- ‘Nemesis is the last volume of an inadvertent trilogy that deals with the way arrogant and misguided American policies have headed us for a series of catastrophes comparable and defeat in Vietnam or even to the sort of extinction that befell our former fellow ‘superpower,’ the Soviet Union. Such a fate is probably by now unavoidable; it is certainly too late for mere scattered reforms of our government or bloated military to make much difference.’ (1)
- ‘Osama bin Laden made clear why he attacked us. In a videotaped statement broadcast by Al Jazeera on October 7, 2001 , a few weeks after the attacks, he gave three reasons for his enmity against the United States
- ‘Osama bin Laden made clear why he attacked us. In a videotaped statement broadcast by Al Jazeera on
- ‘Because Americans generally failed to consider seriously why we had been attacked on 9/11, the Bush Administration was able to respond in ways that made the situation far worse.’ (4)
- ‘It is a sad fact that theUnited States
- ‘We now station over half a millionUS
- ‘It is a sad fact that the
- ‘We now station over half a million
- ‘Americans cannot truly appreciate the impact of our bases elsewhere because there are no foreign military bases within the United States
- ‘Service in our armed forces is no longer a short-term obligation of citizenship, as it was back in 1953 when I served in the navy. Since 1973, it has been a career choice, one often made by citizens trying to escape from the poverty and racism that afflict our society. That is why African-Americans are twice as well represented in the army as they are in our population, even though the numbers have been falling as the war in Iraq America
- ‘When you include its array of privately outsourced services, our professional, permanent military currently costs around three-quarters of a trillion dollars a year. This amount includes the annual Defense Department appropriation for weapons and salaries of more than $425 billion (the president’s request for fiscal year 2007 was $439.3 billion), plus another $120 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, $16.4 billion for nuclear weapons and the Department of Energy’s weapons laboratories, $12.2 billion in the Military Construction Appropriations Bill, and well over $100 billion in pensions, hospital costs, and disability payments for our veterans, many of whom have been severely wounded. But we are not actually paying for these expenses. Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian investors are. We are putting them on the tab and so running the largest governmental as well as trade deficits in modern economic history. Sooner or later, our militarism will threaten the nation with bankruptcy.’ (7-8)
- ‘Article 6 of the US Constitution says, in part, ‘all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land.’ ’ (8)
- ‘Like the Chinese, Ottoman, Hapsburg, imperial German, Nazi, imperial Japanese, British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and Soviet empires in the last century, we are approaching the edge of a huge waterfall and are about to plunge over it.’ (14)
- ‘The intent of the founders was to prevent a recurrence of the tyranny they had endured underBritain
- ‘The intent of the founders was to prevent a recurrence of the tyranny they had endured under
- ‘Since 1947, while we have used our military power for political and military gain in a long list of countries, in no instance has democratic government come about as a direct result.’ (19)
- ‘In some important cases, on the other hand, democracy has developed in opposition to our interference – for example, after the collapse of the regime of the CIA-installed Greek colonels in 1974; after the demise of the US-supported fascist dictatorships in Portugal in 1974 and Spain in 1975; after the overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines in 1986; after the ouster of General Chun Doo-Hwan in South Korea in 1987…’ (19)
- ‘To lack a personal conscience means ‘never to start the soundless solitary dialogue we call thinking.’ ’ Hannah Arendt (22)
- ‘The Imperial Japanese Army contrived one of the worst euphemisms ever used to mask criminal acts – namely, ‘comfort women’ to refer to the women and girls abducted in occupied countries and sent to the front lines to serve as prostitutes for Japanese officers and soldiers. This phrase will probably haunt Japan United States
- ‘The military also certainly hoped that its adoption of such a neutral, inoffensive expression for ones that might offend of suggest unpleasantness would strengthen the resolve of its soldiers and perhaps prevent them from being held accountable for war crimes. ‘Collateral damage’ is nowhere recognized, or even mentioned, in humanitarian international law.’ (25)
- ‘Among the items the United States stopped from entering Iraq in the winter of 2001 were dialysis, dental and firefighting equipment, water tankers, milk and yogurt production equipment, and printing machines for schools.’ (28)
- ‘The US
