Exposing and Resisting Empire and War Media in the Age of Obama*

We are today* one week and two days out from the forty-second anniversary of the execution of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a killing that took place exactly one year – almost down to the hour – after his famous “Break the Silence” speech against the U.S. War on Vietnam at the Riverside Church in New York City.

 

“The black revolution,” King wrote before his death, “is exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society.  It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that the radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.” 

 

The changes we needed to avert catastrophe and build a human civilization, King felt, could not be limited to the periodic re-shuffling of the names and faces and parties in nominal power. It had to go deeper than replacing one brand or shape or color of corporate- and military-captive office-holders with another such brand once every two, four or eight years.

 

The democratic socialist Dr. King was calling for deep change, for systemic change, for radical reform, and even for revolution from the bottom up beneath and beyond the quadrennial, top-down big money mass marketed corporate-crafted, candidate-centered “electoral extravaganzas” that pass for the only politics that matter in the United States. 

 

The Persistence of the Old Killing Regime

 

As the title of my next book (The Empire’s New Clothes”) suggests, I see more continuity than change in the transition from Republican and Bush to Democrats and Obama. Beneath the Great Re-Branding, beyond shifts in style and partisan rule and behind the symbolically powerful color-change in the oval office there lives on the same unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money and empire….the same parasitic and bipartisan corporate state, the same deadly bipartisan planetary militarism, the same globally unmatched and racially disparate mass incarceration state which puts 2.3 million Americans behind bars and saddling one in three black adult males with the lifelong mark of a felony record, the same rigged and narrow elections and policy system whereby nobody reaches and stays long in higher office unless they please the top 1 percent that owns more than a third of the nation’s wealth, the same right wing and so-called mainstream media railing against big government and deficits though not against the vastly expensive $50 billion a year prison state, not against the $1 trillion a year Pentagon budget, not against the trillions of dollars worth of federal corporate subsidies that make the rich yet richer and not against the regressive tax structure that feeds government debt by letting the Few off the hook ……all of this along with persistent gender oppression, the continuing and ever-more deadly, soon perhaps to be irreversible corporate assault on livable ecology, the same deadening and soulless dehumanization of work in alienating hyper-authoritarian workplaces; the same contingency of employment for the Many on the profit prospects of the Few; the same persistent demonization and misunderstanding of immigrants and the same far-from-post-racial world where blacks and Native Americans and Latinos continue to live under harshly separate and unequal circumstances while white folks in Northbrook watch Oprah and Tiger and vote for Obama.

 

Speaking of Empire and the persistence of old substance beneath the style change in the White House, I hope that some of you saw the courageous left journalist Allan Nairn assessing Obama’s first year in power on the left television show Democracy Now! last January. “Once he became president, by virtue of his actions, just like every US president before him,” Naiirn told the interviewer Amy Goodman, “Obama became a murderer and a terrorist.”  The “US,” Nairn said, “has a machine that spans the globe, that has the capacity to kill, and Obama has kept it set on kill.”

 

Strong words. Actually, “kept the machine set on kill” may be an understatement. As the radical   U.S. foreign policy critic Edward S. Herman has noted, Obama has possibly “exceed[ed George W.] Bush’s [global] bullying and power-projection.” Certainly this is true in relation to Bush’s second term. As Herman explains:

 

“Obama's …Iraq ‘withdrawal’ is a phony, just as his expansion of the Afghan-Pakistan war is real. His collapse in supposedly pushing for a just settlement in Palestine has been complete, ending up with a crude attack on the UN Goldstone Report on Gaza and no resistance whatever to escalated Israeli ethnic cleansing….Obama and his secretary of state are once again threatening Iran with intensified sanctions, if not more...”

 

“…The U.S. collabora[ed] in the overthrow of the elected, populist government of Honduras,” Herman notes, adding that “Bush could hardly have surpassed Obama's atrocious performance in Haiti, where the U.S. response to their devastating earthquake was almost completely military—a lagged occupation, with minimal food-water-medical-shelter aid, and even obstruction to aid as airports were preempted for the U.S. military occupation forces and the landing of Hillary Clinton.”

