True statement, despite having come from Hillary: "MoveOn didn't even want us to go into Afghanistan"

I know that with the degree of concentration they've maintained on their overriding goal of replacing George W. Bush, it's hard for the Hard Left, and indeed for the entire Democratic Party, to actually remember what was going on within the United States in the first few days and weeks after 9/11/01. An overwhelming majority of Americans were grimly resolved to hit back — to hit back as hard as we possibly could, meaning militarily — against al Qaeda and their cooperative hosts, the Taliban, in Afghanistan.

But the sentiment was not unanimous. Others besides Obama's pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, were eager to put the blame for 9/11 squarely on America, and still others, like Amnesty International, earnestly argued against any military response and in favor of a brisk law enforcement effort in cooperation with other governments, including the Taliban.

Now, in the 2008 election campaign, it's Hillary Clinton, of all people, who's been caught telling the truth for once — and it's a bitter truth that the Hard Left, including its hysterical Obama supporters, continues to deny. From the opening paragraphs of a Huffpo piece entitled "Clinton Slams Democratic Activists At Private Fundraiser," we read of Sen. Clinton's expression of irritation at her opposition from the Hard Left:

At a small closed-door fundraiser after Super Tuesday, Sen. Hillary Clinton blamed what she called the "activist base" of the Democratic Party — and MoveOn.org in particular — for many of her electoral defeats, saying activists had "flooded" state caucuses and "intimidated" her supporters, according to an audio recording of the event obtained by The Huffington Post.

"Moveon.org endorsed [Sen. Barack Obama] — which is like a gusher of money that never seems to slow down," Clinton said to a meeting of donors. "We have been less successful in caucuses because it brings out the activist base of the Democratic Party. MoveOn didn't even want us to go into Afghanistan. I mean, that's what we're dealing with....

MoveOn.org is quoted in the same Huffpo piece as not only resolutely disputing Hillary's statement, but linking it to that great boogey-man Karl Rove:

In a statement to The Huffington Post, MoveOn's Executive Director Eli Pariser reacted strongly to Clinton's remarks: "Senator Clinton has her facts wrong again. MoveOn never opposed the war in Afghanistan, and we set the record straight years ago when Karl Rove made the same claim. Senator Clinton's attack on our members is divisive at a time when Democrats will soon need to unify to beat Senator McCain. MoveOn is 3.2 million reliable voters and volunteers who are an important part of any winning Democratic coalition in November. They deserve better than to be dismissed using Republican talking points."

And just now, as I'm working my way through today's TiVo'd talking heads shows, I heard Fox News' Chris Wallace repeat and seemingly accept this disavowal — hook, line, and sinker — as part of his interview with Clintonista Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) on Fox News Sunday. Perhaps afraid to offend any genuinely dangerous snakes, even Snake-Oil Chuck didn't correct Wallace and defend the accuracy of Clinton's statement.

So let me say this as precisely as I can: Eli Pariser and MoveOn.org are calculating, deliberate liars, and you have to be an utter idiot to believe their claims that he personally, or that MoveOn.org, "never opposed the war in Afghanistan."

MoveOn.org's and Pariser's disavowal has been thoroughly debunked from the right, by Byron York of the National Review:

At a time when polls showed a huge majority of Americans favoring military action against the terrorists who attacked New York and Washington, MoveOn put its energy into opposing the war in Afghanistan. Shortly after the terrorist attacks, Boyd and Blades circulated a petition that read, “Our leaders are under tremendous pressure to act in the aftermath of the terrible events of Sept. 11th. We the undersigned support justice, not escalating violence, which would only play into the terrorists’ hands.”

At the same time, an activist named Eli Pariser, recently graduated from college, circulated a petition of his own, calling on George W. Bush to use “moderation and restraint” in responding to 9/11 and “to use, wherever possible, international judicial institutions and international human rights law to bring to justice those responsible for the attacks, rather than the instruments of war, violence or destruction.” Boyd and Blades were so impressed by Pariser’s work that they hired him; he now is a top MoveOn official.