- ‘The ‘independent’ Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai has repeatedly asked the US military to obtain Afghan authorization before carrying out attacks, but American officials up to and including President Bush have refused all such requests.’ (32)
- ‘The American fantasy of a final battle, in Fallujah or elsewhere, or the capture of some terrorist mastermind, perpetuates a cycle of bloodletting that puts the world in peril.’ (33)
- ‘[On 9/11,] Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution. Bush nearly bit his head off. ‘No,’ the President yelled in the narrow conference room. ‘I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.’ ’ Richard Clarke (34)
- ‘[Extraordinary rendition] is a euphemism for abducting people anywhere on Earth, including inside the United States, and secretly flying them to countries whose police and intelligence personnel are more than happy to torture them for us or where the United States runs its own secret prisons for doing so. Such countries and territories reportedly have included Egypt Syria Saudi Arabia Jordan Uzbekistan Thailand Diego Garcia , Pakistan Afghanistan Iraq
- ‘The notion that the president has the constitutional power to permit torture is like saying he has the constitutional power to commit genocide….It’s just erroneous legal analysis.’ Harold Koh (39)
- ‘The notion that the president has the constitutional power to permit torture is like saying he has the constitutional power to commit genocide….It’s just erroneous legal analysis.’ Harold Koh (39)
- ‘Perhaps the most shortsighted aspect of this claim to absolute presidential power is that it leads unavoidability to the president’s liability under the concept of ‘command responsibility’ – the doctrine that a military commander is legally liable for all abuses and atrocities committed by his troops whether he knows about them or not. After World War II, the United States Philippines US Manila
- ‘Service in the armed forces of the United States
- ‘After September 11th, a left-wing accusation became a right-wing aspiration: conservatives increasingly began to espouse a world view that was unapologetically imperialist.’ Joshua Marshall (72)
- ‘Apologists for imperialism like Ferguson
- ‘A split between those who support imperialism and those who enforce it is characteristic of all imperialist republics. Both groups, however, normally share extensive rationales for their inherent superiority over ‘subject races’ and the reasons why they should dominate and impose their ‘civilization’ on others.’ (75)
- ‘Even defeat in war did not cause the Japanese to give up their legends of racial, economic, and cultural superiority. Although the Japanese after World War II ‘embraced defeat,’ in the historian John Dower’s memorable phrase, they never gave up their nationalist and racist convictions that in slaughtering over twenty million Chinese and enslaving the Koreans they were actually engaged in liberating East Asians from the grip of Western imperialism. All empires, it seems, require myths of divine right, racial preeminence, manifest destiny, or a ‘civilizing mission’ to cover their often barbarous behavior in other people’s countries. As Foner point out, sixteenth-century Spaniards claimed to be ‘freeing’ members of the Aztec, Mayan, and Incan civilizations from backwardness and superstition via Christian conversion, while Britons in the late nineteenth century liked to think that in massacring Africans they were actually helping to suppress the slave trade.’ (76)
- ‘The first recourse in justification has long been racism – or at least a sense of superiority – in all of its forms.’ (76)
- ‘Racist defenses of imperialism have often been linked to the argument that the imperialists have bestowed some unquestioned benefits, often economic, on their conquered peoples even as they pauperize or enslave them.’ (77)
- ‘John Locke came up with the brilliant idea that the land in North America British colonists were stealing from the indigenous people was actually terra nullius, or ‘nobody’s land.’ ’ (77)
- ‘In the early eighteenth century, India Britain
- ‘[ Britain
- ‘With rare exceptions, the countries that the various imperialisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries exploited and colonized remain poor, disease- and crime-ridden…’ (81)
- ‘The former US colony of the Philippines, a resource-rich country with a large Sino-Malay population, remains the poorest nation in east Asia, the world’s fastest-growing economic region.’ (81)
- ‘The idea that the British Empire conferred economic benefits on any groups other than British capitalists is pure ideology, as impervious to challenge by empirical data as former Soviet prime minister Leonid Brezhnev’s Marxism-Leninism or George Bush’s belief that free markets mean the same thing as freedom.’ (82)
- ‘The looms of India and China were defeated not so much by market competition as they were forcibly dismantled by war, invasion, opium, and a Lancashire-imposed system of one-way tariffs.’ Mike Davis (83)
- ‘The looms of India and China were defeated not so much by market competition as they were forcibly dismantled by war, invasion, opium, and a Lancashire-imposed system of one-way tariffs.’ Mike Davis (83)
- ‘When Mao Zedong introduced Soviet-style collective farms into China and did not get satisfactory results, he did not abandon them but turned instead to truly gigantic collectives called ‘communes.’ This Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s produced a famine that took some thirty million Chinese lives, a monument to communist extremism similar to the extremes of laissez-faire that the British dogmatically imposed on their conquered territories.’ (84)
- ‘ ‘The British entered into partnerships with their nationalists and extricated themselves from empire with grace and goodwill….The unwillingness of the British government after 1945 to be dragged into colonial wars is irrefutable, even if it is not easy to explain’ [PJ Marshall]. This idea, a staple of Anglophile romanticism, is simply untrue. When he was writing in 1996, Marshall Indochina . Although the British claimed victory over the insurgents, much like the French did in Algeria, the long and deadly conflict led to independence for British colonies and the emergence of the two successors states of Malaysia and Singapore.’ (85)
- ‘Since everything the CIA writes and does is secret, including its budget (regardless of article I, section 9, of the Constitution, which says ‘a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time’), accountability to the elected representatives of the people or even an accurate historical record of actions is today inconceivable.’ (91)
- ‘Whatever happens, the CIA will remain first and foremost the president’s private army, officially accountable to no other branch of the government.’ (92-93)
- ‘Since everything the CIA writes and does is secret, including its budget (regardless of article I, section 9, of the Constitution, which says ‘a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time’), accountability to the elected representatives of the people or even an accurate historical record of actions is today inconceivable.’ (91)
- ‘Whatever happens, the CIA will remain first and foremost the president’s private army, officially accountable to no other branch of the government.’ (92-93)
- ‘At least since 1953, when it secretly overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran
- ‘To further enhance secrecy and add to the confusion, the president and the CIA have increasingly turned to completely ‘off-the-books’ operations. The unsuccessful attempt to rig the Iraqi election of January 30, 2005, in favor of the White Houses’s preferred candidate, former CIA operative Iyad Allawi, by using ‘retired’ agents, funds not appropriated by Congress, and other means is but one contemporary example of this phenomenon.’ (95)
- ‘On August 6, 2001, in a blunt one-page analysis headlined, ‘Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US,’ the CIA presented its President’s Daily Brief to Bush at this Crawford, Texas, ranch. According to Steve Coll of the Washington Post, ‘The report included the possibility that bin Laden operatives would seek to hijack airplanes. The hijacking threat, mentioned twice, was one of several possibilities outlined. There was no specific information about when or where such an attack might occur.’ ’ (98)
- ‘The Church Committee estimated that the National Security Council itself knew about and approved of no more than about 14 percent of all covert actions from 1961 to 1975.’ (102)
- ‘The 1974 Hughes-Ryan Act, named after its authors, Senator Harold E. Hughes (Democrat from Iowa California
- ‘In the middle of the Reagan administration, members of Congress first read in the newspapers that, on orders of the president’s national security adviser, Vice Admiral John M. Poindexter, CIA operatives were covertly and illegally selling arms to the revolutionary government of Iran and using the funds thus obtained to finance a congressionally forbidden insurgency against the elected government of Nicaragua.’ (103)
- ‘The heavily censored CIA documents released to the Church Committee in 1975 led Senator Church to produce his own definition of ‘covert action.’ It is a ‘semantic disguise for murder, coercion, blackmail, bribery, the spreading of lies, and consorting with known torturers and international terrorists.’ (104)
- ‘From the moment the Kennedy administration came to power in 1961 until the overthrow and death of Chile’s president Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973, the CIA spent some $12 million on a massive ‘black’ propaganda campaign to support Allende’s primary political opponent, Eduardo Frei, the candidate of the Christian Democratic Party, and to denigrate Allende as a stooge of the Soviet Union. In addition, the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (which owned the Chilean telephone system) and other American-owned businesses in Chile Chile US Chile
