Wednesday, April 30, 2003
Help Me
Ohhhh, my country, my country, my country. Why have you foresaken our most cherished beliefs? This column in the New York Press, by Matt Taibbi, concerning Afghan prisoners in Guatanamo Bay Detention Camp, has me so ashamed of my own country:
"Here’s one of the most amazing passages:
There is some dispute as to the cause of some 25 suicide attempts at the camp and the fact that more than 5 percent of the detainees are being treated with antidepressants.
Capt. Albert Shimkus, the chief medical officer, said in an interview that for the most part, those prisoners arrived already suffering from mental illness. Some outside experts disagree and say depression is a logical consequence of being imprisoned with no certainty about the future.
For this passage alone, Lewis should be fed his own testicles. How can a responsible journalist allow anyone to assert that there can be "disagreement" over the cause of 25 suicide attempts among prisoners who are being held in a permanent stateless limbo, without any rights or any chance at due process, on a rock in the middle of the ocean from which there could never be any escape? And Lewis allows some Army doctor–not exactly an honest medical authority–to claim that the problems were that these people had mental illnesses back when they were free, and not stuck in a square metal cell to shit in a hole in the floor for all eternity?
People forget that reporters have choices when it comes to stuff like this. When an interview subject feeds you an obvious line of crap, you can either leave it out or point out that it’s a line of crap. In fact, it’s your duty to do so, to point out that a spokesman for the government has tried to put a line of crap over on the people’s press. But not according to the New York Times. They see it as their duty to put one over on you."
"Here’s one of the most amazing passages:
There is some dispute as to the cause of some 25 suicide attempts at the camp and the fact that more than 5 percent of the detainees are being treated with antidepressants.
Capt. Albert Shimkus, the chief medical officer, said in an interview that for the most part, those prisoners arrived already suffering from mental illness. Some outside experts disagree and say depression is a logical consequence of being imprisoned with no certainty about the future.
For this passage alone, Lewis should be fed his own testicles. How can a responsible journalist allow anyone to assert that there can be "disagreement" over the cause of 25 suicide attempts among prisoners who are being held in a permanent stateless limbo, without any rights or any chance at due process, on a rock in the middle of the ocean from which there could never be any escape? And Lewis allows some Army doctor–not exactly an honest medical authority–to claim that the problems were that these people had mental illnesses back when they were free, and not stuck in a square metal cell to shit in a hole in the floor for all eternity?
People forget that reporters have choices when it comes to stuff like this. When an interview subject feeds you an obvious line of crap, you can either leave it out or point out that it’s a line of crap. In fact, it’s your duty to do so, to point out that a spokesman for the government has tried to put a line of crap over on the people’s press. But not according to the New York Times. They see it as their duty to put one over on you."
# posted by scorpiorising : 4:32 PM |
Something for the Dems to Cheer About
While I don't agree with her stance on the war, I do believe Nancy Pelosi, House Minority Whip, is working hard on Democratic Party concensus building in the U.S. House of Representatives (from Jim Abrams, Associated Press, Yahoo News):
"WASHINGTON - Nancy Pelosi was running on a few hours sleep after an achingly close loss, at 2:30 in the morning, on a measure setting the stage for a half-tillion dollar tax cut. Nonetheless, she was elated.
All 203 voting House Democrats had opposed it, a sign to her that she is having some success in uniting a party divided over the Iraq (news - web sites) war and still reeling from election defeats in November.
Even conservative Democrats who opposed her promotion to minority leader say they are impressed by the San Francisco liberal's performance so far. She is the first woman to head a party caucus on either side of the Capitol.
Rep. Dennis Moore (news, bio, voting record), D-Kan., said growing budget deficits have united the party against Republicans. But he also gives Pelosi credit for moving more toward the center.
"WASHINGTON - Nancy Pelosi was running on a few hours sleep after an achingly close loss, at 2:30 in the morning, on a measure setting the stage for a half-tillion dollar tax cut. Nonetheless, she was elated.
