05-12-2014, 07:10 AM
(This post was last modified: 05-12-2014, 08:49 AM by Peter Lemkin.)
If there ever was any doubt as to Obama's Trojan Horse image of 'Peacenik' and 'Change One Can Believe In'.....this should put another nail in that coffin!....
We go to Alice Slater, New York director of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and a member of the Abolition 2000 coordinating committee.
You're deeply concerned about Ashton Carter being named secretary of defense.
ALICE SLATER: I am.
AMY GOODMAN: Why?
ALICE SLATER: Because it's business as usual. I mean, it's the perpetuation of what Eisenhower warned about the military-industrial complex. This is somebody that has rotated inside and outside of industry. He's advised Goldman Sachs and other business companies on what kind of military equipment, you know, they shouldn't be manufacturing, and they've been doing deals for years. And he was brought in because Hagel was kind of likewell, not exactly the peace movement, but they were going to ratchet down dumb wars, anyway, which is what Obama said. And now it looks like we're just expanding the whole war machine. And he's a perfect candidate for this. I mean, it's really pathetic, because he actually wrote an op-ed that we should be bombing North Korea's nuclear power plant. And
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, I'd like to go to that, actually, that op-ed. In 2006, in a Washington Post op-ed, written with former Defense Secretary William Perry, Ashton Carter urged the Bush administration to launch a pre-emptive strike against North Korea if the country continued with plans to conduct a test launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile. In the piece headlined, "If Necessary, Strike and Destroy," Perry and Carter wrote, quote, "Should the United States allow a country openly hostile to it and armed with nuclear weapons to perfect an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of delivering nuclear weapons to U.S. soil? We believe not." They went on to say, quote, "if North Korea persists in its launch preparations, the United States should immediately make clear its intention to strike and destroy the North Korean Taepodong missile before it can be launched."
ALICE SLATER: And actually, Cheney criticized them. The peaceful Cheney said they had gone too far. That's where we're at now. It's the same gang. I mean, I'm particularly upset with Ashton Carter because I'm so familiar with the whole nuclear disarmament process, or re-armament process, I should say. Right now our government is planning to spend $1 trillion over the next 30 years for new bomb factories, delivery systems, missiles, submarines, airplanes and new nuclear weapons. And he has been part of the push, particularly starting when Clinton, President Clinton, signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1993, which we had been working for all our adult lives. They had this little kicker that they allowed laboratory tests and subcritical tests. What's a subcritical test? They're blowing up plutonium at the test site a thousand feet below the desert floorthey've done 26 of themwith high explosives, but it doesn't have a
AMY GOODMAN: Where?
ALICE SLATER: In Nevada, at the Nevada test site. And because it doesn't have a chain reaction, Clinton said, "That's not a test. We can do this." Like "I didn't inhale, I didn't have sex, and I'm not doing nuclear testing." And that's why India tested, because India objected, after the test ban was signed, to the technical laboratory tests and the subcritical tests and said, "If you don't preclude that in the test ban," which Carter was advising at that time, "we're not going to sign it." And then India went and developed their weapons. And
AMY GOODMAN: He advised Clinton on deploying a missile shield in Alaska?
ALICE SLATER: Well, he was talking to him that it would be OK, you know, that it didn't violate the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. That was his advice. Well, Russia disagreed. And then Clinton started the bigthe infrastructure for these missilethe expansion of the missiles. We had a treaty since 1972 with Russia, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. In order to stop the missile race, we wouldn't build anti-missiles, so we wouldn't need so many missiles. And Bush actually walked out of the treaty. That wasn't Carter, but they started the inroads. And now we have missiles in Poland, Romania, Yugoslavianot Yugoslavia, Turkey. We took missiles out of Turkey. Kennedy took missiles out of Turkey in order to get the Soviets out of Cuba, and now we've got them back in there. And everybody's saying Putin's a bad guy; meanwhile, we're pushing them right up against the wall.
We go to Alice Slater, New York director of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and a member of the Abolition 2000 coordinating committee.
You're deeply concerned about Ashton Carter being named secretary of defense.
ALICE SLATER: I am.
AMY GOODMAN: Why?
ALICE SLATER: Because it's business as usual. I mean, it's the perpetuation of what Eisenhower warned about the military-industrial complex. This is somebody that has rotated inside and outside of industry. He's advised Goldman Sachs and other business companies on what kind of military equipment, you know, they shouldn't be manufacturing, and they've been doing deals for years. And he was brought in because Hagel was kind of likewell, not exactly the peace movement, but they were going to ratchet down dumb wars, anyway, which is what Obama said. And now it looks like we're just expanding the whole war machine. And he's a perfect candidate for this. I mean, it's really pathetic, because he actually wrote an op-ed that we should be bombing North Korea's nuclear power plant. And
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, I'd like to go to that, actually, that op-ed. In 2006, in a Washington Post op-ed, written with former Defense Secretary William Perry, Ashton Carter urged the Bush administration to launch a pre-emptive strike against North Korea if the country continued with plans to conduct a test launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile. In the piece headlined, "If Necessary, Strike and Destroy," Perry and Carter wrote, quote, "Should the United States allow a country openly hostile to it and armed with nuclear weapons to perfect an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of delivering nuclear weapons to U.S. soil? We believe not." They went on to say, quote, "if North Korea persists in its launch preparations, the United States should immediately make clear its intention to strike and destroy the North Korean Taepodong missile before it can be launched."
ALICE SLATER: And actually, Cheney criticized them. The peaceful Cheney said they had gone too far. That's where we're at now. It's the same gang. I mean, I'm particularly upset with Ashton Carter because I'm so familiar with the whole nuclear disarmament process, or re-armament process, I should say. Right now our government is planning to spend $1 trillion over the next 30 years for new bomb factories, delivery systems, missiles, submarines, airplanes and new nuclear weapons. And he has been part of the push, particularly starting when Clinton, President Clinton, signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1993, which we had been working for all our adult lives. They had this little kicker that they allowed laboratory tests and subcritical tests. What's a subcritical test? They're blowing up plutonium at the test site a thousand feet below the desert floorthey've done 26 of themwith high explosives, but it doesn't have a
AMY GOODMAN: Where?
ALICE SLATER: In Nevada, at the Nevada test site. And because it doesn't have a chain reaction, Clinton said, "That's not a test. We can do this." Like "I didn't inhale, I didn't have sex, and I'm not doing nuclear testing." And that's why India tested, because India objected, after the test ban was signed, to the technical laboratory tests and the subcritical tests and said, "If you don't preclude that in the test ban," which Carter was advising at that time, "we're not going to sign it." And then India went and developed their weapons. And
AMY GOODMAN: He advised Clinton on deploying a missile shield in Alaska?
ALICE SLATER: Well, he was talking to him that it would be OK, you know, that it didn't violate the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. That was his advice. Well, Russia disagreed. And then Clinton started the bigthe infrastructure for these missilethe expansion of the missiles. We had a treaty since 1972 with Russia, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. In order to stop the missile race, we wouldn't build anti-missiles, so we wouldn't need so many missiles. And Bush actually walked out of the treaty. That wasn't Carter, but they started the inroads. And now we have missiles in Poland, Romania, Yugoslavianot Yugoslavia, Turkey. We took missiles out of Turkey. Kennedy took missiles out of Turkey in order to get the Soviets out of Cuba, and now we've got them back in there. And everybody's saying Putin's a bad guy; meanwhile, we're pushing them right up against the wall.
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass