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News and Notes from Chelsea Neigbors United Against the War
Dear Chelsea Neighbor, friend and supporter
May 25, 2010 |
May 25, 2010 · Tuesday, May 18, 2010 marked five years plus two weeks that Chelsea Stands Up Against The War has been taking place each and every Tuesday from 6 until 7 pm at the northwest corner of 8th Avenue and 24th Street. So if you were concerned that we haven't been able to continue, don't worry that hasn't been the case yet.
It was a remarkable evening partly because the driving gusts of wind made the heavy rains that more intense. Trucks and cars and taxis were honking their horns, people gave us the peach sign and thumbs up at we struggled to keep the banner open. It was too wet and windy for us to distribute fliers or put out buttons and petitions on our table. A man walked up to us in the driving storm and pressed some money into one our our hands and said, "I was in the 101st Airborne, I know what this is about."
Others stopped and thanked us for being there. A few stopped and applauded. The thoughtfulness by the passersby were greatly appreciated by us. The "us" this past week was made up of Roberto Rodriguez, Hillary Weiss and Chuck Zlatkin.
While the news media, the dawn of the 2010 election cycle, the elevation of the Tea Party, pressing issues like finance reform, charter schools, health care, and the criminal oil spill in the Gulf have pushed war from center stage, the importance of resistance to permanent war (the Bush-Obama years) has never been more urgent.
Billions more to be spent, more lives to be lost, families decimated as "progressives" do back-flips trying to justify the escalation under Obama, means that protesting war is needed now more than ever.
Please consider joining us on any Tuesday that you can. We are getting into the summer months where some of our regulars are looking to take some vacation. We need you to help out. Even if you an come by once for just 15 minutes or so it will be a meaningful assist.
You weren't wrong. Going to war in Iraq and Afghanistan made no sense It is a waste of lives and resources. It is no more justifiable with Barack Obama as president then it was when George W. Bush was president. Stop the funding, stop the wars.
People say, "Where is the anti-war movement?" Well part of it is on the northwest corner of 8th Avenue and 24th Street in NYC every Tuesday from 6 until 7 pm.
Join us. You might feel better, I know for sure that we will.
Peace,
Chuck for
Chelsea Neighbors United to End the War
Chelsea Neighbors United To End The War
P.O. Box 821
JAF Station
New York, NY 10116-0821
212-726-1385
http://www.chelseaneighborsunited.org
join our listerv: ChelseaNeighborsUnited-Subscribe@yahoogroups.com Chelsea Stands Up Against The War Commemorates 5 Years
May 3, 2010 | Chelsea Stands Up Against The War Commemorates 5 Years
Who: Chelsea Neighbors United to End the War
Where: Northwest corner of 8th Avenue and 24th Street, NYC
When: Tuesday, May 4, 2010 from 6 until 7 pm
What: The 260th Consecutive Week of Chelsea Stands Up Against The War. Community residents
displaying their opposition to war, rain or shine, holding banner that states
WE THE PEOPLE OPPOSE THE WAR BRING THE TROOPS HOME NOW
Why: Members of the Chelsea community made a pledge in May of 2005 that they would Stand Up Against The War
until the war ended and the troops were home safely. While other vigils and Stand Ups have ended, this one continues. The Roots of War
April 12, 2010 | By Barbara Ehrenreich, The Progressive
Only three types of creatures engage in warfare -- humans, chimpanzees, and ants. Among humans, warfare is so ubiquitous and historically commonplace that we are often tempted to attribute it to some innate predisposition for slaughter -- a gene, perhaps, manifested as a murderous hormone. The earliest archeological evidence of war is from 12,000 years ago, well before such innovations as capitalism and cities and at the very beginning of settled, agricultural life. Sweeping through recorded history, you can find a predilection for warfare among hunter-gatherers, herding and farming peoples, industrial and even post-industrial societies, democracies, and dictatorships. The good old pop-feminist explanation -- testosterone -- would seem, at first sight, to fit the facts.
But war is too complex and collective an activity to be accounted for by any warlike instinct lurking within the individual psyche. Battles, in which the violence occurs, are only one part of war, most of which consists of preparation for battle -- training, the manufacture of weapons, the organization of supply lines, etc. There is no plausible instinct, for example, that could impel a man to leave home, cut his hair short, and drill for hours in tight formation.