"I supported her opposition in the race for leader," Moore said. "I have been very, very pleasantly surprised by the way Nancy Pelosi has conducted herself and listened to all elements of the party. She understands as the party leader, she represents a much broader spectrum."
Pelosi, 63, took over her party's leadership in the House in January from Rep. Dick Gephardt (news - web sites), D-Mo., who stepped down to devote more time to his campaign for the presidential nomination in 2004.
As the war in Iraq winds down, Pelosi said it is time for her party to focus the country's attention on the economic issues she thinks will reverberate in the next election. "People know there has to be a better way and they are listening," she said in an interview with The Associated Press as Congress was preparing to leave for its spring vacation.
What is important, she said, is that "never again will Democrats go into a campaign where it's not clear about who we are, what we stand for, how different we are from the Republicans, and what we are going to fight for. The public will know the difference between the two parties."
Although divided last fall on the need for a war with Iraq, Democrats are solidly against President Bush (news - web sites)'s tax cut plans, opting for a much smaller tax cut they say would give more immediate relief to the struggling economy but not add to the budget deficit.
The two parties also have sharp differences on such issues as how to expand health insurance and Medicare prescription drug coverage.
Pelosi noted that every House Democrat supported the party alternative — a $136 billion, one-year package of tax relief and aid to the states — to Bush's plan calling for $726 billion in new tax breaks over the next decade.
"I'm a coalition builder. That's my orientation in politics," she said.
After Republicans picked up net gain of six House seats in November, many feared that elevating the nine-term lawmaker would alienate, or even drive into GOP arms, the conservative wing of the Democratic Party.
While Republicans have had difficulty maintaining party discipline in the first months of the new Congress, Pelosi has cultivated harmony among usually fractious Democrats by assuring that minorities and women get on key committees and establishing a rural working group to provide a voice for more conservative members.
Rep. Michael Michaud, D-Maine, said Pelosi's decision to give less senior Democrats better committee assignments has won her support when she needs it.
"She has not been one to push her thoughts and her ideals onto fellow members of Congress to get what she wants. She looks out for the whole caucus," Michaud said.
Pelosi, among the Democrats who voted last fall against giving Bush authority to go to war in Iraq, said she does not believe that opposition will be a liability. At the same time, she said, "Democrats have to demonstrate to the public our national security credentials."
Applauding the military's success in Iraq, she said it still is an open question whether the United States will be a safer place after a war that "enflamed our enemies and antagonized our allies."
She predicted that Bush's soaring popularity as a result of success in Iraq will be short-lived.
"His re-election numbers are not that high. I think you have to make a distinction," Pelosi said. "The economy, and the issues that relate to the immediacy of people's lives, are going to determine the next election."
"WASHINGTON - Nancy Pelosi was running on a few hours sleep after an achingly close loss, at 2:30 in the morning, on a measure setting the stage for a half-tillion dollar tax cut. Nonetheless, she was elated.
All 203 voting House Democrats had opposed it, a sign to her that she is having some success in uniting a party divided over the Iraq (news - web sites) war and still reeling from election defeats in November.
Even conservative Democrats who opposed her promotion to minority leader say they are impressed by the San Francisco liberal's performance so far. She is the first woman to head a party caucus on either side of the Capitol.
Rep. Dennis Moore (news, bio, voting record), D-Kan., said growing budget deficits have united the party against Republicans. But he also gives Pelosi credit for moving more toward the center.
"WASHINGTON - Nancy Pelosi was running on a few hours sleep after an achingly close loss, at 2:30 in the morning, on a measure setting the stage for a half-tillion dollar tax cut. Nonetheless, she was elated.
"I supported her opposition in the race for leader," Moore said. "I have been very, very pleasantly surprised by the way Nancy Pelosi has conducted herself and listened to all elements of the party. She understands as the party leader, she represents a much broader spectrum."
Pelosi, 63, took over her party's leadership in the House in January from Rep. Dick Gephardt (news - web sites), D-Mo., who stepped down to devote more time to his campaign for the presidential nomination in 2004.
