Soldier receives call back papers from the Army

I‘m grateful that I was never confronted with this situation, even though days after 9/11 I contemplated reenlisting. In time, and with sober head, I saw things more clearly and never placed the call to a recruiter. If I had made that call, however, I might now be in the horrible position that this soldier is now in:

When I voluntarily enlisted in the Army, I remember asking my recruiter about the fine print on the contract about being called back up to active duty once my enlistment was completed. He assured me not to worry, that every contract said that and it would only happen if “World War III” broke out.

That was a little over five years ago. After serving in Iraq, I elected to use my GI Bill to enroll in a photography course at San Francisco City College. I felt good, and I had a feeling that the days to come were all going to be good as well.

On way out of my building two weeks ago, I checked my mailbox and found a letter from the Department of the Army with “Important Document” printed in all caps on the middle. I immediately felt sick, so I went back to my room, locked the door, grabbed a beer from the fridge and stared out my window for a while. People outside were all wearing sunglasses and walking about enjoying the sun. I took a picture.

And like this soldier, I agree, reinstating the draft may be the only way to bring the Iraq war to an end:

Many people believe that the draft ended the Vietnam War. I’m convinced that reinstating the draft would definitely end this war. Rich, connected people will always find a way to evade mandatory service, but what about the rest of America? The middle class - people with good jobs and nice lives - would perhaps riot if the government even suggested that it expected from them what the Army expects from veterans.

What Did Bush Do to Prevent 9/11?

Keith Olbermann drives another hole through Bush’s 9/11 armor of infallibility, and answers the question, Just what did the Bush administration do to prevent 9/11 and to respond to the bombing of the Cole?

Right Wingers and ABC

And still the right-wing sympathizers think that there’s such a monster as the so-called liberal media:

“Path to 9/11″ Maker Has Evangelical Ties
By Justin Rood - September 8, 2006, 2:39 PM

The director of ABC’s controversial “Path to 9/11″ docudrama has ties to an evangelical Christian group whose goals include “transform[ing] Hollywood from the inside out.”

Update: This story just gets murkier and murkier… just who is behind this fake "docudrama"? Max Blumenthal, over at HuffingtonPost.com, has some answers:

“The Path to 9/11″ is produced and promoted by a well-honed propaganda operation consisting of a network of little-known right-wingers working from within Hollywood to counter its supposedly liberal bias. This is the network within the ABC network. Its godfather is far right activist David Horowitz, who has worked for more than a decade to establish a right-wing presence in Hollywood and to discredit mainstream film and TV production. On this project, he is working with a secretive evangelical religious right group founded by The Path to 9/11’s director David Cunningham that proclaims its goal to “transform Hollywood” in line with its messianic vision.

Before The Path to 9/11 entered the production stage, Disney/ABC contracted David Cunningham as the film’s director. Cunningham is no ordinary Hollywood journeyman. He is in fact the son of Loren Cunningham, founder of the right-wing evangelical group Youth With A Mission (YWAM). The young Cunningham helped found an auxiliary of his father’s group called The Film Institute (TFI), which, according to its mission statement, is “dedicated to a Godly transformation and revolution TO and THROUGH the Film and Televisionindustry.” As part of TFI’s long-term strategy, Cunningham helped place interns from Youth With A Mission’s in film industry jobs “so that they can begin to impact and transform Hollywood from the inside out,” according to a YWAM report.

This American Life: Habeas Schmaebeas

Just finished listening to a very moving radio piece from This American Life — an amazing public radio show that every week brings the sort of stories to its audience that informs, moves and presents the world as if one were seeing it for the first time. This week This American Life brought us the stories of some Guantanamo Prison detainees. These are men so dangerous, so monstrous that the Bush Administration had to build a prison camp 90 miles outside of the US, so that these men, err, terrorists, could not harm American citizens… well, at least that’s what Administration tells us.

Of course, given all that we’ve learned about this incompetent Republican Administration over the past five years, if one still believes what comes out of their press office, then one might as well still believe in the tooth fairy, that clouds are made of cotton and that the moon is composed of cheese — only children are excused for believing in such fantasies. As this week’s This American Life episode shows us, much — if not all — that the Bush Administration has told us of the men imprisoned at Guantanamo are plain lies. For instance, according to stats mentioned in the program, only 5% of the Guantanamo detainees were processed by US forces in the field of battle; instead, the vast majority of the prisoners were handed over by "bounty hunters" in Afghanistan and elsewhere, looking to cash in on the reported $5,000 to $10,000 per head that the US military was offering locals in exchange for Al Queda or Taliban fighters. Now, one can easily imagine that, in a lawless country, like Afghanistan was right after the US invasion, that some opportunistic men would take advantage of such a situation and collect what must be a tidy sum for that part of the world — and keep in mind how much more difficult it all must have been to sort things out in the middle of an armed conflict, with language barriers and all, where virtually anybody could be the enemy… well, these are the conditions that ensnared many unwitting and innocent young men, some of which are now in Guantanamo, where they can do no harm to American citizens — and, too, where the Bush Administration does not have to abide by habeas corpus.

The radio episode also asks some more substantive questions about our legal system and about whether the current Administration has violated the long held principled of habeas corpus — a principle that’s at the very heart of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence and, too, a principle that was at the center of our American Revolution. Now, it is unmistakably clear to me that, yes, the Bush Administration has lied to us about virtually everything that’s happened since 9/11, just as it is unmistakably clear to me that this Republican president has violated and soiled the founding principles of the American Revolution; yet, in spite of it all, the most harden of his supporters, the self-deluded morons that consider themselves uber-patriots, are complicit with the Bush Administration in betraying the spirit and legacy of our nation’s war for independence.

Here’s a synopsis of this week’s This American Life episode:

The right of habeas corpus has been a part of this country’s legal tradition longer than we’ve actually been a country. It means the government has to explain why it’s holding a person in custody. But now, the war on terror has nixed many of the rules we used to think of as fundamental. At Guantanamo Bay, our government initially claimed that the prisoners should not be covered by habeas – or even by the Geneva Conventions – because they’re the most fearsome terrorist enemies we have. But is that true? Is it a camp full of terrorists, or a camp full of our mistakes?

And you can hear this week’s episode here — it’s a great show, as always.

We Were Attacked by Al Queda

On September 11, 2001, we were attacked by Osama Bin Ladin and his terrorist network: Al Queda. The Bush administration took their eyes off the ball, plunged us into a war of choice in Iraq, all the while Osama Bin Ladin remains at large. As for Al Queda, the terrorist organization now is a multi-headed beast with outcrops in many more countries than it had in 2001 and all Mr. Bush can now say about Osama Bin Ladin is:

“I don’t know where he is. You know, I just don’t spend that much time on him… I truly am not that concerned about him.” [President Bush, Press Conference, 3/13/02]

Bush’s supporters can rationalize things all they want and split hairs into a million pieces, but none of their cognitive dissonance will change facts on the ground, and every day that passes the truth becomes harder and harder to spin.

http://www.johnkerry.com/pressroom/speeches/spc_2004_0924.html