Contrary to the biological theories of war, it is not easy to get men to fight. In recent centuries, men have often gone to great lengths to avoid war -- fleeing their homelands, shooting off their index fingers, feigning insanity. So unreliable was the rank and file of the famed eighteenth century Prussian army that military rules forbade camping near wooded areas: The troops would simply melt away into the trees. Even when men are duly assembled for battle, killing is not something that seems to come naturally to them. As Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman argued in his book "On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society" (Little, Brown, 1995), one of the great challenges of military training is to get soldiers to shoot directly at individual enemies.
What is it, then, that has made war such an inescapable part of the human experience? Each war, of course, appears to the participants to have an immediate purpose -- to crush the "Hun," preserve democracy, disarm Saddam, or whatever -- that makes it noble and necessary. But those who study war dispassionately, as a recurrent event with no moral content, have observed a certain mathematical pattern: that of "epidemicity," or the tendency of war to spread in the manner of an infectious disease. Obviously, war is not a symptom of disease or the work of microbes, but it does spread geographically in a disease-like manner, usually as groups take up warfare in response to war-like neighbors. It also spreads through time, as the losses suffered in one war call forth new wars of retaliation. Think of World War I, which breaks out for no good reason at all, draws in most of Europe as well as the United States, and then "reproduces" itself, after a couple of decades, as World War II.
In other words, as the Dutch social scientist Henk Houweling puts it, "one of the causes of war is war itself." Wars produce war-like societies, which, in turn, make the world more dangerous for other societies, which are thus recruited into being war-prone themselves. Just as there is no gene for war, neither is there a single type or feature of society -- patriarchy or hierarchy -- that generates it. War begets war and shapes human societies as it does so.
In general, war shapes human societies by requiring that they possess two things: one, some group or class of men (and, in some historical settings, women) who are trained to fight; and, two, the resources to arm and feed them. These requirements have often been compatible with patriarchal cultures dominated by a warrior elite -- knights or samurai -- as in medieval Europe or Japan. But not always: Different ways of fighting seem to lead to different forms of social and political organization. Historian Victor Hansen has argued that the phalanx formation adopted by the ancient Greeks, with its stress on equality and interdependence, was a factor favoring the emergence of democracy among nonslave Greek males. And there is no question but that the mass, gun-wielding armies that appeared in Europe in the seventeenth century contributed to the development of the modern nation-state -- if only as a bureaucratic apparatus to collect the taxes required to support these armies.
Marx was wrong, then: It is not only the "means of production" that shape societies, but the means of destruction. In our own time, the costs of war, or war-readiness, are probably larger than at any time in history, in relation to other human needs, due to the pressure on nations not only to maintain a mass standing army -- the United States supports about a million men and women at arms -- but to keep up with an extremely expensive, ever-changing technology of killing. The cost squeeze has led to a new type of society, perhaps best termed a "depleted" state, in which the military has drained resources from all other social functions. North Korea is a particularly ghoulish example, where starvation coexists with nuclear weapons development. But the USSR also crumbled under the weight of militarism, and the United States brandishes its military might around the world while, at this moment, cutting school lunches and health care for the poor.
"Addiction" provides only a pallid and imprecise analogy for the human relationship to war; parasitism -- or even predation -- is more to the point. However and whenever war began, it has persisted and propagated itself with the terrifying tenacity of a beast attached to the neck of living prey, feeding on human effort and blood.
If this is what we are up against, it won't do much good to try to uproot whatever war-like inclinations may dwell within our minds. Abjuring violent speech and imagery, critiquing masculinist culture, and promoting respect for human diversity -- all of these are worthy projects, but they will make little contribution to the abolition of war. It would be far better to think of war as something external to ourselves, something which has to be uprooted, everywhere, down to the last weapon and bellicose pageant.
The "epidemicity" of war has one other clear implication: War cannot be used as a means to prevent or abolish war. True, for some time to come, urgent threats from other heavily armed states will require at least the threat of armed force in response. But these must be very urgent threats and extremely restrained responses. To indulge, one more time, in the metaphor of war as a kind of living thing, a parasite on human societies: The idea of a war to end war is one of its oldest, and cruelest, tricks.
