Chalmers Johnson - Nemesis - The Last Days of the American Republic

40. Dean, “Presidential Signing Statements.”

41. Aziz Huq, “Constitutional License,” TomPaine.com, January 24, 2006, http://www.tompaine.com/print/constitutional_license.php.

42. See Alfred W. McCoy, “Why the McCain Torture Ban Won’t Work,” Tom Dispatch.com, February 8, 2006, http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=57336.

43. Quoted by Savage, “Bush Could Bypass Torture Ban.”

44. Anthony Legouranis, “Tortured Logic: What I Learned as a Military Interrogator in Iraq,” New York Times, February 28, 2006.

45. Feldman, “Who Can Check the President?”

46. Al Gore, “U.S. Constitution in Grave Danger,” January 16, 2006, http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/printer_011606Y.shtml.

47. See Chalmers Johnson, “The Military-Industrial Man,” TomDispatch.com,, September 14, 2004, http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=1818; and “My Congressman Stands for Money, Not for Me—And, What’s Even Worse, There’s No Way I Can Get Rid of Him,” Los Angeles Times, September 26, 2004.

48. Matt Kelley and Jim Drinkard, “Secret Military Spending Gets Little Oversight,” USA Today, November 8, 2005; Paul Sisson, “Defense Dollars for Everyone,” North County Times (San Diego), July 17, 2005, p. E5.

49. Onell R. Soto, “Rep. Cunningham Resigns; Took $2.4 Million in Bribes,” San Diego Union-Tribune, November 29, 2005; Soto, “Feds Seek 10 Years for Cunningham,” San Diego Union-Tribune, February 18, 2006; Finlay Lewis, Jerry Kammer, and Joe Cantlupe, “Contractor Admits Bribing Cunningham,” San Diego Union-Tribune, February 25, 2006.

50. Laura Rozen,” ’Duke’ of Deception,” American Prospect, February 2006, http://www.prospect.org/web/printfriendly-view.ww?id=10816.

51. Bill Moyers, “Restoring the Public Trust,” TomPaine.com, February 24, 2006, http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/02/24/restoring_the_public_trust.php.

52. Matt Kelley and Jim Drinkard, “Contractor Spends Big on Key Lawmakers,” USA Today, November 20, 2005.

53. Dean Calbreath, “The Power of Persuasion: Poway Businessman Brent Wilkes Funneled Campaign Donations to Key Lawmakers as He Tried to Build a Defense Empire,” San Diego Union-Tribune, February 5, 2006.

54. Wes Allison and Anita Kumar, “Fla. Senators Get Funds for Military Companies, Many of Them Donors,” St. Petersburg Times (FL), March 11, 2006.

55. Moyers, “Restoring the Public Trust.”

56. Ibid. Also see Larry Margasak and Sharon Theimer, Associated Press, “Dollar Trail from D.C. to Islands,” CBS News, May 3, 2005; Rep. George Miller (Democrat from California), “New Developments—Abramoff, DeLay, and the Northern Mariana Islands,” May 6, 2005, http://www.house.gov/georgemiller/marianasupdate.html; Dennis Cook, Associated Press, “Controversial Lobbyist Had Close Contact with Bush Team,” USA Today, May 6, 2005, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-05-06-abramoff-bush_x.htm; Eamon Javers, “Op-Eds for Sale,” Business Week, December 15, 2005; Byron York, “Hillary, Saipan, Sweatshops, Campaign Cash—and Abramoff,” National Review, March 10, 2006.

57. Ken Silverstein, “The Great American Pork Barrel,” Harper’s Magazine, July 2005, http://www.harpers.org/TheGreatAmericanPorkBarrel.html.

58. Ibid.

59. Quoted by David Wood, Newhouse News Service, “Pentagon’s ’Black’ Budgets Ripe for Corruption,” San Diego Union-Tribune, December 2, 2005. Also see Dan Morgan, “Classified Spending On the Rise,” Washington Post, August 27, 2003; Drew Brown, “Classified Military Spending Reaches Highest Level Since Cold War,” Knight Ridder Newspapers, May 19, 2006.