 

“Elsewhere in Latin America,” Herman notes, “Obama's policies have been regressive, with more open hostility to left regimes in the region, collaboration in the Honduras coup, and acquisition of seven new military bases in Colombia that all send a message of ‘change’ for the worse.”

 

“Across the globe,” Herman writes, “U.S. military bases are expanding, not contracting. The encirclement of Russia and steady stream of war games in the Baltic, Caspian, Mediterranean, and Western Pacific areas continue, the closer engagement with Georgia and efforts to bring it into NATO moves ahead, as do plans for placing missiles along Russia's borders and beyond.” [1]

 

Yikes. As John Pilger noted last October, “Like Bush’s America, Obama’s America is run by some very dangerous people.” [2]

 

War Media

 

The dominant corporate mass media’s coverage of U.S. foreign policy is no magical exception to the rule that the more things change the more they stay the same. Under the standard media rules, deeply internalized by reporters and commentators who want to keep their paychecks coming, Uncle Sam is always at bottom a noble, benevolent, democratic, selfless, altruistic and well-intentioned actor on the global stage. The U.S. is never a vicious, selfish, murderous, and criminal oppressor or an imperialist. The U.S. occasionally makes tragic “mistakes” and tactical errors in the design and execution of its inherently virtuous foreign policies, but those policies are never fundamentally immoral, illegal, or imperial in nature.

 

There is some space for criticism of U.S. militarism in dominant media but only for pragmatic criticism, never for principled moral criticism.  There is room only for critical evaluation of whether or not the policy in question is working – working for “us,” with “us” taken to be synonymous with an empire that accounts for nearly half of the world’s military spending and maintains more than 800 bases spread across more than 130 countries – all in the name of something they call “defense

 

Dominant media routinely repeats and disseminates Uncle Sam’s charges against governments and groups that Washington’s foreign policy elite doesn’t like.  The U.S. is good because Uncle Sam says so and its enemies are bad, for the same basic reason. 

 

People who die or are otherwise harmed by the U.S. military and by Washington’s clients and allies – people like the Palestinians, the Iraqis, the Afghans and the East Timorese – are   “Unworthy Victims.”  They do not merit attention, personalization, empathy, or concern.

 

By contrast, the tribulations of those who suffer at the hands of officially designated enemy regimes and forces are a source of great media focus and concern.  They are “Worthy Victims.”

 

Along the way, those who criticize and (more than that) those who experience U.S. foreign policy as immoral, illegal, and/or imperial are seen as beyond the pale of acceptable debate.  When they are not simply made invisible they are treated as fanatical extremists, crackpot “ideologues” and fringe “fanatics” who do not deserve to be taken seriously.

 

(By the way I never call it “mainstream media.”  Back in the Cold War era, we didn’t call Soviet state television and the official state Soviet newspapers Pravda and Izvestia “mainstream Russian media.”  I will not extend the term “mainstream” to “official state corporate war and entertainment media firms like NBC, CBS, ABC, FOX, and NBC, all part of a communications empire wherein six giant multinational corporations own more than half of all U.S. media print and electronic.)

 

 

Killing Afghan Civilians v. Scaring New Yorkers

 

None of this has ended simply because the president happens now to be an eloquent black Democrat from Chicago instead of a boorish white Republican moron from West Texas.  Dominant U.S. media plays along today with his false claim that Iran poses a significant nuclear threat to the so-called international community (in defiance of the findings of the IAEC and the United States’ own intelligence community), just like it played along with Bush’s lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.  That media continues to ignore U.S. ally Israel’s nuclear arsenal and Israel’s provocative policies of apartheid and occupation.  Dominant mass media continues to denounce Cuba’s authoritarianism and Iran’s authoritarianism and Hugo Chavez’s authoritarianism while ignoring our own “dictatorship or money” (Edward S. Herman and David Peterson) and the arch-repressive practices of many of  “our” allies likes Saudi Arabia, Israel, Egypt, and Columbia.

