It’s the Economics, [REDACTED]

SOMEWHERE IN AFGHANISTAN—Two months ago long-time White House correspondent Helen Thomas got fired by her employer, the Hearst newspaper conglomerate, in response to her off-the-cuff slam at Israel. I criticized the firing on free speech grounds.

“Free speech must be defended no matter what—even that of cranky anti-Semitic columnists (if that’s what Thomas is/was),” I wrote. “Unless we are truly free to say what we think—without fear of reprisal—free speech is not a right. It is merely a permission.”

I received many letters in response. Most people disagreed with me.

A letter from Joseph Just was typical, but better written than most (which is why I quote it here):

“Ms. Thomas has been denied not one of her constitutional rights. She faces no fine, legal censure or criminal charges for saying what she said. Her immunity from the threat of such sanction (rather than immunity from being, shall we say, ‘asked to resign’) is what the First Amendment protects. The only reprisal Ms. Thomas has materially suffered (in addition to the public opprobrium directed at her) is the loss of her job at Hearst. She held her job at the pleasure of her employers, and if they decide that due her comments they no longer want her around, they are not obligated to retain her. She is not—indeed, none of us is—entitled to a forum…particularly a paid one.”

Legally, Just is right. The First Amendment does not protect us from economic reprisals. I was arguing that employers ought to choose not to fire people for speaking their minds.

Unfortunately, employers seem to be whacking people for what they say outside of work more than ever. Countless workers have gotten canned for statements they made on non-work-related blogs and social networking sites. Even more worrisome, many citizens don’t have a problem with that. Even self-described leftists have embraced the libertarian extremist view that you have the right to say whatever you want—but don’t expect to be able to feed yourself or your family if you do.

Posters at Democratic Underground, a left-of-center discussion site frequented by that rarest and most appreciated of creature, balls-out Democrats, has long been a community I’ve been able to count upon. On the Thomas issue, however, they sound like Sean Hannity. “Private organizations aren’t and shouldn’t be required to put up with speech they don’t agree with,” said one poster.” “Free speech is not guaranteed to be speech without consequences,” wrote another.

“Freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from criticism,” argued a third. “It means that you can say what you want without the threat of being thrown in jail.”

Funny, these same libertarians would have freaked out if the artists who created the Danish Mohammed cartoons had all gotten fired by their newspaper.

True, the First Amendment doesn’t protect your right to keep your gig as a community banker even though you wear a swastika T-shirt and whistle the Horst Wessel song on your lunch break.

But it ought to.

If the First Amendment is to truly protect freedom of speech, it must allow Americans to say and think whatever the hell they want, no matter how outrageous. So the First Amendment should be expanded to prohibit economic reprisals.

As things stand, the First Amendment is pure sophistry, a bad joke. A right to free speech, ostensibly protected in order to encourage the vigorous exchange and discussion of ideas that make a society truly free, is meaningless if a person risks getting fired each time he opens his mouth. While it is true that some people will decide that the risk of professional opprobrium and unemployment is worth it, most people won’t. And don’t.

Consider the other basic right guaranteed under the First Amendment: freedom of worship. Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act makes it illegal for an employer to fire you because of your religion (or lack thereof). (There’s an exception for employers that are religious groups.) The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has filed numerous federal lawsuits against companies it accused of reprisals against employers due to their religious preference.

Why is religious expression granted greater protection than, say, political speech? It’s not because religion is inherently less offensive. To many people, religion is itself offensive.

The distinction is arbitrary and, ironically, wholly political: in the secular American republic, you have the right to say that your God is better than anyone else’s God without fear of losing your job. If Helen Thomas had thrown down a Muslim prayer carpet on the White House lawn and prayed toward Mecca, it would have been offensive to many people—she’d still be working.

Another way to examine my proposed expansion of free speech protections is to look at it from the standpoint of an employer. What would a boss stand to lose if the First Amendment were strengthened?

Certainly, employers would lose a measure of control over their workers. They would risk embarrassment. But they would also gain a big measure of CYA: when one of their staff did or said something outrageous (but constitutionally protected), they could point to the First Amendment and shrug their shoulders. In the Helen Thomas example, Hearst execs could say: “What can we do? She has the right to say whatever the hell she wants.”

Which of course she should.

