Despite WikiLeaks Revelations, Congress Votes for War Funding
Tom Hayden
TheNation.com : July 28, 2010
Never was the case so weak for throwing another $33 billion into the
Afghanistan sinkhole, but that's what a defensive US Congress did anyway on
Tuesday evening. The vote was 308-114, with Republicans supplying most of
the prowar votes.
Washington-based peace groups, after weeks of e-mailing messages to
Congress, put the best face possible on the vote, claiming a "significant"
gain of fourteen additional antiwar votes over the 100 cast for a similar
amendment by Representative Barbara Lee two weeks ago. (The new Democratic
votes were cast by Corrine Brown, Kathy Castor, John Conyers, Rosa Delauro,
Lloyd Doggett, Anna Eshoo, Chaka Fattah, Eddie Bernice Johnson, Hank
Johnson, Marcy Kaptur, Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, Gregory Meeks, James
Moran, Christopher Murphy, Carol Shea-Porter, Mike Thompson, Lynn Woolsey
and David Wu; while five Republicans joined the opposition: Paul Broun,
Vernon Ehlers, Jeff Flake, Phil Gingrey and John Linder.)
Those casting prowar votes from safe liberal districts included Lois Capps,
James Clyburn, Susan Davis, John Hall, Patrick Kennedy, Nita Lowey, Lucille
Roybal-Allard, John Sarbanes and Joe Sestak. Significantly, Speaker Nancy
Pelosi abstained from voting, which meant retreating from the chance to draw
an antiwar line more firmly.
The highest measure of House opposition remains the 162 votes, including
Pelosi's, cast in the House recently for Representative Jim McGovern's
amendment requiring an exit strategy including a withdrawal timeline. Only
eighteen senators voted for an identical amendment by Senator Russ Feingold
earlier this spring. The dissenting numbers have almost doubled since last
year.
In the moments after Tuesday's vote, a representative of Barbara Lee's
office said new antiwar measures may be put forward around the defense
appropriations bill later in this session. No concrete plan yet exists.
Those Congressional antiwar votes are in part due to years of grassroots
work and mobilization, according to Rusti Eisenberg of the legislative
committee of United for Peace and Justice. Is the glass half-full or
half-empty?, she asks. What is clear is that there was never a better time
to stop or delay this war. The political climate around Afghanistan turned
extremely sour in the days leading up to Tuesday's vote. The Washington
establishment was shaken by the spilling of 91,000 classified documents by
the independent muckrakers at WikiLeaks.org. The raw documents revealed a
much grimmer situation in Afghanistan than portrayed by the White House and
the Pentagon with its information-war strategy. As millions read the
WikiLeaks revelations in the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel, a
nervous White House pressed for an immediate House vote. "We don't know how
to react. This obviously puts Congress and the public in a bad mood,"
lamented one White House official.
The president could have declared that the newly released materials only add
to a growing consensus that the war is unwinnable. Instead he sent his
spokesperson Robert Gibbs out to discredit the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian
Assange, who is fast becoming a hero in the global info-wars.
Gibbs was offended by a German interview with the elusive Assange, in which
he said "I enjoy crushing bastards," a sentiment that will do him no harm
with Assange's readers and collaborators.
The Pentagon also is seeking to muzzle and imprison the American Private
First Class Bradley Manning, 22, charged with downloading the documents and
sending them to Assange. Manning, who is known by his hacker name Bradass87,
copied the secret information on a CD labeled "Lady Gaga" while pretending
to hum along to her music.
"I want people to see the truth, the non-PR version," said Manning. While
downloading the materials, he had discovered "awful things that belong in
the public domain and not on some server stored in a darkroom in Washington,
DC.. I just couldn't let these things stay inside of the system and inside
of my head."
Manning calls his action "open diplomacy.. It's beautiful and horrifying. It
belongs in the public domain."
WikiLeaks founder Assange announced Monday that he has another 15,000
documents ready to release.
For now, funding for the escalation has been salvaged by the House vote. But
the full impact of the documents remains to be seen. If the Pentagon finds a
way to shut down WikiLeaks, it is likely that a huge media and public
protest will follow. Going forward with upbeat messages about the war
becomes hazardous for Obama too, especially with the release of more
documents threatened. Pressures thus will increase here and across the NATO
alliance to begin reducing the military presence.
On the very day the disclosures were splashed across front pages, American
officials were quarreling with Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai over
whether fifty-two civilians were killed by Western rockets in Helmand
Province, a scene of the current offensive. And, according to official
sources interviewed by Dexter Filkins of the New York Times, Karzai is
"pressing to strike his own deal with the Taliban and the country's
archrival, Pakistan, the Taliban's longtime supporter."
Instead of bending to these apparent realities, Obama instead seems intent
on doubling-down with the military offensive in Kandahar and his secret
attacks in Pakistan.
No one in the government has found a way to stop him, despite 73 percent of
Democrats and a majority of independents opposing his Afghanistan policy. By
voting for war funding without conditions, Congress has yielded its checks
and balances function, and now is being usurped and outperformed in its
oversight responsibilities by the twentysomething geeks of WikiLeaks.
Tom Hayden
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