COMMENT
Comment theProgressive War Is Declared We went to our well-thumbed copy of the Constitution, and there it was in Article I, Section 8, among the enumerated powers of Congress: the power to...
...Breggin's case is more than just another instance of professional orthodoxy attempting to muzzle dissenting opinion...
...Increasingly, our fellow citizens seem to feel compelled to call in the law whenever they hear or see anything that shakes their assumptions or offends their sensibilities...
...Since 1950, and continuing to the present day, the Senate and the House of Representatives have repeatedly passed up opportunities to assert their right to declare war or, more to the point, to prevent war by denying consent...
...The latest revelations about the CIA are perfectly in keeping with the Agency's sordid history and with the fanciful wishes of Ronald Reagan...
...Last spring, in an interview on a syndicated television talk show, Breggin ventured the opinion that people who seek psychiatric treatment should avoid therapists who immediately want to prescribe medication...
...And he insists on support for the contras, proposing a $270 million aid package...
...You have to be very cautious," Breggin said, "and especially avoid anyone who's diagnosing you, offering you drugs, offering you a hospital, or has biology or electroshock attached to his associations...
...He has released some political prisoners and permitted political exiles to return safely...
...The peasants, presumably, will get the usual treatment...
...Perhaps state action will establish the principle that the Federal Government continues to ignore—thai health care is a fundemental right, not a privilege...
...State of Health Massachusetts may soon guarantee health care to all of its residents, including the 10 per cent who now lack any type of medical insurance...
...It was a rogue operation," we are told time and time again...
...And at those words, sputtering members of Congress retreat in disarray...
...The CIA under William Casey was just doing its job...
...Massachusetts has a budget surplus and high employment rate, a rare combination that has freed the state from the kind of sluggishness that has beset the Federal Government in devising a rational and humane national health-care system...
...It wasn't supposed to be that way...
...Peace is not in his vocabulary...
...These are all steps that the Reagan Administration has been urging the Sandinistas to take for the past seven years...
...Empowered to wage secret wars, unobstructed by a toothless Congress, the CIA mocks our laws and besmirches our name...
...It's not a mystery: American workers don't want the jobs because they can't live on the wages, can't stand the working conditions, and don't want to die slow deaths from chronic exposure to the chemicals used on the crops...
...We wanted the Reagan Administration to realize that they will have to reach out to constituents of our groups and get our members to work for INF to get it passed," said Fay Kelle, assistant political director of Women's Action for Nuclear Disarmament...
...American workers just don't want to harvest their crops, they complain, and there's a shortage of 300,000 to 500,000 fieldhands...
...At 10:30 p.m...
...But even that has proven too much of a responsibility for the cowardly lions of Capitol Hill...
...Comes now Bob Woodward's book, VEIL: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987...
...But our official killers on the U.S...
...Comment theProgressive War Is Declared We went to our well-thumbed copy of the Constitution, and there it was in Article I, Section 8, among the enumerated powers of Congress: the power to declare war...
...The details of the Massachusetts plan have yet to be worked out...
...Inexorable increases in health-care costs leave these individuals and families at the mercy of forces they can't possibly control...
...The place for peace activism is outside the corridors of the Capitol, far from the conference rooms in the White House, beyond the caverns of political opportunism...
...Among the sticky issues still to be resolved are whether all workers will receive equal benefits...
...It hasn't been repealed, revoked, or amended, despite all the mendacious rhetoric emanating from the Reagan White House and the waffling responses of Democratic legislators...
...Death Before Breakfast When the subject is the death penalty, we've become expert at believing any number of impossible things...
...The peace movement should not make common cause with the Reagan Administration, for there is nothing in common...
...Louisiana was thus free to act...
...Don't Call Them Coolies Latest wrinkle on the agribusiness front: Chinese peasants will be imported, beginning next spring, to work in U.S...
...Farm workers who are organized want work, but they want decent work, and their unions reasonably dispute the figures on the worker shortage...
...Peter Breggin is a former psychiatric fellow at Harvard Medical School and a former psychiatric consultant to the National Institute of Mental Health...
...But that's just my guess.' —Senator Robert Dole of Kansas, candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination...
...If they can't, no basis exists for expending a single dollar or a single life...
...it's with the institution...