(Ted Rall is in Afghanistan to cover the war and research a book. He is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto,” which will be published in September by Seven Stories Press. His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2010 TED RALL

Thanks to WikiLeaker, Afghan War Will End Soon

MUMBAI–“An appalling irresponsible act.” That’s how General James Nattis, fresh at the helm of U.S. Central Command, characterizes the release of more than 76,000 classified Pentagon reports released by the website WikiLeaks.

You may recall that the Pentagon, headquarters of the Department of Defense, is the same outfit that loaded $24 billion in $100 bills onto shrinkwrapped pallets and loaded the cash onto C-130 transport planes bound for Iraq–guarded by enlisted men who earn $20,000 a year. Not one of those Benjamins has ever heard from since. Which, given that the money was supposed to be paid to corrupt tribal sheikhs, is just as well. Don’t be surprised if you see contractors installing one of those great a new Gunnite pool at the house belonging to your recently discharged veteran neighbor.

So anyway, when a Pentagon biggie calls someone irresponsible, take them seriously. These guys know from irresponsibility.

Speaking of behavior that falls short of the highest ethical standards (and is highly amusing), the involuntarily declassified material contains some real gems. My current fave–there will, no doubt, be others, for I am fickle and the material is vast–comes from an August 2007 report that explains some of the ways Pakistan uses the billions in U.S. taxdollars Bush and Obama send it.

Based in Waziristan in Pakistan’s western Tribal Areas, the Haqqani network is a neo-Taliban-affiliated Islamist organization led by Sirajuddin Haqqani and his father Jalaluddin Haqqani. Officially, the Haqqanis are American targets because they harbor members of Al Qaeda and are involved in weapons smuggling across the Afghan border. Unofficially–on the ground, as they say–things are different.

Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency (its equivalent of our CIA), is supposed to help the U.S. arrest and/or kill the Haqqanis. That’s why the U.S. pays the ISI. Instead, the ISI pays the Haqqanis. With U.S. money.

Which is why, when you lose your house to foreclosure, the only help you get from Obama is a feigned expression of vague concern.

Anyway, the ISI hires the Haqqanis to carry out interesting projects. For example, Pakistan used your money to hire Haqqani assassins to kill Indian road engineers and workers in Nimruz province, in western Afghanistan. Going rate: $15,000 to $30,000 each.

Hey, the Haqqanis still have their houses. No doubt with Gunnite pools.

The coolest and weirdest ISI-Haqqani business deal concerns 1,000 motorcycles. The ISI shipped the bikes to the Haqqanis for use in suicide bomb attacks in Khost and Logar provinces. Let’s hope they at least had the decency to buy cool, American-made Harleys so that some of our dough makes its way back here. Besides, who wants to spend the afterlife tooling around on a moped?

So, back to the issue of irresponsible behavior. U.S. government, meet kettle.

It has been pointed out that the WikiLeaks documents don’t reveal much that is new. We already knew that Pakistan was our frenemy. We knew that drone planes kill more wedding guests than terrorists. We didn’t want to admit it, but we already kind of knew we were losing. The starred headline involves the likelihood that the Taliban have surface-to-air missiles.

But the Wikileaks leaks are nevertheless a game-changer. They confirm what those few of us who opposed this war from the start have been saying all along. They prove that the military sees things the same way we do. So that’s the end of the debate. The war is an atrocity and a mistake. Everyone agrees.

Public support for the war was already waning. Just 43 percent of the public still backs “the good war.” The leaks mark the beginning of the end of one of a stupid country’s countless stupid misadventures. I don’t see what else might have accomplished the same thing so quickly.

Thanks to the leaker, thousands of lives will be saved in Afghanistan. Hundreds of U.S. soldiers will live out normal lives. Billions of dollars will stop pouring into the pockets of the Pakistanis. If that’s irresponsible, well, call me a fan of irresponsibility.

(Ted Rall is in Afghanistan to cover the war and research a book. He is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto,” which will be published in September by Seven Stories Press. His website is tedrall.com.)

THE IDIOCRACY FACTOR

How U.S. Ignorance Helped Doom the Afghan War

Americans’ lack of knowledge about Afghanistan is virtually limitless. Which matters, because the U.S. is at war there. And which explains why the American military is losing its longest war.

During my 2001 trip, where I covered the Taliban defeat at the Battle of Kunduz for the Village Voice and KFI radio, I met a British reporter who offered an amusing prescription for American military action. “If the average American cannot identify three cities in a country,” he suggested, “the U.S. should not invade it.”