As the war in Iraq winds down, Pelosi said it is time for her party to focus the country's attention on the economic issues she thinks will reverberate in the next election. "People know there has to be a better way and they are listening," she said in an interview with The Associated Press as Congress was preparing to leave for its spring vacation.
What is important, she said, is that "never again will Democrats go into a campaign where it's not clear about who we are, what we stand for, how different we are from the Republicans, and what we are going to fight for. The public will know the difference between the two parties."
Although divided last fall on the need for a war with Iraq, Democrats are solidly against President Bush (news - web sites)'s tax cut plans, opting for a much smaller tax cut they say would give more immediate relief to the struggling economy but not add to the budget deficit.
The two parties also have sharp differences on such issues as how to expand health insurance and Medicare prescription drug coverage.
Pelosi noted that every House Democrat supported the party alternative — a $136 billion, one-year package of tax relief and aid to the states — to Bush's plan calling for $726 billion in new tax breaks over the next decade.
"I'm a coalition builder. That's my orientation in politics," she said.
After Republicans picked up net gain of six House seats in November, many feared that elevating the nine-term lawmaker would alienate, or even drive into GOP arms, the conservative wing of the Democratic Party.
While Republicans have had difficulty maintaining party discipline in the first months of the new Congress, Pelosi has cultivated harmony among usually fractious Democrats by assuring that minorities and women get on key committees and establishing a rural working group to provide a voice for more conservative members.
Rep. Michael Michaud, D-Maine, said Pelosi's decision to give less senior Democrats better committee assignments has won her support when she needs it.
"She has not been one to push her thoughts and her ideals onto fellow members of Congress to get what she wants. She looks out for the whole caucus," Michaud said.
Pelosi, among the Democrats who voted last fall against giving Bush authority to go to war in Iraq, said she does not believe that opposition will be a liability. At the same time, she said, "Democrats have to demonstrate to the public our national security credentials."
Applauding the military's success in Iraq, she said it still is an open question whether the United States will be a safer place after a war that "enflamed our enemies and antagonized our allies."
She predicted that Bush's soaring popularity as a result of success in Iraq will be short-lived.
"His re-election numbers are not that high. I think you have to make a distinction," Pelosi said. "The economy, and the issues that relate to the immediacy of people's lives, are going to determine the next election."
# posted by scorpiorising : 2:41 PM |
Goddess bless you Nina Simone, you'll never be forgotten
I've been looking and hoping for a good homage to the late, great Nina Simone, 1933-2003, and, well here it is from Thulani Davis in the Village Voice:
"She gave 'em hell till the end," said my friend Arnim last week when Nina Simone passed. The first time he saw her perform was in the late 1960s when he had just reached the legal drinking age and ventured into the Village Gate. She came onstage and announced to the audience that she was "feeling it" and intended to play until she got tired, no matter how long it took. She said she hated being disturbed when she was playing, so if anyone thought they might want to leave, "I suggest you leave now." She then stepped into the wings, fetched her bottle of cognac, put it on the piano, and began to play, moving, he said, "from the sacred to the profane." She played some gospel and then railed against how puritanical she found American society. "Sex is a sacrament," she lectured and then returned to the spirituals. At 6 a.m. she announced she was tired, and he went to make an eight o'clock biology lab at college. Hostage of that transcendent one-night stand, he became a devotee.
Like the novelist Toni Morrison, Simone always took her audiences captive. You had to surrender to her work, give her the silence or singing as demanded, and in return she would enthrall, enlighten, and even menace you with murderous dreams of revenge plucked from Kurt Weill and given the intonations of a sullen black maid. Her driving rhythms and urgent calls played counterpoint to plaintive, often delicate, ballads of love never quite as hoped.
