Michael Scherer does an excellent job of dissecting toture advocate Mark Thiessenattack on Wikileaks. Scherer looks back at history, namely the release of the Pentagon Papers that helped turn the war. The Pentagon Papers showed that more than one president deliberately mislead the country about the war in Vietnam and almost 70,000 US troops died as a result.

Supreme Court’s opinion in New York Times Co. v. United States, the so-called Pentagon Papers case from 1971.

Concurring in that case, Justice Potter Stewart observed, “In the absence of governmental checks and balances present in other areas of our national life, the only effective restraint upon executive policy and power in the area of national defense and international affairs may lie in an enlightened citizenry — in an informed and critical public opinion which alone can here protect the values of democratic government.. . . . Without an informed and free press, there cannot be an enlightened people.”

The article also quotes from Justices Hugo Black and William Brennan

[W]e are asked to hold that, despite the First Amendment’s emphatic command, the Executive Branch, the Congress, and the Judiciary can make laws enjoining publication of current news and abridging freedom of the press in the name of “national security.” The Government does not even attempt to rely on any act of Congress. Instead, it makes the bold and dangerously far-reaching contention that the courts should take it upon themselves to “make” a law abridging freedom of the press in the name of equity, presidential power and national security, even when the representatives of the people in Congress have adhered to the command of the First Amendment and refused to make such a law. To find that the President has “inherent power” to halt the publication of news by resort to the courts would wipe out the First Amendment and destroy the fundamental liberty and security of the very people the Government hopes to make “secure.” No one can read the history of the adoption of the First Amendment without being convinced beyond any doubt that it was injunctions like those sought here that Madison and his collaborators intended to outlaw in this Nation for all time. The word “security” is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the First Amendment. The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security for our Republic.

A government that lies to its people betrays everything a soldier hopes to be fighting for, everything. Long live Wikileaks and all independent media because without it we have no democracy at all.

http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/the-war-logs/

Read the spin then read the data

Obama cannot persuade us that more blood and treasure should be spent in Afghanistan, bring our troops home. Olbermann, of course, says it much better

Rachel talks with IAVA director Paul Rieckhoff about the need to push for adequate veterans’ benefits. Recent reports have highlighted the alarmingly high suicide statistics amongst active duty military personnel and I have reported in the past that one in four homeless once served their country.

Salon has a moving series of articles entitled Coming Home telling the stories of different soldiers some suicidal some homicidal.

The day before Halloween 2008, Army Pvt. Adam Lieberman swallowed handfuls of prescription pain pills and psychotropic drugs. Then he picked up a can of black paint and smeared onto the wall of his room in the Fort Carson barracks what he thought would be his last words to the world.

“I FACED THE ENEMY AND LIVED!” Lieberman painted on the wall in big, black letters. “IT WAS THE DEATH DEALERS THAT TOOK MY LIFE!”

Rieckhoff asks for the American people to please contact their representatives and insist they fund the Veterans Administration and provide mental health services to the men and women that have sacrificed so much.

So while the national economy crumbles and the violence in Afghanistan escalates our president is spending most of his time selling his administration failures as successes and blaming everyone else at the same time.

John has been empaneled and testified before a group of college board regents as to what veterans need to be successful, post combat, in school.

The superbly done photo essay, montage now showing at the New American Art Union in Portland, Exit Wounds: Combat Trauma and the trials of homecoming, is earning rave reviews. Jim Lommasson’s photographic work surrounded by photos taken from the veterans themselves tells a story that we will not see in mainstream media. Dahr Jamail who has reported from Iraq and is author of ‘Beyond the Green Zone’, writes for IPS News.

PORTLAND, Oregon, Nov 4 (IPS) – Artist Jim Lommasson hates war. His exhibit of 1,500 photographs, taken by soldiers who served in Iraq, brings the war home to the United States, in a way he hopes will help bring it to an end.

“It’s all about the soldier’s lives upon their return home,” Lommasson, a soft-spoken man with kind, yet piercing eyes, told IPS at a reception for his powerful exhibit in mid-October. “I want people to listen to the soldiers. I want them to support the veterans, and hear what they have to say about Iraq, and what they’ve done to civilians.”

The photographs, handpicked from thousands brought home on laptops by soldiers who served in the occupation of Iraq, are grouped together on two walls. Collages of photos surround larger photos of the soldier who took them, along with quotes from interviews Lommasson conducted with them over the last year.

“Mom, I wouldn’t wish war on my worst enemy,” reads one photo. Nearby it are photos of bombs exploding, Iraqi children peering at the photographer, and another photo taken through the scope of what looks like a sniper’s scope, with the cross-hairs square on the head of an Iraqi man standing in a doorway.

Dahr Jamail was a panelist with me at the Winter Soldier event hosted by PDX Peace last month. Jamail also reports for Democracy Now!