- ‘In the 1964 election, the CIA directly underwrote more than half of Frei’s campaign expenses…these ‘dirty tricks’ produced the desired results. Frei received 56 percent of the vote to Allende’s 39 percent.’ (105-106)
- ‘The agency’s operatives soon discovered that the main obstacle was the commander in chief of the army, General Rene Schneider, who represented what the CIA called ‘the apolitical, constitution-oriented inertia of the Chilean military.’ Therefore, the CIA set out to find and arm dissident Chilean forces who would assassinate him.’ (107)
- ‘The CIA worked tirelessly to find a suitable general to put in power. They finally identified a likely candidate in the summer of 1971 – the cruel, ruthless, and corrupt General Augusto Pinochet. The Chilean military under Pinochet finally moved against Allende on ‘the other 9/11’ – September 11, 1973 . During the attack on La Moneda, the presidential palace, Pinochet’s forces offered Allende an airplane to fly him and his family into exile. (Pinochet was taped giving radio instructions to his troops, in which he says, ‘That plane will never land.’) Allende apparently took his own life rather than agreeing to any offer or allowing himself to be captured. He was found dead of gunshot wounds in his office around 2 PM on September 11. Thus began Pinochet’s seventeen-year dictatorship and reign of terror – sponsored and paid for by the US
- ‘The end of the military dictatorship came only when the passive resistance of the people of Chile October 5, 1988 , with 98 percent of eligible Chileans turning out, 54.7 percent voted to end the dictatorship.’ (109)
- ‘The Carter administration deliberately provoked the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan July 3, 1979 , President Carter signed a finding authorizing secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime then ruling in Kabul USSR Iran USSR USSR Afghanistan
- ‘The communists’ policies of secularization in turn provoked a violent response from devout Islamists. The anticommunist revolt that began in western Afghanistan United states Pakistan Saudi Arabia
- ‘Nothing more readily illustrates the dangers of secrecy in the United States government than the ways an ignoramus of a congressman and a high-ranking CIA thug managed to hijack American foreign policy. Under the covert guidance of Representative Charlie Wilson and CIA operative Gust Avrakotos, the agency flooded Afghanistan with an incredible array of extremely dangerous weapons and ‘unapologetically mov[ed] to equip and train cadres of high tech holy warriors in the art of waging a war of urban terror against a modern superpower’ – initially, the USSR.’ (113)
- ‘On February 23, 1998, bin Laden had summoned newspaper and TV reporters to the camp at Khost, in the eastern part of Afghanistan, that the CIA had built for him at the height of the anti-Soviet jihad. There he announced the creation of a new organization – the International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders – and issued a manifesto saying that ‘to kill and fight Americans and their allies, whether civilian or military, is an obligation for every Muslim who is able to do so in any country.’ Just over five months later, he and his associates put this manifesto into effect with their devastating embassy truck bombings in Africa .’ (118-119)
- ‘Human Rights Watch has identified at least twenty-four secret detention and interrogation centers worldwide operated by the CIA.’ (124)
- ‘The people held in this US
- ‘If you want a good interrogation, you send someone to Jordan Egypt Syria US
- ‘Transferring any prisoner to a country where he might be tortured was a violation…of article 3 of the 1984 UN Convention Against Torture.’ (130)
- ‘Transferring any prisoner to a country where he might be tortured was a violation…of article 3 of the 1984 UN Convention Against Torture.’ (130)
- ‘The military, financial, and strategic logic of closing redundant military facilities is inarguable, particularly when some of them date back to the Civil War and others are devoted to weapons systems such as Trident-missile-armed nuclear submarines that are useless in the post-Cold war world. At least in theory, there is a way that this local dependence on ‘military Keynesianism’ – the artificial stimulation of economic demand through military expenditures – could be mitigated. The United States
- ‘More than one hundred thousand women live on our overseas bases, including women in the services, spouses, and relatives of military personnel, obtaining an abortion – a constitutionally protected right of American citizens – is prohibited in military hospitals.’ (146)
- ‘Another difference between the bases abroad and those at home is the presence of military-owned slot machines in officers’ clubs, bowling alleys, and activities centers at overseas facilities. The military takes in more than $120 million per year on a total slot machine cash flow of about $2 billion…The result has been a serious rise in compulsive gambling and family bankruptcies among our forces deployed abroad.’ (46)