 

Dominant mass media persists in deceptively portraying Washington’s aggressive and imperial and murderous five-front war of terror in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia as just and “defensive.” It continues to ignore the Obama administration’s deepening militarization of Latin America and Africa. It continues under Obama as under Bush to refuse to blow any kind of serious audible moral whistle on the epic and ongoing crimes of “our” military.

 

Sometimes the callousness of it all just numbs your soul. Here’s one horrific example among many under Obama. In the first of May last year, U.S. air-strikes killed 140 civilians in Bola Boluk, a village in western Afghanistan’s Farah Province. Ninety-three of the dead villagers torn apart by U.S. explosives were children. Just 22 were males 18 years or older. Villagers brought tractor trailers full of the pieces of human bodies to the provincial governor’s office to prove that the casualties had occurred. “Everyone at the governor’s office was crying, watching that shocking scene.”[3]

 

The initial response of the Obama Pentagon to this appalling incident – one of many mass civilian-butchering U.S. aerial killings in Afghanistan since Obama became president – was to absurdly blame the civilian deaths on “Taliban grenades.”  This was a preposterous lie that dominant U.S. media reported without question, without derision. Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed “regret” about the loss of innocent life, but the administration refused to issue an apology or acknowledge U.S. responsibility for the blasting apart of civilian bodies in Farah Province.[4] Dominant war media reported this without disgust.

 

The matter was quickly dropped and forgotten, sent down George Orwell’s memory hole, with deep media complicity, as the Pentagon wrote checks to the Afghan government to give families a couple thousand dollars per child corpse to compensate them for the blasting apart of their little ones.  The U.S. subsequently conducted a dubious “investigation” that reduced the civilian body count drastically and blamed the Taliban for putting civilians in the way of U.S. bombs. The “liberal” media offered no critical commentary.

 

By contrast around the same time last year, there was a brief media frenzy over a very different occurrence, enough to elicit a full apology and to fire a White House official. The problem was that the White House had scared New Yorkers with an ill-advised Air Force One photo-shoot flyover of Manhattan that reminded people of 9/11.[5] 

 

The sickening irony was quite remarkable. Scaring some New Yorkers was a big deal that led to a full presidential apology and the discharge of a White House staffer. Killing more than 100 Afghan civilians was a minor matter that did not require any apology.  Nobody had to be fired.  Nobody in the dominant media sought to comment on the perversity of it all.

 

Invisible Experience, Invisible Commentary

 

Seven months after the Bola Boluk and Manhattan flyover incidents, as The New York Times and other leading “liberal” media outlets joined in the celebration of Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize, a young woman from Bola Boluk was heard to say, "He doesn't deserve the award. He bombed us and left us with nothing, not even a home,” the woman added.[6]

 

She was heard, that is, on the Arab media outlet Al Jazeera.  Her comments never made the CBS or NBC or ABC Evening News or CNN or MSNBC or the front page of the New York Times or the Washington Post, where they belonged. 

 

Neither did the comments of a young Pashtun man who spoke to Al Jazeera on December 10, 2009 - the day that Obama was ridiculously gifted with the Nobel. ”Peace Prize? He’s a killer,” the man said. “Obama,” the man added, “has only brought war to our country.” This man spoke from the village of Armal, where a crowd of 100 gathered around the bodies of 12 people, one family from a single home.  The 12 were killed, witnesses reported, by U.S. Special Forces during a late night raid. "Why are they giving Obama a peace medal?" another village resident asked. "He claims to want to bring security to us but he brings only death.”

 

It was a powerful observation form an angle of experience that cannot be taken seriously in dominant U.S, mass media. 

 

“A Fog of War Moment”

 

Thanks in no small part to that empire’s service to state power, America’s crimes go down “the memory hole” even as they occur,  Thinking about  Obama’s Nobel award earlier this year, I reflected back on some remarkable comments that the British playwright Harold Pinter made while accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005.  In his brilliant and courageous speech, Pinter noted that while “the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, and the ruthless suppression of independent thought” in the former Soviet Union were widely known in the West, the United States’ imperial crimes were hidden beneath “a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.”  Rapacious “America” had slaughtered and crippled millions, both directly and indirectly, through wars big and small, executions, invasions, coups, the sponsorship of dictatorships, the equipping of repressive regimes, “economic sanctions,” and more, Pinter noted.  “But you wouldn’t know it,” Pinter added.  “It never happened,” Pinter observed.” Nothing ever happened.  Even while it was happening it never happened….”