Barbara Ehrenreich is a columnist for The Progressive. She is the author of "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America" (Metropolitan Books, 2001) and "Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War" (Henry Holt, 1997).
© 2010 The Progressive All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/15604/ Cindy Sheehan's PEACE OF THE ACTION
February 13, 2010 | Dear Friend,
I have been on the national board of Voters for Peace since its inception and believe strongly in the Pledge for Peace. I have not voted for a pro-war candidate since.
Unfortunately, many people are still mired in fear-based voting. Elected in 2008, our new president has continued and expanded the path of war begun by Bush and Cheney. He is also increasing military and nuclear budgets as he escalates our troop and contractor commitments in the Middle East.
Peace of the Action is a new peace group that I am putting together with the help and encouragement of Voters for Peace. Our first large event will be Camp OUT NOW, an anti-war camp that we will be setting up on the lawn of the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C., on March 13th. We are focusing our attention on the wars in which our nation is incredibly mired and will be doing civil resistance on a daily basis until our demands are met. This is a sustained action.
I am writing to invite you to come for all or part of Camp OUT NOW. Please visit our website so you can get more information or donate to this very worthy cause.
In love, peace, and solidarity!
Cindy Sheehan
National Director of Peace of the Action
www.PEACEOFTHEACTION.ORG
Chelsea Neighbors United to End the War to be Honored
May 11, 2009 |
On Saturday, May 16th at 12 Noon Chelsea Neighbors to End the War will be honored by the Chelsea Reform Democratic Club at its fundraising brunch at Nisos Restaurant, 176 8th Avenue at 19th Street.
Chelsea Neighbors to End the War, which, recently commemorated the fourth year of Chelsea Stands Up Against The War, is proud to be recognized by another community organization for our contribution to the Chelsea community.
If you would like to attend the donation to the CRDC is $50 per person. The CRDC can be reached at 212-929-9188.
And please remember that Chelsea Stands Up Against the War continues Tuesdays at 6 p. m. at the northwest corner of 8th Avenue and 24th Street. This Tuesday will be the 209th consecutive week. Join us. 4th Anniversary of Chelsea Stands Up Against The War this coming Tuesday
May 3, 2009 | May 1, 2009
contact: Chuck Zlatkin (917-693-9427) chuckzlatkin@gmail.com
MEDIA ADVISORY
Neighborhood Anti-War Group Commemorates the 4th Anniversary of Chelsea Stands Up Against The War on Tuesday, May 5th
Chelsea Neighbors United to End the War will commemorate the 208th consecutive week (4 years!) of Chelsea Stands Up Against The War on Tuesday May 5, 2009 at the northwest corner of 8th Avenue and 24th Street in NYC at 6 p.m.
Each every Tuesday from 6 until 7 p. m. members of Chelsea Neighbors United to End the War, participate in Chelsea Stands Up Agaisnt The War by holding up banners and signs, distributing weekly newsletters, engaing in conversation with passersby, burning candles and playing musical instruments and welcoming suprise guests.
During life of Chelsea Stands Up Against The War participants have been joined by
Congressman Jerrold Nadler, State Senator Tom Duane and Assemblyman Richard Gottfried, in addition to playwright Barbara Garson and filmmaker and journalist Danny Schechter.
The neighborhood anti-war group decided in 2005 that it wanted to protest the war in Iraq, do it in their neighborhood, and have an ongoing presence. The first Chelsea Stands Up Against the War began on Tuesday May 10, 2005 and has continued, weekly, without interruption ever since.
Chelsea Stands Up Against The War was designed as a community statement in opposition to the war in Iraq. Throughout the country, there have been similar actions, but recently with the election of President Obama, a number of such actions have ceased.
Chelsea Neighbors United to End the War made a pledge at the first StandUp that they would be Standing Up until the war was over and the troops were home safely.
208 weeks later it still goes on.
Chelsea Stands Up Against The War
Chelsea Neighbors United To End The War
P.O. Box 821
JAF Station
New York, NY 10116-0821
212-726-1385
http://www.chelseaneighborsunited.org
join our listerv: ChelseaNeighborsUnited-Subscribe@yahoogroups.com Obama to seek $83.4 billion for Iraq, Afghan wars
April 9, 2009 | WASHINGTON – Congressional aides say President Barack Obama is seeking $83.4 billion to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan into the fall.