- ‘The Pentagon always imposes on countries in which it deploys our troops Status of Forces Agreements, which usually exempt the United States from cleaning up or paying for the environmental damage it causes.’ (149)
- ‘Most Americans do not know that some ‘host nations’ for our military bases abroad pay large sums to the United States to support our presence in their countries. Somewhat like the Romans of old, who taxed their colonies mercilessly, the Americans have added a modern basing twist to military imperialism. They have convinced sovereign nations in which our bases are located that they have an obligation to help pay for them in order to deter our common enemies. This is called ‘burden sharing.’ Japan Japan Japan Persian Gulf are the biggest spenders on this form of protection money. Bahrain Kuwait Qatar United Arab Emirates Germany US Spain Turkey Republic of Korea
- ‘The Bush administration intended, upon Saddam Hussein’s certain defeat, to create military bases in Iraq similar to those we built or took over in Germany and Japan after World War II. The covert purpose of our 2003 invasion was empire building – to move the main focus of our military installations in the Middle East from Saudi Arabia to Iraq, gain control over Iraq’s oil resources, and make that country a permanent Pentagon outpost for the control of much of the rest of the ‘arc of instability.’ ’ (157-158)
- ‘On February 17, 2005, for instance, Secretary Rumsfeld testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee, ‘I can assure you that we have no intention at the present time of putting permanent bases in Iraq.’ The actual policy being implemented on the ground, however, is to build a number of stable, hardened facilities (the military avoids the term ‘permanent’) that, according to Lieutenant General Walter E. Buchanan III, chief of air operations in the US’s Central Command, ‘will remain available for US use for at least another decade or two.’ ’ (158)
- ‘These permanent bases are the successors to the formerly permanent bases we hoped to hang on to in Saudi Arabia August 26, 2003 , in a small ceremony at Prince Sultan Air Base, near Riyadh United States
- ‘Three of the bases are in or around Baghdad US
- ‘The other two bases in the Baghdad vicinity are Camp Victory North, adjacent to the international airport, and al-Rashid Military Camp, the capital’s former military airport.’ (161)
- ‘Thirteen miles north of Camp Taji is the fifteen-square-mile Balad Air Base, the largest American base in the country, and its associated army facility, Camp Anaconda, so gigantic it requires none internal bus routes…Its air traffic is second only in the world to London’s Heathrow.’ (162)
- ‘According to information gathered by Bradley Graham of the Washington Post, the United States has chosen four Iraqi bases that it will try to hang on to come what may: Tallil Air Base in the south, al-Asad Air Base in the west, Balad Air Base in the center, and either Camp Qayyarah or an unnamed airfield near Irbil in the north.’ (163)
- ‘The legal systems of some of these ‘hosts’ are every bit as sophisticated as our own, ones in which Americans would be unlikely to find themselves seriously disadvantaged by local law enforcement. What SOFAs do, however, is give American soldiers, contractors, Department of Defense civilians, and their dependents a whole range of special privileges that are not available to ordinary citizens of the country or to non-American visitors.’ (171-172)
- ‘The NATO SOFA and the agreements with individual European countries do not contain exemptions from responsibility for environmental and noise pollution, which is undoubtedly one reason Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld wants to move American bases from Germany to the ‘new Europe,’ those ex-communist satellites of Eastern Europe that are poor and desperate enough to be willing – at least for now – to let the Americans pollute as their wish, cost free, in order to get what economic benefits they can.’ (174)
- ‘The most contentious issues between the United States and nations on the receiving end of our empire of bases involve problems of civil and criminal jurisdiction. For civil matters, such as damage caused by off-duty American personnel driving their cars, SOFAs often stipulate how the injury is to be determined and compensated – including the possibility of requiring our forces to carry personal property damage insurance. For criminal cases, all SOFAs differ, but most award primary jurisdiction to the United States
- ‘SOFAs quite explicitly take away sovereign rights, which is why they are more easily imposed on defeated or occupied nations like Germany and Japan after World War II and South Korea after the Korean War, or extremely weak and dependent nations like Ecuador and Honduras.’ (176)