And it has been thoroughly debunked from the left, from a Peter Beinart piece in The New Republic (which used to appear here, but which, unfortunately and perhaps conveniently, they since appear to have taken offline or firewalled):

Wes Boyd and Joan Blades write that I am "simply wrong to state that MoveOn opposed the war in Afghanistan." But the petition MoveOn circulated after September 11 speaks for itself. It demands that the United States "support justice, not escalating violence," calls for "ending the cycle of violence," and says that "[i]f we retaliate by bombing Kabul and kill people oppressed by the Taliban dictatorship ... we become like the terrorists we oppose."

By any reasonable standard, that is opposition to war in Afghanistan. War, by definition, does not end "the cycle of violence." And any military action that avoided "bombing Kabul" would have left the deeply interwoven Taliban-Al Qaeda regime in power. Had the United States done as MoveOn counseled, we might have avoided killing Afghan civilians. But prolonged Taliban-Al Qaeda rule would surely have killed many more while threatening American lives as well. It is this insistence on absolute American purity, and the refusal to make real world moral tradeoffs, that produces the practical hostility to U.S. power that Arthur Schlesinger Jr. termed in The Vital Center "doughface" progressivism.

But do not believe any of them, gentle readers. Believe instead your own eyes, because through the miracle of the internet, you can still read, in its original pristine form, the online petition that MoveOn.org began running on September 25, 2001. Just click this link.

Finally, I'll reprint here what I wrote in my own blog's comments when this issue came up during MoveOn.org's sponsorship last year of their infamous "General Betray-us" advertisement:

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Courtesy of the Wayback Machine — because MoveOn.org has nacht und nebeled this from their own website, of course — here's a link to the online form petition, intended to be sent to the president and Congress, as of September 25, 2001:

"Justice, not terror"

Our leaders are under tremendous pressure to act in the aftermath of the terrible events of Sept. 11th. We the undersigned support justice, not escalating violence, which would only play into the terrorists' hands:

In bringing terrorists to justice, the U.S. must commit to protecting innocent civilians everywhere and ending the cycle of violence....

To combat terrorism, we must act in accordance with a high standard that does not disregard the lives of people in other countries. If we retaliate by bombing Kabul and kill people oppressed by the Taliban dictatorship who have no part in deciding whether terrorists are harbored, we become like the terrorists we oppose. We perpetuate the cycle of retribution and recruit more terrorists by creating martyrs.

Please do everything you can to counsel patience as we search for those responsible. Please ensure that our actions reflect the sanctity of human life everywhere. Thank you.

(They continued running essentially the same thing throughout 2002 and into early 2003.)

That's not support for taking out the Taliban or al Qaeda or anyone through military force. That's not support for any kind of war, period. You can't have a war, even a war in which all reasonable care is taken to avoid collateral damage to innocents, without escalating the amount of violence. "[Searching] for those responsible" was what was being argued by those who insisted that, gee, we ought to just ask the Taliban to extradite those mean naughty al Qaeda folks.

Read the damned headline. They've carefully scrubbed the phrase "Justice, not terror" from their current website, but MoveOn.org's leaders were arguing that we Americans are the terrorists while the smoke was, quite literally, still rising from Ground Zero. Okay, fine. Free country, First Amendment, yada yada. But don't come to my blog and tell me that's not Hard Left. Just ... don't.

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UPDATE (Mon Apr 21 @ 2:05pm): Gateway Pundit has a nice screenshot of MoveOn.org's online petition (of which I'm also preserving a copy, here), as captured from the Wayback Machine service. DRJ, guest-blogging at Patterico's Pontifications, was kind enough to link both this post and one by Tom Maguire at Just One Minute. Tom and his commenters quote and link additional contemporaneous evidence from 2001 as to MoveOn.org's opposition to military action in Afghanistan. This is simply not a close question; there is no possibility that Tom or I are misinterpreting or misstating MoveOn.org's previous position.