Once approved by Congress, the money would bring the total amount for U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan since Sept. 11, 2001 to almost $1 trillion.
Budget office spokesman Tom Gavin says the White House will send an official request to Congress this afternoon.
Obama was a harsh critic of the Iraq war as a candidate. He opposed a war funding bill in 2007, when former President George W. Bush increased the tempo of military operations.
The upcoming request will include $75.5 billion for the military and more than $7 billion in foreign aid.
Obama announced plans in February to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq on a 19-month timetable.
Despite Obama’s Vow, Combat Brigades Will Stay in Iraq
March 26, 2009 | by Gareth Porter, IPS
WASHINGTON, Mar 25 (IPS) - Despite President Barack Obama’s statement at Camp LeJeune, North Carolina Feb. 27 that he had "chosen a timeline that will remove our combat brigades over the next 18 months," a number of Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs), which have been the basic U.S. Army combat unit in Iraq for six years, will remain in Iraq after that date under a new non-combat label.A spokesman for Defence Secretary Robert M. Gates, Lt. Col. Patrick S. Ryder, told IPS Tuesday that "several advisory and assistance brigades" would be part of a U.S. command in Iraq that will be "re-designated" as a "transition force headquarters" after August 2010.
But the "advisory and assistance brigades" to remain in Iraq after that date will in fact be the same as BCTs, except for the addition of a few dozen officers who would carry out the advice and assistance missions, according to military officials involved in the planning process.
Gates has hinted that the withdrawal of combat brigades will be accomplished through an administrative sleight of hand rather than by actually withdrawing all the combat brigade teams. Appearing on Meet the Press Mar. 1, Gates said the "transition force" would have "a very different kind of mission", and that the units remaining in Iraq "will be characterised differently".
"They will be called advisory and assistance brigades," said Gates. "They won't be called combat brigades."
Obama’s decision to go along with the military proposal for a "transition force" of 35,000 to 50,000 troops thus represents a complete abandonment of his own original policy of combat troop withdrawal and an acceptance of what the military wanted all along - the continued presence of several combat brigades in Iraq well beyond mid-2010.
National Security Council officials declined to comment on the question of whether combat brigades were actually going to be left in Iraq beyond August 2010 under the policy announced by Obama Feb. 27.
The term that has been used internally within the Army to designate the units that will form a large part of the "transition force" is not "Advisory and Assistance Brigades" but "Brigades Enhanced for Stability Operations" (BESO).
Lt. Col. Gary Tallman, a spokesman for the Joint Staff, confirmed Monday that BESO will be the Army unit deployed to Iraq for the purpose of the transition force. Tallman said the decision-making process now underway involving CENTCOM and the Army is to determine "the exact composition of the BESO".
But the U.S. Army has already been developing the outlines of the BESO for the past few months. The only change to the existing BCT structure that is being planned is the addition of advisory and assistance skills rather than any reduction in its combat power. The BCT is organised around two or three battalions of motorized infantry but also includes all the support elements, including its own artillery support, needed to sustain the full spectrum of military operations.
Those are permanent features of all variants of the BCT, which will not be altered in the new version to be deployed under a "transition force", according to specialists on the BCT.
They say the only issue on which the Army is still engaged in discussions with field commanders is what standard augmentation a BCT will need for its new mission.
Maj. Larry Burns of the Army Combined Arms Centre at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, told IPS that Army Chief of Staff Gen. George W. Casey directed the Combined Arms Centre, which specialises in Army mission and doctrine, to work on giving the BCTs the capability to carry out a training and advisory assistance mission.
The essence of the BESO variant of the BCTs, according to Burns, is that the Military Transition Teams working directly with Iraqi military units will no longer operate independently but will be integrated into the BCTs.
That development would continue a trend already begun in Iraq in which the BCTs have gradually acquired operational control over the previously independent Military Transition Teams, according to Maj. Robert Thornton of the Joint Centre for International and Security Force Assistance at Fort Leavenworth.
Gen. Martin Dempsey, the commander of Army Training and Doctrine Command, has issued Planning Guidance calling for further refinement of the BESO. After further work on the additional personnel requirements, Casey was briefed on the proposed enhancement of the BCT for the second time in a month at a conference of four-star generals on Feb. 18, according to Burns.