- ‘It has long been an article of neocon faith that the United States must do everything in its power to prevent the development of rival power centers, whether friendly or hostile, which meant that after the collapse of the Soviet Union they turned their attention to China as one of our probable next enemies. In 2001, having come to power along with George W. Bush, the neoconservatives had shifted much of our nuclear targeting from Russia China Taiwan China Japan
- ‘Article 9 of Japan’s American-drafted constitution explicitly states that Japan will not maintain any offensive military capability or resort to war in its international relations. In fact, however, other than nuclear arms, virtually all of Japan Japan Japan Iraq
- ‘Reagan’s impenetrable shield in space was a mere fantasy and, over the years, all that remains in practicable terms is a fabulously expensive, ground-based, minimalist antiballistic missile system. A series of futuristic conceptions, still in various stages of research and, in some cases, actual development, is aimed not at protecting the American people from a nuclear attack by another country but at the future control of the planet from space and the militarization of the heavens. These new devices included not only antisatellite satellites but weaponry in space that could be fired at Earth.’ (209)
- ‘Reagan’s impenetrable shield in space was a mere fantasy and, over the years, all that remains in practicable terms is a fabulously expensive, ground-based, minimalist antiballistic missile system. A series of futuristic conceptions, still in various stages of research and, in some cases, actual development, is aimed not at protecting the American people from a nuclear attack by another country but at the future control of the planet from space and the militarization of the heavens. These new devices included not only antisatellite satellites but weaponry in space that could be fired at Earth.’ (209)
- ‘The militarization of space has clearly been on the secret agenda for some time. Somewhere between boondoggle and imperial venture, the program to conquer the ‘high frontier’ is also essentially a program for creating the equivalent of bases in space where, once the issue of militarization is settled, no SOFAs would be necessary. There would be no foreign governments to negotiate with, pay off, or placate; no issues of crime and justice to sort out. Best of all, the weaponizing of space enables us to project power anywhere in the world from secure bases of operation. It is, by definition, the global high ground.’ (210)
- ‘Of all the high-frontier weapons into which R&D money has been poured since President Reagan’s speech, only one – the distinctly Earth-bound ‘defensive shield’ – has come into even partial being. That is the modest antiballistic missile (ABM) defense system being installed at Fort Greely , Alaska California
- ‘At present no country has antisatellite weapons in space, that the only country talking about a possible space war is theUnited States
- ‘At present no country has antisatellite weapons in space, that the only country talking about a possible space war is the
- ‘It is inconceivabl, observes Theresa Hitchens, an authority on weapons in space and vice president of the independent Washington research organization Center for Defense Information, ‘that either Russia or China would allow the United states to become the sole nation with space-based weapons.’ ’ (215)
- ‘More than five years after George W. Bush committed himself to an initial deployment by election day 2004, elaborate plans had been laid and huge amounts of money spent but nothing had been completed that actually worked. Shortly after June 13, 2002 , when President Bush’s withdrawal of the United States
- ‘ America
- ‘During the first years of the new century, an array of experienced Pentagon and congressional budget officers began sounding the alarm that the purchase of weapons systems is now totally beyond public control – or often even public visibility. Of all the weapons systems, the most expensive and most prone to misuse and abuse has been the whole project to create an intercontinental-ballistic-missile defense system. At $8.8 billion, it was, after all, the largest single weapons request in the fiscal year 2006 defense budget.’ (229-230)
- ‘From Reagan’s 1983 ‘Star Wars’ speech to 2006, depending on which export you listen to, the United States has spent between $92.5 billion and $130 billion on the basic problem of shooting down an ICBM in flight – and that’s without even once having succeeded in doing so.’ (230)
- ‘From Reagan’s 1983 ‘Star Wars’ speech to 2006, depending on which export you listen to, the United States has spent between $92.5 billion and $130 billion on the basic problem of shooting down an ICBM in flight – and that’s without even once having succeeded in doing so.’ (230)
- ‘As soon as we had determined that such a launch was not an error, we would retaliate instantly and catastrophically against whatever nation had allowed a missile to be fired against us. The government’s own experts agree that a long-range ballistic missile is the least likely way a hostile state or terrorist group would choose to deliver a weapon of mass destruction against a US target.’ (231)
