Published on Tuesday, May 11, 2010 by TomDispatch.com
Afghan Escalation Funding: More War, Fewer Jobs, Poor Excuses
Isn't it time to call what Congress will soon vote on by its right name: war escalation funding?
Early in 2009, President Barack Obama escalated [1] the war in
So it seemed like progress for our representative government when, last fall, the media began to engage in a debate over whether further escalation in
In September, for instance, 57 members of Congress sent [5] a letter to the president opposing an escalation of the war. In October, Congresswoman Barbara Lee introduced a bill to prohibit the funding of any further escalation. In December, various groups of Congress members sent letters [5] to the president and to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi opposing an escalation and asking for a chance to vote on it. Even as Congress voted overwhelmingly [6] for a massive war and military budget in December, some representatives did speak out against further escalation and the funding needed for it.
While all sides in this debate agreed that such escalation funding would need to be voted on sometime in the first half of 2010, everyone knew [6] something else as well: that the President would go ahead and escalate in Afghanistan even without funding in place -- the money all being borrowed anyway -- and that, once many or all of the new troops were there, he would get less resistance from Congress which would be voting on something that had already happened.
The corporate media went along with this bait-and-switch strategy, polling and reporting on the escalation debate in Washington until the president fell in line behind his generals (give or take 10,000 or so extra troops). The coming vote was then relabeled as a simple matter of "war funding." This was convenient, since Americans are far more likely to oppose escalating already unpopular wars than just keeping them going -- and would be likely to oppose such funding even more strongly if the financial tradeoffs involved were made clear. However, a new poll shows [7] a majority of Americans do not believe that this war is worth fighting at all.
Nonetheless, as in a tale foretold, Congress is expected to vote later this month on $33 billion in further "war funding" to pay for sending 30,000 troops (plus "support" troops, etc.) to Afghanistan -- most of whom are already there or soon will be. In addition, an extra $2 billion is being requested for aid and "civilian" operations in
This upcoming vote, of course, provides the opportunity that our representatives were asking for half a year ago. They can now vote the president's escalation up or down in the only way that could possibly be enforced, by voting its funding up or down. Blocking the funding in the House of Representatives would mean turning those troops around and bringing them back home -- and unlike the procedure for passing a bill, there would be no need for any action by the Senate or the president.
What Does $33 Billion Look Like?
So, how much money are we talking about exactly? Well not enough, evidently, for the teabagging enemies of reckless government spending to take notice. Clearly not enough for the labor movement or any other advocates of spending on jobs or healthcare or education or green energy to disturb their slumbers. God forbid! Yet it's still a sizeable number by a certain reckoning.
After all, 33 billion miles could take you to the sun 226 times. And $33 billion could radically alter any non-military program in existence. There's a bill in the Senate, for instance, that would prevent schools from laying off teachers in all 50 states for a mere $23 billion. Another $9.6 billion would quadruple the Department of Energy's budget for renewable energy. Now, what to do with that extra $0.4 billion?
And remember what this $33 billion actually involves: adding more troops, support troops, and private contractors, whose work, in turn, will mean ongoing higher costs to maintain the Afghan occupation, construct new bases [8] there, fuel the machines of war, and provide the weaponry. Keep in mind as well that various other costs associated with the president's most recent "surge" are hidden in the budgets of the CIA, the Department of State, and other parts of the government. Looking just at the military, however, this is $33 billion to be added to an unfathomable pile of waste. According to the Congressional Budget Office, Congress has already approved $345 billion [9] for war in
According to the National Priorities Project, for that same money we could have renewable energy [10] in 1,083,271,391 homes for a year (or every home in the country for more than 10 years), or pay 17,188,969 elementary school teachers for a year. There may be 2.6 million elementary and middle school teachers in our country now. Assuming we could use 3 million teachers, we could hire them all for five years and employ that extra $13 billion or so to give them bonuses. "Honor our brave teachers" anyone?
Even these calculations, however, are misleading. As economists Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz demonstrated in The Three Trillion Dollar War [11], their book on the cost of the Iraq war alone, adding in debt payments on moneys borrowed to fight that war, long-term care for veterans wounded in it, the war's impact on energy prices, and other macroeconomic impacts, the current tax bill for the Iraq War must be at least tripled and probably quadrupled or more to arrive at its real long-term cost. (Similarly, the cost in lives must be multiplied by all those lives that could have been saved through other, better uses of the same funding.) The same obviously applies to the Afghan War.
The fact is that military spending is destroying the
*Investing public dollars in the military produces fewer jobs than cutting taxes.
*Cutting taxes produces fewer jobs than investing public dollars in any of these areas: healthcare, education, mass transit, or construction for home weatherization and infrastructural repair.
*Investing public dollars in mass transit or education produces more than twice as many jobs as investing in the military.