60. Moyers, “Inside the Pentagon.” See also William D. Hartung, “Dick Cheney and the Power of the Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone,” in How Much Are You Making on the War, Daddy? A Quick and Dirty Guide to War Profiteering in the Bush Administration (New York: Nation Books, 2004), pp. 23-43.

61. Winslow T. Wheeler, “How Congress Sacrifices Readiness for Pork,” Counter-punch, January 24, 2006; Emanuel Pastreich, “Rebels Within the U.S. Federal System,” Center for Defense Information, January 10, 2006.

62. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2004.

63. Center for Defense Information, “Fiscal Year 2001 Add-Ons: Congress’s Unrequested Spending for the Pentagon,” July 28, 2000, http://cdi.org/issues/budget/add-onsOl.html; Center for Defense Information, “Fiscal Year 2002 Add-Ons,” January 16, 2002, http://www.cdi.org/issues/budget/add-ons02-pr.cfm.

64. Editorial, “Kabuki Congress,” New York Times, March 6, 2006. See also Editorial, “The Death of the Intelligence Panel,” New York Times, March 9, 2006.

65. Brian Foley, “Playing with Fire: Congress and Executive Power,” Jurist, January 9, 2006, http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/forumy/2006/01/playing-with-fire-congress-and.php.

66. McCoy, “McCain Ban Won’t Work.”

67. Quoted by Eric Schmitt, “Senate Approves Limiting Rights of U.S. Detainees,” New York Times, November 11, 2005.

68. Foley, “Playing with Fire.”

69. Quoted by Woods, “All the President’s Power.”

70. Bob Herbert, “The Torturers Win,” New York Times, February 20, 2006.

71. Anatol Lieven, “Decadent America Must Give Up Imperial Ambitions,” Financial Times, November 29, 2005.

72. Louis Uchitelle, “U.S. and Trade Partners Maintain Unhealthy Long-Term Relationship,” New York Times, September 18, 2004; Christopher Swann,”U.S. Deficit Data Fuel Anxieties on Dollar,” Financial Times, March 15, 2006.

73. Martin Crutsinger, “U.S. Trade Deficit Hits All-Time High,” Associated Press, February 10, 2006.

74. Keith Bradsher, “China Passes Japan in Foreign Exchange Reserves,” New York Times, March 29, 2006.

75. Marshall Auerback, “What Could Go Wrong in 2005?” TomDispatch.com, January 22, 2005, http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2141.

76. See the discussion by Doug Dowd, “U.S. Military Expenditures: Beneficial or Harmful? Or, Who Benefits and Who Pays?” State of Nature, Winter 2006, http://www.stateofnature.org/milex.html. See also Robert B. Reich, “John Maynard Keynes: His Radical Idea that Governments Should Spend Money They Don’t Have May Have Saved Capitalism,” Time, March 29, 1999, http://www.time.com/time/timelOO/scientist/profile/keynes.html.

77. Wikipedia, “Permanent Arms Economy,” February 10, 2006, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_arms_economy.

78. Andrew Gumbel, “How the War Machine Is Driving the U.S. Economy,” Independent, January 6, 2004.

79. Wikipedia, “Military Keynesianism,” February 5, 2006, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Keynesianism; Michael Kidron, “A Permanent Arms Economy,” International Socialism 1, no. 28 (Spring 1967), http://www.marxists.org/archive/kidron/works/1967/xx/permarms.htm.

80. Ronald Steel, Temptations of a Superpower (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 61.

81. See John L. Boies, Buying for Armageddon: Business, Society, and Military Spending Since the Cuban Missile Crisis (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994).

82. Gumbel, “War Machine”; Fred Kaplan, “The Military’s Bloated Budget,” Slate, September 12, 2003.

83. Jonathan Karp, “Pet Projects Prevail in U.S. Military-Spending Boom,” Wall Street journal, June 16, 2006.

84. Jeff Bliss, “U.S. War Spending to Rise 44% to $9.8 Billion a Month, Report Says,” Bloomberg.com, March 17, 2006, http://truthout.org/docs_2006/printer_031706B.shtml.