- ‘Missile defense has almost nothing to do with defense and nothing whatsoever to do with the war against terrorism. ABM weapons may actually prove to be useless against incoming ICBMs, but they might be highly effective offensive weapons against other nations’ satellites, and this is why almost nothing said officially by the administration, the Pentagon, or the Congress on the subject of missile defense can be taken at face value. These dual-use weapons are less likely to be employed for missile defense than as a stealthy way to introduce weapons in outer space with the intent of dominating the globe.’ (232)
- ‘The Global Positioning System…is probably the greatest advance in navigation since the discovery of the compass and the invention of the sextant. It is the general term for at least twenty-four satellites, each circling the Earth twice a day, that are positioned in a ‘medium Earth orbit’ (12,600 to 14,760 miles above the planet). A GPS receiver on a ship, automobile, aircraft, bomb, or a hiker’s handheld navigational device decodes a time signal from four of these satellites, which carry extremely accurate atomic clocks, and then calculates a position based on the different times and distances to the various satellites.’ (233)
- ‘Although created for military use, the GPS is today available to any and all users worldwide, providing strikingly accurate information on position and time in all weather conditions. The GPS has spawned a multibillion-dollar industry in applications, including handheld guidance devices for the blind. The US
- ‘The invasion of Iraq
- ‘Bush has unleashed a political crisis comparable to the one Julius Caesar posed for the Roman constitution. If the United States
- ‘From the start the FOIA exempted from requests for disclosure the federal courts, the Congress (a big mistake), and parts of the Executive Office of the President that function solely to advise and assist the president.’ (245-246)
- ‘The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act allows the FBI and the NSA to listen in on American citizens in order to collect intelligence, and it set up a secret court to issue warrants based on requests from the intelligence community. From its inception in 1979 through 2004, the FISA court issued 18,742 secret warrants while denying only four government requests. The court was originally made up of seven federal judges appointed by the chief justice of the Supreme Court; the USA Patriot Act of 2001 expanded that number to eleven. The judges’ identities are secret. They meet in total privacy behind a cipher-locked door in a windowless, bugproof, vaultlike room guarded twenty-four hours a day on the top floor of the Justice Department’s building in Washington, D.C. Everything they do is ‘top secret.’ The judges hear only the government’s side. The court makes annual reports to Congress, normally just two paragraphs long, that gie only the total number of warrants it has approved. Beyond that, there is no congressional oversight of the court’s activities whatsoever. The law even allows emergency taps and searches for which a warrant can be issued retroactively if the government notifies the court within seventy-two hours. Compared with ordinary wiretaps, for which the government must provide a federal district court judge with evidence of ‘probable cause’ that the person or persons under investigation are likely to commit a crime, the FISA process is weighted toward the government, not the citizen, and not surprisingly the secret court had authorized more warrants than all federal district judges combined.’ (255)
- ‘On November 14, 2002, the New York Times’ conservative columnist William Safire outlined the kind of data TIA sought: ‘Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book, and every event you attend – all these transactions and communications will go into what the Department of Defense describes as a ‘virtual centralized grand database.’ ’ Add to that all government information – passport applications, drivers’ licenses, judicial and divorce records, IRS files, complaints by nosy neighbors, plus the latest hidden camera surveillance – and one that has the perfect American computer version of Gestapo or KBG files. There is growing evidence that in 2003 the TIA project was stopped in name only.’ (256)
- ‘Signing statements eliminate the possibility of the Congress overriding [a presidential] veto since they take effect (whatever that might mean) after the bill has already become law, and they violate the first sentence of the Constitution’s first article: ‘All legislative powers herein granted’ belong to Congress. As the framers carefully explained, this means only the ‘Senate and House of Representatives’ – not the president in the act of signing a bill into law.’ (258)