*Investing public dollars in education produces better paying jobs than investing in the military or cutting taxes.
*Investing public dollars in any of these areas: healthcare, education, mass transit, construction for home weatherization and infrastructural repair has a larger direct and indirect economic impact than investing in the military or cutting taxes.
[13]Too broad a view? Then consider just the present proposed $33 billion escalation funding for the Afghan War. For that sum, we could have 20 green energy jobs paying $50,000 per year here in the United States for every soldier sent to Afghanistan; a job, that is, for each of those former soldiers and 19 other Americans. We're spending on average $400 per gallon [14] to transport gas over extended and difficult supply lines into
What Excuses Are They Using?
A strong case [16] can be made that the war in
Many members of Congress will still tell you that our goal in
I recently asked Congressman Jerrold Nadler, for example, if he would vote no on that funding, and he replied that he absolutely would -- unless the Democratic leadership put something so good into the bill that he wouldn't want to vote against it. In just this way, aid for Hurricane Katrina victims, the extension of unemployment insurance, and all sorts of other goodies have been added to war and escalation funding bills over the years.
Nadler claimed that the Haiti aid already in the bill wouldn't win his vote, but something else might. In other words, if there were any chance of the bill being in trouble, Nadler's vote could essentially be bought simply by adding some goody he likes. Never mind whether or not it outweighed $33 billion worth of damage; never mind if the benefit, whatever it might be, could pass separately. The point is that Nadler is not really committed to ending the war or even blocking its escalation in the way he would be if he committed himself now to a no vote and lobbied his colleagues to join him. Instead, he's ready to pose as a war opponent only as long as his stance proves no threat to the war. And in this, he's typical.
Congressman Bill Delahunt gave me a unique excuse [22] for not committing in advance to a no vote on the funding. He craved the attention, he said, that comes from not announcing how you will vote -- as if such attention matters more than the lives he might fund the taking of. Radio host Nicole Sandler took up my question and asked [23] Congressman Kendrick Meek what he was planning to do. He responded by claiming that he hadn't yet been briefed about the war and so couldn't decide.
Congressman Donald Payne gave me an excuse [24] (now common among Democrats who evidently haven't read the Constitution in a while) guaranteed to lead to a yes vote: he must support his president and so plans to vote for what the President tells him to.
Some excuses can only be anticipated at this point. Many congress members will, for instance, undoubtedly settle for voting for [25] a relatively meaningless non-binding exit-timetable amendment to the bill, or at least co-sponsor a bill identical to that amendment, and some will likely use that as reasonable cover for casting their votes to fund the escalation.
Antiwar advocates for peace and justice are not taking [26] all of this lying down. Cities are passing resolutions opposing any more war funding. People are holding vigils and sit-ins at local congressional offices -- more than 100 of which are planned for May 19th [27]. Congressional phones are ringing, newspaper editors are receiving letters, and an online whip list [26] -- a list of where every House member stands -- is being constantly updated. In the end, though, the fundamental question is how many people will outgrow their partisan loyalties, of either variety, and tell their representative that they will vote for someone else if he or she votes for more war.
An extreme step? Well, what do you call wasting $33 billion on a hopeless, immoral, illegal war that a majority of Americans oppose, and denying those same dollars to job creation or any other decent purpose?
© 2010 David Swanson
David Swanson is the author of Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union [13] and blogs at his website, War Is a Crime [28]. To catch Timothy MacBain's TomCast audio interview with Swanson on the media, Congress, and the administration's latest request for escalation funding, click here [29] or, to download to your ipod, here [30].
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/05/11-8
Published on Tuesday, May 11, 2010 by BBC News
Red Cross Confirms 'Second Jail' at
by Hilary Andersson
The
Nine former prisoners have told the BBC that they were held in a separate building, and subjected to abuse.
The
However, it has said it will look into the abuse allegations made to the BBC.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said that since August 2009 US authorities have been notifying it of names of detained people in a separate structure at Bagram.
"The ICRC is being notified by the
"This has been routine practice since August 2009 and is a development welcomed by the ICRC."
The spokesman was responding to a question from the BBC about the existence of the facility, referred to by many former prisoners as the Tor Jail, which translates as "black jail".
"We are being notified about persons at the Bagram Theatre Internment Facility [now Detention Facility in Parwan] since Feb 2008," the ICRC spokesman added.
In recent weeks the BBC has logged the testimonies of nine prisoners who say they had been held in the so-called "Tor Jail".
They told consistent stories of being held in isolation in cold cells where a light is on all day and night.
The men said they had been deprived of sleep by US military personnel there.
In response to these allegations, Vice Adm Robert Harward, in charge of US detentions in
He told the BBC that the Parwan Detention Facility was the only
BBC © MMX
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/05/11-2
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"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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