Other names for the new variant that were used in recent months but eventually dropped made it explicitly clear that it is simply a slightly augmented BCT. Those names, according to Burns, included "Brigade Combat Team-Security Force Assistance" and "Brigade Combat Team for Stability Operations".
The plan to deploy several augmented BCTs represents the culmination of the strategy of "relabeling" or "remissioning" of BCTs in Iraq that was developed by U.S. military leaders in the wake of the surge of candidate Barack Obama to near-certain victory in the presidential election last year.
Late last year, Gen. David Petraeus, the CENTCOM chief, and Gen. Ray Odierno, the top commander in Iraq, were unhappy with Obama’s pledge to withdraw all U.S. combat brigades within 16 months. But military planners quickly hit on the relabeling scheme as a way of avoiding the complete withdrawal of BCTs in an Obama administration.
The New York Times revealed Dec. 4 that Pentagon planners were talking about "relabeling" of U.S. combat units as "training and support" units in a Dec. 4 story, but provided no details. Pentagon planners were projecting that as many as 70,000 U.S. troops would be maintained in Iraq "for a substantial time even beyond 2011".
That report suggested that the strategy envisioned keeping the bulk of the existing BCTs in Iraq as under a new label indicating an advisory and support mission.
Secretary Gates and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen discussed a plan to re-designate U.S. combat troops as support troops at a meeting with Obama in Chicago on Dec. 15, according a report in the Times three days later.
Gates and Mullen reportedly speculated at the meeting on whether Iraqis would permit such "re-labeled" combat forces to remain in Iraqi cities and towns after next June, despite the fact that the U.S.-Iraq withdrawal agreement signed in November 2008 called for all U.S. combat forces to be withdrawn from populated areas by the end of June 2010.
That report suggests that Obama was well aware that giving the Petraeus and Odierno a free hand to determine the composition of a "transition force" of 35,000 to 50,000 troops meant that most combat brigades would remain in Iraq rather than being withdrawn, as he ostensibly promised the U.S. public on Feb. 27.
*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.
Barack Obama's Kettle of Hawks
December 5, 2008 |
Monday 01 December 2008
by: Jeremy Scahill,
The Guardian UK
The absence of a solid anti-war voice on Obama's national security team means that US foreign policy isn't going to change.
Barack Obama has assembled a team of rivals to implement his foreign policy. But while pundits and journalists speculate endlessly on the potential for drama with Hillary Clinton at the state department and Bill Clinton's network of shady funders, the real rivalry that will play out goes virtually unmentioned. The main battles will not be between Obama's staff, but rather against those who actually want a change in US foreign policy, not just a staff change in the war room.
When announcing his foreign policy team on Monday, Obama said: "I didn't go around checking their voter registration." That is a bit hard to believe, given the 63-question application to work in his White House. But Obama clearly did check their credentials, and the disturbing truth is that he liked what he saw.
The assembly of Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, Susan Rice and Joe Biden is a kettle of hawks with a proven track record of support for the Iraq war, militaristic interventionism, neoliberal economic policies and a worldview consistent with the foreign policy arch that stretches from George HW Bush's time in office to the present.
Obama has dismissed suggestions that the public records of his appointees bear much relevance to future policy. "Understand where the vision for change comes from, first and foremost," Obama said. "It comes from me. That's my job, to provide a vision in terms of where we are going and to make sure, then, that my team is implementing." It is a line the president-elect's defenders echo often. The reality, though, is that their records do matter.
We were told repeatedly during the campaign that Obama was right on the premiere foreign policy issue of our day - the Iraq war. "Six years ago, I stood up and opposed this war at a time when it was politically risky to do so," Obama said in his September debate against John McCain. "Senator McCain and President Bush had a very different judgment." What does it say that, with 130 members of the House and 23 in the Senate who voted against the war, Obama chooses to hire Democrats who made the same judgement as Bush and McCain?
On Iraq, the issue that the Obama campaign described as "the most critical foreign policy judgment of our generation", Biden and Clinton not only supported the invasion, but pushed the Bush administration's propaganda and lies about Iraqi WMDs and fictitious connections to al-Qaida. Clinton and Obama's hawkish, pro-Israel chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, still refuse to renounce their votes in favour of the war. Rice, who claims she opposed the Iraq war, didn't hold elected office and was not confronted with voting for or against it. But she did publicly promote the myth of Iraq's possession of WMDs, saying in the lead up to the war that the "major threat" must "be dealt with forcefully". Rice has also been hawkish on Darfur, calling for "strik[ing] Sudanese airfields, aircraft and other military assets".