 

Still true! The systematic media disappearance and mystification of U.S. imperial criminality continues to this day. Last Monday, on the CBS Evening News that remarkable and horrific WikiLeaks video showing U.S. Apache helicopter gunners crassly murdering Arab journalists in Iraq got about 30 seconds and was the fourth or fifth story down whereas Tiger Woods’ return to golf was like two minutes and was I think the second story.  That’s typical.

 

Last Wednesday, The New York Time way back on page nine referred to the U.S. helicopter murders as a, quote “fog of war moment…on the streets of Baghdad.”  No it was a one-sided imperial murder moment, consistent with the homicidal and deeply racist military training and beliefs that the American armed forces bring to the Middle East – beliefs and training that are chillingly depicted in the antiwar documentary The Ground Truth.

 

 

Bob Herbert Still Doesn’t Hear Him (Dr. King)

 

Two Saturdays ago, the New York Times’ liberal black columnist Bob Herbert marked the forty-second anniversary of the assassination Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr. by noting that “it took great courage for Dr. King to speak out as he did” against the Vietnam War. “His bold stand,” Herbert wrote, “seems all the more striking in today’s atmosphere, in which moral courage among the …prominent seems…to have disappeared. …More than 4,000 Americans have died in Iraq and more than 1,000 in Afghanistan,” Herbert noted, “where the Obama administration has chosen to escalate rather than to begin a careful withdrawal. Those two wars will ultimately cost us more than $3 trillion. And yet,” Herbert concluded, “the voices in search of peace, in search of an end to the ‘madness,’ in search of the nation-building so desperately needed here in the United States, are feeble indeed.” Herbert’s column was titled “We Still Don’t Hear Him,” with “him” referring to the martyred Dr. King.

 

As one of my Facebook friends wrote me, “[that’s] about the far extreme level of acceptable ‘dissent’ within the mainstream, of which the NYT is the best example.”

 

The key phrase in Herbert’s column was “cost us.”  Cost us? Hello? Herbert’s eloquent column itself does NOT fully HEAR Dr. King’s antiwar stance. King wrote and spoke not only against the Vietnam War’s terrible impact on Americans but also and equally against the terrible crimes that the U.S. committed against Southeast Asians. The people of Indochina, King said in 1967, "must find Americans to be strange liberators” as we “destroy their  families, villages, land” and send them “wander[ing] into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one 'Vietcong'-inflicted injury. So far we have killed a million of them – mostly children.” Further:

 

“They languish” King said, “under our bombs and consider us – not their fellow Vietnamese – the real enemy.  They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers and into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met.  They know they most move or be destroyed by our bombs…they watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their land.  They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy he precious trees….They wander into the towns and see thousands of children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals.  They see the children degraded by our solders as they beg for food.  They see the children selling their sisters to our solders, soliciting for their mothers." [6A]

 

That’s the kind of serious and substantive, principled and moral criticism of U.S. foreign policy you do not hear in U.S. media today or back in the 1960s.

 

“They Have Seen Their Sons and Daughters Killed in Fallujah”

 

According to the respected international journalist Nir Rosen in December 2007, “Iraq has been killed, never to rise again.  The American occupation has been more disastrous than that of the Mongols who sacked Baghdad in the thirteenth century.  Only fools talk of solutions now,” Rosen said, “The only hope is that perhaps the damage can be contained.” [7]

 

Rosen was more right than wrong in this assessment. The invasion of Iraq killed well more than a million people, maimed countless others, and devastated Iraqi infrastructure that had already been crushed by more than a decade of U.S.-imposed so-called economic sanctions that had already killed more than a million.  It led to a gigantic exodus of the Iraqi professional and middle class. 