Given that the average American doesn’t know their state capital, much less three cities in, say, Canada, this would transform us into a pacifist society overnight.

More appalling than Joe and Jane Sixpack’s ignorance about Afghanistan is the doltishness of the official media. If print and broadcast journalists get the facts wrong, how can the public (or the military) be expected to do better? To cite one tiny example, U.S. newspapers routinely refer to the citizens of Afghanistan as “Afghanis.” Afghanis are the national currency; the people are Afghans. Dammit.

On a broader level, the Afghan war document trove leaked by WikiLeaks has prompted many to ask: Why didn’t the media question the war against Afghanistan before now?

Mostly, U.S. state media didn’t want to know anything that questioned the Bush-Obama Administration’s official line: 9/11 came out of Afghanistan, we have to prevent Al Qaeda from turning the country into a land of terrorist jungle gyms, and oh, yeah, we should do something about opium and burqas too.

People like Ahmed Rashid, the Pakistani journalist who wrote “Taliban,” tried repeatedly to get the world to pay attention to a different take. Pakistan, not Afghanistan, was the real danger in the region. In Afghanistan, Karzai government was underfunded and overcorrupt and widely considered illegitimate. The U.S. sent in troops to shoot and bomb when they ought to have delivered construction equipment to build the infrastructure necessary to form a coherent state and viable Afghan economy.

Rashid wrote books. Wonks bought them and read them, but the political leadership ignored them. I wrote books. Ditto. But it didn’t make a difference. It is shocking and disgusting that President Obama listened to people who knew nothing about Afghanistan while ignoring those who do.

Countless personal experiences confirmed my impression that reporters “parachuted in” to cover wars for brief assignments could never deliver the nuanced, detailed, accurate coverage necessary for American leaders and the public to make informed decisions.

In ’01 CBS’ correspondents sent to cover the invasion flew straight to Pakistan, only to get stuck there because the Khyber Pass was closed. (Anyone familiar with the region knew that.) I had a brief discussion with the network about my plan to go in via Tajikistan. A producer told me I would never make it. “The mountain passes are already snowed over,” he said confidently, looking out his window at Manhattan traffic. “There’s six feet of snow there.” I made it. No snow. Not a single flake.

This reminds me of D-Day. Civil affairs detachments that accompanied the first wave of troops at Omaha Beach brought tons of food to feed French civilians, whom the Allied military believed to be starving. Though hunger was indeed widespread in occupied France, warehouses in Normandy were bursting with food; Allied bombing raids had cut the train lines that carried Norman produce to the rest of France. “Plenty of food,” officers wired Eisenhower. “Send shoes.”

French feet hadn’t seen new shoes for four years.

In 2001 the Village Voice committed to me only after their first attempt to get a reporter “in country” failed. As Dave Barry says, I am not making this up: the poor guy got himself embedded with the Navy. He spent the war on the deck of a ship floating in the Indian Ocean taking photos of cruise missile launches. What part of “landlocked nation” did he miss?

I’m leaving for South Asia on August 1 and expect to be in Afghanistan for a month, beginning on or about August 13. Accompanied by fellow cartoonists Matt Bors and Steven L. Cloud, I’m going to take advantage of new satellite technology to upload a new kind of daily war correspondency to my blog (rall.com/) and a half-dozen newspapers: a recounting of the day’s events in comic form. I’ll be going to the most remote parts of the country—the north and western villages and towns that see few if any visits by Western reporters. Why? Because they see few if any visits by Western reporters.

Pitching papers on this project has proven that little has changed since 2010: editors and producers are still clueless. Among some of the more priceless responses I’ve gotten:

“Do they take American Express there?” (No credit cards. Cash only.)

“How about if you call us and pitch us if you see something interesting?” (No phones.)

“Do you speak Pashto?” (No, but neither do Afghans in the north or west.)

“You’d be safer if you were embedded.” (U.S. troops are the main target. Embedded reporters get hurt more often than independents. And of course it’s impossible to be objective, or speak freely with locals, when you’re traveling with soldiers.)

But nothing speaks louder than the lack of interest in this project by the vast majority of media outlets. They’ll keep talking about Afghanistan—but they won’t put up the bucks to find out what’s really going on.

(Ted Rall is in Afghanistan to cover the war and research a book. He is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto,” which will be published in September by Seven Stories Press. His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2010 TED RALL