...Here were representatives of the peace movement and representatives of the Reagan Administration meeting for the first time...
...If members of Congress can look their constituents in the eye and say America must go to war in the Persian Gulf, let them do so...
...foreign policy along with it...
...He has proposed a unilateral cease-fire with the contras, and he has appointed Archbishop Obando y Bravo, his harshest domestic critic, to head a national commission of reconciliation...
...Pentagon spokesmen now refer to it as the Arabian Gulf...
...He has agreed to reopen the opposition paper, La Prensa, as well as an anti-government Roman Catholic radio station...
...He should tell that to the Mexicans who participated in the long-discredited, but similar, bracero program, or the Jamaicans imported each year to cut sugar cane in the Southeast, or the workers in any other of the Labor Department-regulated programs for the temporary importation of farm laborers...
...We were really feeling our oats...
...The next day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appeared before a joint session of Congress, requesting—and receiving—the constitutional mandate, a declaration of war...
...The President suggests that Congress breaches the Constitution if it so much as asks meek questions about the Administration's warmaking intentions...
...Beneath the Veil Whenever a Government operation runs amok, the first instinct of pundits and the press is to blame only the individual in charge, to label the embarrassing action as exceptional, out of the ordinary, a mistake...
...Willie Watson is one of more than eighty people put to death in the United States since 1976...
...Now that "immigration reform" has made American growers a bit fearful of getting caught employing and exploiting undocumented Hispanic aliens, they need a new underclass...
...It was all Casey's fault, we are informed...
...Reminded of the hapless fate of the thousands of Chinese imported a century ago to build railroads and work the gold mines, Soo's project manager says it's not at all the same: "Those Chinese were mostly illegal immigrants and were poorly paid...
...The CIA also engaged in torture: One suspect under CIA interrogation was killed after an overzealous application of an electric prod...
...At 11:40, Edwards finally showed up and told aides to find the warden at the prison...
...It has been called the Persian Gulf for about 2,500 years, but the U.S...
...And so, just a few hours after the U.S...
...The War Powers Resolution, adopted in the wake of the tragedy in Indochina, was a marginal attempt to restore at least a semblance of Congressional oversight by giving the legislators a say after the fact...
...Contra Dictions Daniel Ortega, president of Nicaragua, has bent over backwards to abide by the provisions of the Central American peace accord signed in Guatemala City in August...
...For venturing those controversial views in public, Breggin came under investigation by the Maryland Commission on Medical Discipline...
...It is time to abolish the CIA and prohibit covert actions...
...But now that they have been adopted, the Administration isn't satisfied...
...The United States gets contract migrant labor...
...peace movement is in disarray...
...It is symptomatic of a national disease that is reaching epidemic proportions—the impulse to silence any critic, to stifle any discussion that falls outside the narrow bounds of the mainstream...
...But at least some steps are being taken...
...Until he was officially "cleared" early in October, he faced a possible reprimand or even loss of his medical license...
...China gets foreign exchange...
...President Reagan warns about "Potemkin reforms," "mere show," and "phony" steps toward democracy...
...Then, when they're done with the harvest, we will send them back...
...Some oats should not be felt...
...Otherwise, in five or ten years, we will hear of another CIA operation that goes off the rails, again taking U.S...
...Every execution is barbaric, but some are more absurd than others...
...But less than a decade later, President Truman set a disastrously different precedent: He chose to call the conflict in Korea a "police action" rather than a war, and he embarked on that bloody and costly enterprise without bothering to obtain a Congressional declaration...
...Congress doesn't have the guts to fulfill its own obligations...
...He wants no part of the peace accord, which he characterizes as fatally flawed...
...Unfortunately—too bad, and all that—it takes five votes to stay an execution...
...At 11:58, the warden was on the phone, and Edwards delayed the execution to hold a clemency hearing...
...fields...
...I've got a feeling a little three-day invasion wouldn't make anybody unhappy down there, if you just overthrew Ortega...
...one recent day...
...But K.K...
...And so we sink deeper into potentially catastrophic involvement in the Persian Gulf while the Democrats who control Congress dither over whether they might, perhaps, gently tap the Administration's wrists by adopting a watered-down modification of the already watered-down War Powers Resolution...
...that's where we should cultivate our gardens of resistance...