It is also deeply telling that, of his own free will, Obama selected President Bush's choice for defence secretary, a man with a very disturbing and lengthy history at the CIA during the cold war, as his own. While General James Jones, Obama's nominee for national security adviser, reportedly opposed the Iraq invasion and is said to have stood up to the neocons in Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, he did not do so publicly when it would have carried weight. Time magazine described him as "the man who led the Marines during the run-up to the war - and failed to publicly criticise the operation's flawed planning". Moreover, Jones, who is a friend of McCain's, has said a timetable for Iraq withdrawal, "would be against our national interest".
But the problem with Obama's appointments is hardly just a matter of bad vision on Iraq. What ultimately ties Obama's team together is their unified support for the classic US foreign policy recipe: the hidden hand of the free market, backed up by the iron fist of US militarism to defend the America First doctrine.
Obama's starry-eyed defenders have tried to downplay the importance of his cabinet selections, saying Obama will call the shots, but the ruling elite in this country see it for what it is. Karl Rove, "Bush's Brain", called Obama's cabinet selections, "reassuring", which itself is disconcerting, but neoconservative leader and former McCain campaign staffer Max Boot summed it up best. "I am gobsmacked by these appointments, most of which could just as easily have come from a President McCain," Boot wrote. The appointment of General Jones and the retention of Gates at defence "all but puts an end to the 16-month timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, the unconditional summits with dictators and other foolishness that once emanated from the Obama campaign."
Boot added that Hillary Clinton will be a "powerful" voice "for 'neoliberalism' which is not so different in many respects from 'neoconservativism.'" Boot's buddy, Michael Goldfarb, wrote in The Weekly Standard, the official organ of the neoconservative movement, that he sees "certainly nothing that represents a drastic change in how Washington does business. The expectation is that Obama is set to continue the course set by Bush in his second term."
There is not a single, solid anti-war voice in the upper echelons of the Obama foreign policy apparatus. And this is the point: Obama is not going to fundamentally change US foreign policy. He is a status quo Democrat. And that is why the mono-partisan Washington insiders are gushing over Obama's new team. At the same time, it is also disingenuous to act as though Obama is engaging in some epic betrayal. Of course these appointments contradict his campaign rhetoric of change. But move past the speeches and Obama's selections are very much in sync with his record and the foreign policy vision he articulated on the campaign trail, from his pledge to escalate the war in Afghanistan to his "residual force" plan in Iraq to his vow to use unilateral force in Pakistan to defend US interests to his posturing on Iran. "I will always keep the threat of military action on the table to defend our security and our ally Israel," Obama said in his famed speech at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee last summer. "Sometimes, there are no alternatives to confrontation."
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Jeremy Scahill pledges to be the same journalist under an Obama administration that he was during Bill Clinton and George Bush's presidencies. He is the author of "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army" and is a frequent contributor to The Nation and Democracy Now! He is a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute.
Congress Gives Bush $612.5 Billion for "Defense"
October 9, 2008 | On September 24th, bowing to President Bush's demands, the House passed a mammoth defense-appropriations package yesterday that contains a pay raise for troops and billions of dollars for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The 392-39 vote sent the $612 billion defense-authorization bill to the Senate, which was expected to clear it this week.
To avoid Bush's veto, House and Senate negotiators dropped several provisions that he opposed. They include a ban on private interrogators in U.S. military detention facilities and congressional veto power over a security pact with Iraq.
Negotiators had to address objections from some Senate Republicans to $5 billion in earmarks not requested by Bush. In the compromise, the earmarks are listed in a table accompanying the legislation.
The measure would permit $612.5 billion in spending for national-defense programs in 2009, including $68.6 billion for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. It also includes a 3.9 percent pay increase for military personnel, half a percentage point more than Bush requested.
The $612 billion military authorization bill also would fully fund the request for a radar site in the Czech Republic, opening the door for the next U.S. administration to begin building a European missile-defense system.
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