Biden, unlike Obama, not overpromising on closing Gitmo

President Barack Obama signed Executive Order 13492 just 2 days into his presidency ordering the closing of the American gulag at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

At the time 245 detainees were still held there, down from nearly 800 at the height of U.S. hysteria over Middle East terrorism. Many were innocent dupes rounded up in Afghanistan to secure an American bounty.

Obama trumpeted this shameful prison, where the concept of prisoner justice doesn’t exist, would be history within a year. Congress, still fanning the flames of Islamophobia, said no by prohibiting funds for its closure nor approval of sending some of the imagined bad guys to supermax prisons.

Gitmo survived Obama’s first year and the seven following. Obama’s successor Trumped loved Gitmo. He got rid of just a single prisoner there in his four years, leaving his successor Biden with 40 remaining hapless souls that cost Joe Taxpayer $25 million dollars annually.

Now Biden hopes to finish the job his former boss started twelve and a half years ago. He’s quietly working the machinery of government to make Gitmo history by the end of his term. No one year promise from Biden. He’s a realist.

The disgusting Islamophobia that infects America is still lurking in Congress to keep 40 hapless souls imprisoned in the shame of America till they die of old age…or suicide.

Biden’s first Pentagon budget increase small…but still an increase

President Biden’s first Pentagon budget disappoints. While being transformational on domestic affairs, Biden is same old, same old in foreign policy; more money for the military.

He’s proposed $753 billion for defense, up 1.8% over Trump’s last budget of $740 million.

America deserved a decrease for several reasons. Why an increase when America is winding down one war, Afghanistan, this year, and negotiating an end to its neighboring war in Iraq. That alone should save billions to house and supply roughly 6,000 troops in 2 countries who want them out.

We could also save billions by reducing our large troop contingents in Germany and South Korea. There is no need for 28,000 troops in South Korea and 36,000 troops in Germany. Neither country is under threat while both have the capability to handle any future enemy. A big reason they do little to prepare for potential threat is reliance on Uncle Sam.

They spend their treasure to uplift their societies. America does the reverse; spending its treasure to prop up client states while letting American infrastructure crumble.

Speaking of reverse, how about American’s reverse Monroe doctrine. It’s supposed to be that foreign countries must stay out of America’s neighborhood. But it’s morphed into the whole world becoming America’s neighborhood in which only America can interfere.

This simply serves the interests of the Military-Industrial Complex which need new Cold War against both Russia and China to keep the expanding defense spending.

Defense spending is a misnomer. Ever larger defense budgets are mainly offensive in two senses. They promote offensive U.S. militarism worldwide. They are an offense to the need for investment in America and its people suffering to feed the beast of unbridled militarism.

Biden mimicking Trump’s ‘shortsightedness on Open Skies Treaty

President Joe is accomplishing and plugging for many good things on domestic issues. But he continues to flounder on foreign policy.

His latest miss step is putting the final nail into the Open Skies

Treaty that Trump dumped just 2 months before leaving office.

Ratified in 2002, it allows the U.S. and Russia to spy on each other’s military movements with unarmed reconnaissance flights. Besides providing mutual, valuable military information of each other, it helped bind together the world’s 2 nuclear superpowers to reduce tensions that could lead to misunderstanding, even war.

Dumping valuable nuclear and military safeguards with Russia was a core policy for Trump. He withdrew from the 1987 INF Treaty that had secured removal of nearly 2,700 American and Russian intermediate range nuclear weapons.

He left office without renewing for five years the New Start Treaty first implemented in 2011 and renewed in 2016. Set to expire February 21, 2021, Biden’s first call to Russia’s Putin was to complete the renewal good till February, 2026.

Why Biden has whiffed on doing the same for Open Skies is a mystery. He campaigned against Trump’s foolishness, calling it ‘shortsighted.’ Open Skies was especially helpful to U.S. European allies who used it to keep tabs on Russian troop movements on their borders, such as the recent buildup near Ukraine.

Biden and Putin hold a summit in just 9 days. Completing the withdrawal from Open Skies casts a pall on it securing any new substantive arms control agreements.

Instead of ‘open skies’ we have ‘open season’ to escalate tensions in America’s new Cold War against Russia.

Uncle Sam, please arrest Dan Ellsberg for violating 1917 Espionage Act

Danial Ellsberg, 90, is not going quietly into that goodnight. He was prosecuted in 1973 under the Espionage Act for pilfering and disseminating the Pentagon Papers.  Ellsberg only escaped life in prison because Nixon’s ‘dirty tricks’ against him resulted in all charges being dismissed.

That was only right because Ellsberg wasn’t spying, aiding a U.S. enemy or seeking the overthrow of our government. He was simply spilling the beans on our criminal war in Vietnam that killed several million for no valid reason at all. His spillage helped degrade support for the war and arguably hastened its end.

The Espionage Act of 1917 and its evil twin, the Sedition Act a year later, were primarily used to stifle dissent and free speech during WWI. Several dozen newspapers were banned from the mails and several thousand war dissenters were jailed in one of the worst episodes curtailing free speech in U.S. history. Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs garnered nearly a million votes for prez in 1920 while incarcerated for verbally opposing U.S. involvement in WWI.  

Ellsberg has spent the last 48 years working to end senseless U.S. wars and promote nuclear disarmament. His latest ploy is releasing classified government documents from 1958 that were purloined along with the Pentagon Papers. They reveal top U.S. military officials were lobbying Ike to nuke China over the Taiwan issue involving disputed islands Quemoy and Matsu.

At 90 Ellsberg isn’t concerned about decades in the clink if indicted and convicted for releasing these still top secret archives. He’s betting on his case going to the Supreme Court which may mercifully put the Espionage Act in the unconstitutional penalty box  after 104 years.

If so, Ellsberg can use his remaining free time in society continuing his valiant struggle to end senseless wars and defuse the race to nuclear Armageddon.