- ‘Signing statements eliminate the possibility of the Congress overriding [a presidential] veto since they take effect (whatever that might mean) after the bill has already become law, and they violate the first sentence of the Constitution’s first article: ‘All legislative powers herein granted’ belong to Congress. As the framers carefully explained, this means only the ‘Senate and House of Representatives’ – not the president in the act of signing a bill into law.’ (258)
- ‘After World War II, [the Northern Marianas Islands] – the largest of which is the island of Saipan – became a United Nations trust territory, administered by the United States Department of the Interior. Under a scheme to make Saipan a sweatshop, the Interior Department exempted the islands from US Saipan . Tens of thousands of Chinese women live in dormitories with no basic political rights; they are prohibited from marrying and paid almost nothing. They work producing clothes with ‘Made in the USA
- ‘The mainstream press regularly refers to members of Congress as ‘lawmakers,’ but the phrase bears little relationship to what they actually do.’ (263)
- ‘[Former Pentagon budget analyst Frank] Spinney explained that a main lobbying strategy of the military-industrial complex is to emphasize to members of Congress how many jobs are dependent on a particular contract being approved, rather than the usefulness of feasibility of a weapon. Lobbyists’ letters and presentations to members of Congress always include maps showing precisely the communities that will be enriched by Pentagon spending and the funds they will receive.’ (264-265)
- ‘The mainstream press regularly refers to members of Congress as ‘lawmakers,’ but the phrase bears little relationship to what they actually do.’ (263)
- ‘[Former Pentagon budget analyst Frank] Spinney explained that a main lobbying strategy of the military-industrial complex is to emphasize to members of Congress how many jobs are dependent on a particular contract being approved, rather than the usefulness of feasibility of a weapon. Lobbyists’ letters and presentations to members of Congress always include maps showing precisely the communities that will be enriched by Pentagon spending and the funds they will receive.’ (264-265)
- ‘The likelihood is that the United States United States Germany China Argentina
- ‘On March 16, 2006 , Congress raised the national debt limit from $8.2 trillion to $8.96 trillion. This was the fourth time since George W. Bush took office that it had to be raised.’ (270)
- ‘In 1943, the Polish economist in exile Micha Kalecki coined the term ‘military Keynesianism’ to explain Nazi Germany’s success in overcoming the Great Depression and achieved full employment. Adolf Hitler did not undertake German rearmament for purely economic reasons; he wanted to build a powerful German military. The fact that he advocated governmental support for arms production made him acceptable to many German industrialists, who increasingly supported his regime. For several years before Hitler’s aggressive intentions became clear, he was celebrated around the world for having achieved a ‘German economic miracle.’ Speaking theoretically, Kalecki understood that government spending on arms increases manufacturing and also has a multiplier effect on general consumer spending by raising workers’ incomes. Both of these points are in accordance with general Keynesian doctrine. In addition, the enlargement of standing armies absorbs many workers, often young males with few skills and less education. The military thus becomes an employer of last resort, like the old Civilian Conservation Corps, but on a much larger scale. Increased spending on military research and the development of weapons systems also generates new infrastructure and advanced technologies. Well-known examples include the jet engine, radar, nuclear power, semiconductors, and the Internet, each of which began as a military project that later formed the basis for major civilian industries.’ (273)
- ‘ ‘Despite whatever theories strategists may spin, the defense budget is now, to a large degree, a jobs program. It is also a cash cow that provides billions of dollars for corporations, lobbyists, and special interest groups.’ [Ronald Steel] The negative aspects of military Keynesianism include its encouragement of militarism and the potential to create a military-industrial complex. Because such a complex becomes both direct and indirectly an employer and generator of employment, it comes to constitute a growing proportion of aggregate demand. Sooner or later, it short-circuits Keynes’ insistence that government spending be cut back in times of nearly full employment. In other words, it becomes a permanent institution whose ‘pump’ must always be primed.’ (273)
- ‘Between the 1940s and 1996, the United States
- ‘By 1967, the peak year of its nuclear stockpile, the United States possessed some 32,500 deliverable bombs, none of which, thankfully, was ever used. But they perfectly illustrate Keynes’ proposal that, in order to create jobs, the government might as well decide to bury money in old mines and then pay unemployed workers to dig it up.’ (274)
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