of a splash because it advocates the wisdom of the elite class - the neo-Straussian fallacy?
Joss Whedon on the Entertainment Value of Watching a Woman get Beaten to Death
Last month seventeen year old Dua Khalil was pulled into a crowd of young men, some of them (the instigators) family, who then kicked and stoned her to death. This is an example of the breath-taking oxymoron “honor killing”, in which a family member (almost always female) is murdered for some religious or ethical transgression. Dua Khalil, who was of the Yazidi faith, had been seen in the company of a Sunni Muslim, and possibly suspected of having married him or converted. That she was torturously murdered for this is not, in fact, a particularly uncommon story. But now you can watch the action up close on CNN. Because as the girl was on the ground trying to get up, her face nothing but red, the few in the group of more than twenty men who were not busy kicking her and hurling stones at her were filming the event with their camera-phones.
There were security officers standing outside the area doing nothing, but the footage of the murder was taken – by more than one phone – from the front row. Which means whoever shot it did so not to record the horror of the event, but to commemorate it. To share it. Because it was cool.
Women’s inferiority – in fact, their malevolence -- is as ingrained in American popular culture as it is anywhere they’re sporting burkhas. I find it in movies, I hear it in the jokes of colleagues, I see it plastered on billboards, and not just the ones for horror movies. Women are weak. Women are manipulative. Women are somehow morally unfinished. (Objectification: another tangential rant avoided.) And the logical extension of this line of thinking is that women are, at the very least, expendable.
I try to think how we got here. The theory I developed in college (shared by many I’m sure) is one I have yet to beat: Womb Envy. Biology: women are generally smaller and weaker than men. But they’re also much tougher. Put simply, men are strong enough to overpower a woman and propagate. Women are tough enough to have and nurture children, with or without the aid of a man. Oh, and they’ve also got the equipment to do that, to be part of the life cycle, to create and bond in a way no man ever really will. Somewhere a long time ago a bunch of men got together and said, “If all we do is hunt and gather, let’s make hunting and gathering the awesomest achievement, and let’s make childbirth kinda weak and shameful.” It’s a rather silly simplification, but I believe on a mass, unconscious level, it’s entirely true. How else to explain the fact that cultures who would die to eradicate each other have always agreed on one issue? That every popular religion puts restrictions on women’s behavior that are practically untenable? That the act of being a free, attractive, self-assertive woman is punishable by torture and death?
Fitzgerald: Libby Protected Cheney
Libby lies prevented investigation into CIA agent's outing from going further.
The Texas Speaker's race starts now
Limping out of town after surviving House revolts, Craddick didn't accomplish much for the GOP or Gov. Perry who will likely call a special session soon. Teachers got a 1% pay raise and couples will pay twice as much for a marriage license unless they take a premarital training class. As John says: Governor Perry got a $32,000 pay increase, the Attorney General got a $25,000 increase, and the Director of the Teachers Retirement System got a $151,000 increase.
More on the final days.
Media Matters - Left Behind: The Skewed Representation of Religion in Major News Media
Does it surprised anyone that although the Religious Right and the Religious Left are almost exactly the same size the so-called-liberal-media reports the views of conservative religious leaders 2.7 to 3.8 times as often as moderate and liberal religious leaders? Discussion and chart.
You owe $516,348 to the Feds
Bush's legacy, an incredibly expanding deficit.
The federal government recorded a $1.3 trillion loss last year — far more than the official $248 billion deficit — when corporate-style accounting standards are used, a USA TODAY analysis shows.
The loss reflects a continued deterioration in the finances of Social Security and government retirement programs for civil servants and military personnel. The loss — equal to $11,434 per household — is more than Americans paid in income taxes in 2006.
Unfunded promises made for Medicare, Social Security and federal retirement programs account for 85% of taxpayer liabilities. State and local government retirement plans account for much of the rest.