...The Americans and Indo-chinese who died or were maimed in Southeast Asia, the Marines whose lives were snuffed out in Lebanon, and now the casualties in the Persian Gulf were not even given the benefit of Congressional deliberation over the policies that compelled them to make the ultimate sacrifice...
...Consider this: Representatives of U.S...
...Supreme Court and in the governors' mansions keep writing new scripts that no one in Wonderland would try out before breakfast...
...Our Shrinking Freedom Dr...
...Supreme Court officially ruled that a man had a case worthy of its attention, his jailers strapped him into an electric chair and pulled the switch...
...He wants war, plain and simple...
...Woodward, The Washington Posfs ace investigative reporter, discloses that the CIA under its late director William Casey hatched assassination plots, conducted clandestine wars, and paid off foreign heads of state...
...Look at the letters (or, for that matter, the editorials) published by your local newspaper: Odds are that few days will go by without a demand that somebody be gagged...
...He listened for ninety minutes, thought about it for half an hour, and decided for death...
...The problem is not with the person...
...Under the Constitution, war is not embarked on by stealth, connivance, or fait accompli...
...It's a sickness toward which organized psychiatry might well direct its attention...
...peace groups have offered their services to the Reagan Administration...
...Willie Watson was scheduled to die in Louisiana at 12:01 a.m...
...But the constitutional language is clear: Congress—no one else—has the power to declare war...
...Department of Defense has renamed it...
...The new coolies can expect ten months at hard labor, and then a ticket home...
...Government...
...Senator Lowell P. Weicker, Connecticut Republican, recently summed it up nicely: "As a matter of history...
...What's more, the Administration threatens world peace every day with its Star Wars development, its research into biological warfare, and its interventions around the globe...
...This is a legal program where the workers' wages, food, and living conditions will be supervised by the U.S...
...four votes were enough to grant the hearing...
...on the eve of Watson's date with the electric chair, the Clerk of the Supreme Court telephoned Baton Rouge with the news that the Justices had voted four-to-four to hear Watson's case as well...
...That set the pattern for American military adventures in our time...
...On December 7, 1941, Japanese forces attacked the American installation at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii...
...The siren song of political influence becomes almost irresistible, and in exchange for the slenderest piece of the action, progressive groups willingly surrender principle and power...
...Soo has a solution the growers like better than having to make the jobs more attractive...
...It got out of hand...
...Our power resides at the grass roots...
...This one was vile beyond words...
...Soo is president of the Chinese Agricultural Manpower Center in New York, and he'has a deal with the Chinese government...
...He is now in private psychiatric practice in Bethesda, Maryland, and is nationally known as an advocate of patients' rights and a critic of antipsychotic drugs and electroshock therapy...
...Another rogue operation, another individual gone awry...
...war is declared...
...Nonsense...
...Nancy Reagan's 'inflexible goal,' according to the London Sunday Express, is to see President Reagan win the Nobel Peace Prize next year...
...Watson was now in the hands of Governor Edwin Edwards, who knew that Watson's lawyers and supporters were waiting in the governor's mansion to see him...
...The state's governor and Presidential contender, Michael Dukakis, proposes that all employers be required to provide health insurance for their workers, with the state paying for coverage of the unemployed...
...To invoke so feeble a piece of pap as the 1973 War Powers Resolution would "usurp Executive Branch prerogatives," says White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater...
...He had a Federal appeal in the works, one considered "indistinguishable" from another the Court will shortly decide...
...Leaders of Physicians for Social Responsibility, SANE/Freeze, Women's Action for Nuclear Disarmament, the American Friends Service Committee, and the American-Soviet Peace Walk sat down with White House officials in May to discuss ways of working together to ensure passage of the Administration's proposal on Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF), Nuclear Times reported...
...These peace groups have fallen into the lobbying trap that ensnares so many radical causes that set up shop in Washington, D.C...
...A Peace of the Action The U.S...
...The ranks of the traditionally uninsured—seasonal and sweat-shop laborers, part-time workers, and the unemployed—have swelled to thirty million Americans as more jobs become rooted in non-unionized service industries...
...The proposed INF agreement is of dubious value (as Sam Day argues on Page 14 of this issue...
Vol. 51 • November 1987 • No. 11
