05 December 20
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FOCUS | RootsAction: Daniel Ellsberg, Jody Williams, Prominent Progressives Voice Opposition to Michèle Flournoy as Defense Secretary
Daniel Ellsberg and Jody Williams, RootsAction
Excerpt: "Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and Nobel Peace Prize winner Jody Williams made public statements Friday in opposition to the potential nomination of Michèle Flournoy to be Secretary of Defense. Their statements were released by the activist organization RootsAction.org."
entagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and Nobel Peace Prize winner Jody Williams made public statements Friday in opposition to the potential nomination of Michèle Flournoy to be Secretary of Defense. Their statements were released by the activist organization RootsAction.org.
Ellsberg said: “Michèle Flournoy was wrong about Iraq, as Biden has acknowledged he was. But she was then also wrong about Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Libya. She is wrong right now in opposing the congressional ban on all arms sales to Saudi Arabia, and in planning to maintain Minuteman-type land-based ICBMs, the hair-trigger to the Doomsday Machine. Her unquestioned intelligence and competence have long been in service to her serious interventionist misjudgments and to her own involvement in a revolving-door military-industrial complex. This is ‘experience’ that President Biden should not be seeking to duplicate in his own term.”
Williams said: “If President-elect Biden really has a progressive agenda in mind for his administration, he should appoint members of his cabinet and other high-level positions who demonstrate progressive thinking and do not move this fractured country backwards. Nominating Michèle Flournoy for Defense Secretary would not be forward thinking. We do not need a hawk with relationships with the weapons industry.”
Also on Friday, RootsAction released statements by Pat Alviso, the mother of an active duty Marine and the national coordinator for Military Families Speak Out, and former State Department official Matthew Hoh, who resigned in protest of the Afghanistan war in 2009.
Alviso said: “The appointment of Michèle Flournoy as Secretary of Defense would be both wrong-headed and a huge setback for our troops and military families. After disastrous policies that have caused almost 20 years of death and untold suffering in a war that never should have happened in the first place, we deserve better. Flournoy pushed for the surge in Afghanistan and believes that we need to leave a residual force in Afghanistan. Why? If thousands of U.S. troops couldn’t accomplish our ever-changing mission, what good could possibly come out of leaving a small force there? Flournoy and the think tank she co-founded (the Center for a New American Security) promise more of the same -- military solutions for conflict. If Biden truly cares about military families, as he has professed, then he should surround himself with the voices of those who value diplomacy over military force and find ways to bring all of our troops home now.”
Hoh said: “I do not understand how the Democratic Party continues to embrace, and promote, the people responsible for this nation’s unending wars. Michèle Flournoy has been integral in the failed, counter-productive and catastrophic wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, Syria, Libya, and across Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa. Flournoy’s record is indisputably one of failure and folly, and ‘the experience’ touted in her favor is experience that benefits solely the Pentagon and the weapons industry, and not the American people. Flournoy’s resume is conclusive evidence she will serve to justify massive Pentagon budgets, weapons sales to despots, and vainglorious wars, while bringing colossal waste to U.S. taxpayers, death without purpose to American service-members, and unending horror to tens of millions of people in the Muslim world.”
The four new statements were released by RootsAction, a progressive activist group with an email list of 1.2 million supporters in the United States. The organization emphasized on Friday that it is committed to grassroots organizing to prevent Flournoy from getting the top job at the Pentagon: “We are prepared to launch a massive grassroots campaign so that large numbers of constituents in each state will demand that their senators vote against confirmation of Flournoy if she is nominated to be Secretary of Defense.”
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