This hidden debt is the amount taxpayers would have to pay immediately to cover government's financial obligations. Like a mortgage, it will cost more to repay the debt over time. Every U.S. household would have to pay about $31,000 a year to do so in 75 years.
Tags: national debt
Contrary to rumors, U.S. Rep. Lampson says he's not running for U.S. Senate
U.S. Rep. Nick Lampson, D-Stafford, won't run next year for the U.S. Senate seat held by Republican John Cornyn of Texas, but San Antonio lawyer Mikal Watts is poised to launch an exploratory committee.
Other Democrats thought to be looking at the race include former state Comptroller John Sharp and state Rep. Rick Noriega of Houston.
I Finally Updated The Blogroll
There is a high profile Texas political blogger I debated including. I think he is a has-been who is usually wrong even if he has many high level contacts and I believe he displays frequent lapses in judgement. His not posting of critical comments that disagree with him, including mine, tipped the decision - Burka at Texas Monthly is out. Like I am sure he cares.
I am now considering what Texas right bloggers and so-called-liberal-media I might link to. I will probably just keep them on my browser bookmarks and not add them here.
I have left on Memeorandum which is a right and left political blog feed with a slight right tilt. I have added Taegan Goddard's Political Wire which may have a slight left tilt but includes both left and right blog feeds. Glenn Greenwald, and others, is available through the Salon.org opinions link. I have also added the Radical Middle although many of the blogs linked there are not in the middle, Ann Althouse?, Dean's World??, but dissatisfied or even satisfied Republicans and conservatives.
I know I've forgotten some - comment or email me with suggestions or corrections. BTW - Greenwald has another great moment in right-wing-nut fake news, a fake memo that wasn't.
Just contemplate the deep shame and sense of remorse that a normal, healthy person would feel after spewing that kind of venom at people, including a former Green Beret, who were completely right. But they don't. Like the brilliant pundits whose every proclamation about the Iraq war turned out to be false yet who still parade around as proud and pompous experts, right-wing bloggers continuously hurl accusations like this and then, when proven wrong, simply move on to the next accusatory orgy without any real acknowledgment of wrongdoing or apology.Too bad Greenwald wasn't around when they smeared Dan Rather with fake document analysis, some good analysis here - (PDF). Just another shameful example of so-called-liberal-media journalism.
Bookstore owner burns books in protest
Hardly anyone is reading so a large used bookstore owner is burning his thousands of books in protest. See Fahrenheit 451 about another society that gave up on reading in favor of TV. Link from David.
American Wars Expanded Democracy
I have long held that the Great Depression and World War 2 expanded civil rights and democracy in the United States as nearly everyone felt a sense of community and had an appreciation for the role of government and encouraged the democratic participation of all. The link above to cannonfire reminds us that the American Civil War and the Revolutionary War also expanded democracy by expanding the voting franchise of soldiers with a profound influence.
Make it easier for soldiers to vote.
Boing Boing: Venezuelan media crackdown: the other POV
I don't have much to add to this but before lying propagandists who advocate the violent overthrow of government are made into martyrs of free speech people should check out The Revolution Will Not Be Televised - view for free here. Instead of closing the station down should management and on-air broadcasters have been put on trial for treason instead?
The Houston Chronicle went with an AP story, relatively balanced for them.
Monday, May 28, 2007
Another GOP front group for Voter-ID fraud disappears
Are RNC and GOP high-level insiders getting out fast before the Department of Justice stories leads to their voter ID fraud front groups?
Along with the American Center for Voting Rights I previously reported on, the Free Enterprise Coalition entirely funded by GOP operatives and entirely concerned with supposed voter ID fraud cases has shut down and tried to disappear. The Free Enterprise Coalition provided millions in funding for losing voter ID fraud cases. Like the ACVR it was entirely funded and supported by donors and officials of the Republican Party.
Is this connected to the real 2004 vote fraud cases in Ohio with RNC computers being used to count the Ohio vote on software written by gushing Bush admirers?
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