 

Rosen’s comment was relegated to the margins in a monthly journal called Current History.  It would never have appeared in The New York Times or the Washington Post, on the front page where it belonged.  Doctrinal rules would not have permitted that.

 

I wonder what Nir Rosen would have had to say about the following comment offered by Barack Obama to autoworkers assembled at the General Motors plant in Janesville, Wisconsin on February 13, 2008, just before that state’s Democratic primary: “It's time to stop spending billions of dollars a week trying to put Iraq back together and start spending the money putting America back together.”[8] For those who knew the depth and degree of the destruction inflicted on Iraq by two invasions, one ongoing, and more than a decade of deadly economic sanctions (embargo), this statement was nothing short of obscene.

 

I wonder what Rosen would have made of the following comment that Obama made to the Chicago Council of Global Affairs in November of 2006. “The American people have been extraordinarily resolved” in support of the war in Iraq, Obama said…”They have seen their sons and daughters killed or wounded in the streets of Fallujah.” [9]

 

This was a spine-chilling selection of locales. Fallujah was the site for colossal U.S. war atrocity – the crimes included the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, the targeting even of ambulances and hospitals, and the practical leveling of an entire city – by the U.S. military in April and November of 2004. The town was designated for destruction as an example of the awesome state terror promised to those who dared to resist U.S. power. Not surprisingly, Fallujah became a powerful and instant symbol of American imperialism in the Arab and Muslim worlds.  It was a deeply provocative and insulting place for Obama to have chosen to highlight American sacrifice and “resolve” in the imperialist occupation of Iraq. [10]

 

Nobody who did any serious left due-diligence research on U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama has any business being “surprised” and “disappointed” by his death-dealing performance as “commander in chief.”

 

The Enemy at Home

 

I have a lot more to say about the role that media plays, especially when it comes to so-called “entertainment media” and related to that about why the media’s role may actually be worse than what Noam Chomsky and Anthony

Dimaggio [11]let on. I also of course want and expect to talk about what we can do, which is the biggest question of all. But I’m running out of time so let’s get into all that in the Q and A.

 

I want to conclude with two very different statements made by two very different Americans last Christmas holiday season.  The first statement comes from The Empire’s New Clothes Barack Obama in his New Years’ Radio Address, where he spoke about the successful attack that had just been made against seven U.S. imperial killing machine operatives employed by the CIA and the private mercenary firm Blackwater.  Those killers were killed by a Jordanian suicide bomber as punishment for their role in launching unmanned CIA Predator drone attacks that had killed large numbers of innocent Pakistani civilians. 

 

After praising the dead CIA drone killers as “brave Americans in Afghanistan,” Obama asked U.S. citizens to always remember that “our adversaries are those who would attack our country, not our fellow Americans. Not each other.”

 

What a bunch of bullshit. Let me finish with a very different take on who are real adversaries are from a young Iraq War veteran named Mike Prysner, a fellow who had been forced to actually risk his life in service to the “machine set to kill” – something very different than being like Obama and ordering other people to kill and die while you enjoy the privileges of empire in the corridors of power like other masters of war past and present.

 

After relating his inability to participate any further in the deeply racist and de-humanizing conduct of U.S. foreign and military policy in the Middle East, Prysner got serious about the real threat to “homeland security” in the United States:

 

"I threw families on to the street in Iraq,” Prysner said, “only to come home and see families thrown on to the street in this county in this tragic and unnecessary foreclosure crisis.” Reflecting on how the invasion of Iraq involved working class Americans subjugating working class Iraqis while the wealthy owners of vast and distant corporate entitles like Boeing and Raytheon and Halliburton and Blackwater enjoyed the profits of death, Prysner reflected on his powerful realization “that our real enemies are not in some distant land. They're not people whose names we don't know and whose culture we don't understand. The enemy is people we know …and people we can identify. The enemy is a system that wages war when it's profitable. The enemy is the CEOs who lay us off from our jobs when it's profitable. It's the insurance companies who deny us health care when it's profitable. It's the banks who take away our homes when it's profitable. Our enemy is not 5000 miles away. They are right here at home.” [12]

 

In the 128 self-composed words I just read, young working class Mike Prysner spoke more truth than the Great 49 year old Harvard Law graduate and bourgeois Speechifier Barack Obama has spoken in the many hundreds of all-knowing, fake-progressive and (in fact) deeply conservative orations he has given over the last eight years..

 

“Our enemy is right here at home.” Exactly.  It prominently includes the corporate masters of Empire, who profit from endless one-sided conflicts that put Americans at risk while providing cover for an ever-deepening assault on civil liberties and sucking up resources that need to be invested in addressing the growing mountain of unmet social needs at home and abroad. It includes the Masters of War Media who lie and deceive and delete and distort and “hide in their mansions while young people’s blood flows out of their bodies and gets buried in the mud.”

 

Thank you very much.

 

* This is an extended and  merged version of shorter comments given at two recent and separate speaking engagements: “Holding Up the Mirror to Empire” (University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, April 11, 2010 sponsored by AWARE [Alliance Against War and Racism] and the International Socialist Oranization [ISO], panel shared with Kathy Kelly) and “Collective Irresponsibility: Examining Our Relationships to Distant Conflict” (Columbia College,Chicago,IL, April 13, 2010, sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee, Art Activists at Columbia College, and Critical Encounters: Fact and Faith, panel shared with Anthony Dimaggio)

 

Paul Street’s next book is The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, July/August 2010). Street (paulstreet99@yahoo.com) is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder,CO: Paradigm, 2008); Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis ( New York : Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); Segregated School: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era ( New York: Routledge, 2005); and Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008).

 

 

SELECTED ENDNOTES

 

1. Edward S. Herman, “Obama and the Steady Drift to the Right,” Z Magazine (March 2010), p. 9.

 

2. John Pilger, “Media Lies and the War Drive Against Iran,” Pakistan Daily, October 15, 2009, read at http://www.daily.pk/media-lies-and-the-war-drive-against-iran-12189/

 

3. Carlotta Gall and Taimoor Shah, "Civilian Deaths Imperil Support for Afghan War," New York Times, May 6, 2009.

 

4. Gall and Shah, “Civilian Deaths;”

 

5. Christina Boyle, "President Obama Calls Air Force One Flyover ‘Mistake' After Low-Flying Plane Terrifies New York," New York Daily News, April 28, 2009; Michel Muskai, "Presidential Plane's Photo-Op Over New York Coast as Much as $357,000," Los Angeles Times, May 9, 2009; Peter Nicholas, "Louis Caldera Resigns Over Air Force One Flyover Fiasco," Los Angeles Time, May 9, 2009.

 

6. Aljazeera English, "Afghans Anger at Obama's Nobel Peace Prize," YouTube (December 10, 2009) qt www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBHrnQTinGY&feature=related

 

6A. Martin, Luther King, Jr., "A Time to Break Silence," New York City, April 4, 1967, read text at http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2564.htm

 

7. Nir Rosen, “The Death of Iraq,”Current History (December 2007), p. 31.

 

8. WIFR Television, CBS 23, Rockford, Illinois,   “Obama Speaks at General Motors in Janesville,” February 13, 2008, read at http://www.wifr.com/morningshow/headlines/15618592.html

 

9. Barack Obama, “A Way Forward in Iraq,” Speech to Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Chicago Illinois (November 20, 2006), available online at http://obama.senate.gov/speech/061120-a_way_forward _in_iraq/index.html.

 

10. Michael Mann, Incoherent Empire (New York: Verso, 2005, p. xii); Anthony Arnove, Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal (New York, 2006), pp. 27-28; Paul Street, “Vilsacking Iraq,” ZNet Magazine (December 22, 2006).

 

11. Author of two recent important books on the propagandistic pro-war/pro-empire content of dominant U.S. media: When Media Goes to War: Hegemonic Discourse, Public Opinion, and The Limits of Dissent (New York: Monthly Review, 2010); Mass Media, Mass Propaganda: Examining American News in the “War on Terror” (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008),

 

12. Mike Prysner, “Speech to Iraq Veterans Against the War,” December 20, 2009, view and hear at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akm3nYN8aG8