I realized I was a country girl when I first heard her early jazz records at the home of a family friend, a gentleman who sipped martinis and reveled to "My Baby Just Cares for Me" on summer evenings. I was about 10. A few years later, after the sit-ins and boycotts in my home town, when Medgar Evers was killed in a series of ever more deadly reactions to our movement for self-determination, she appeared at the local black college to sing for the students. Simone, like Baldwin and others, was an artist who served willingly and long as a regal warrior for the civil rights movement. If they both became bitter and lived elsewhere later on, they stand as artists who cared enough to be that discouraged. These are rare now. That night, though, she had just written a new song, and as she sang the chorus, everyone jumped up in tears and laughter, and shouted it out with her.
Don't tell me, I'll tell you/Me and my people just about due/I've been there so I know/You keep on saying, "go slow."
?"Mississippi Goddam"
What Simone did for African American women was more liberating than the sweet elegance of her take on "I Love You, Porgy" (delivered without the fake dialect of all its predecessors), the thought-provoking militancy she added to spirituals like "Sinnerman," or the wicked humor of "Old Jim Crow" and "Go Limp," or the wonderfully ironic cover of Screamin' Jay Hawkins's kitsch hit, "I Put a Spell on You."
First of all, her songs, whether covers or original compositions, always privileged the black woman's point of view; they spoke for the dispossessed Sister Sadie who cleaned floors or raised children who would never in their lives again treat black women with respect.
Yes, you lied to me all these years/told me to wash and clean my ears/and talk real fine, just like a lady/and you'd stop calling me Sister Sadie.
"See Line Woman" viewed its exotic black female as an object of desire and admiration in a way unknown outside of the black poetry that was its source, or those raunchy blues songs that polite Negroes did not play, which nonetheless lauded the virtues of a full body and brown skin.
My skin is black/My arms are long/My hair is wooly/My back is strong/Strong enough to take the pain/Inflicted again and again/What do they call me?/My name is Aunt Sara. ?"Four Women"
But it was "Four Women," an instantly accessible analysis of the damning legacy of slavery, that made iconographic the real women we knew and would become. For African American women it became an anthem affirming our existence, our sanity, and our struggle to survive a culture which regards us as anti-feminine. It acknowledged the loss of childhoods among African American women, our invisibility, exploitation, defiance, and even subtly reminded that in slavery and patriarchy, your name is what they call you. Simone's final defiant scream of the name Peaches was our invitation to get over color and class difference and step with the sister who said:
My skin is brown/My manner is tough/I'll kill the first mother I see/ My life has been rough/I'm awfully bitter these days/Because my parents were slaves.
For African American women artists of my generation, "Four Women" became the core of works to come, notably Julie Dash's film of the same name, and it should be regarded a direct ancestor of Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf. This Simone song was a call heard by Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, and countless artists who come to mind as women who gave us a whole generation of the stories of Aunt Sara, Safronia, Sweet Thing, and Peaches.
May the High Priestess's cult widen to take in the unwise who made her as outrageous as she was."
"She gave 'em hell till the end," said my friend Arnim last week when Nina Simone passed. The first time he saw her perform was in the late 1960s when he had just reached the legal drinking age and ventured into the Village Gate. She came onstage and announced to the audience that she was "feeling it" and intended to play until she got tired, no matter how long it took. She said she hated being disturbed when she was playing, so if anyone thought they might want to leave, "I suggest you leave now." She then stepped into the wings, fetched her bottle of cognac, put it on the piano, and began to play, moving, he said, "from the sacred to the profane." She played some gospel and then railed against how puritanical she found American society. "Sex is a sacrament," she lectured and then returned to the spirituals. At 6 a.m. she announced she was tired, and he went to make an eight o'clock biology lab at college. Hostage of that transcendent one-night stand, he became a devotee.
Like the novelist Toni Morrison, Simone always took her audiences captive. You had to surrender to her work, give her the silence or singing as demanded, and in return she would enthrall, enlighten, and even menace you with murderous dreams of revenge plucked from Kurt Weill and given the intonations of a sullen black maid. Her driving rhythms and urgent calls played counterpoint to plaintive, often delicate, ballads of love never quite as hoped.
I realized I was a country girl when I first heard her early jazz records at the home of a family friend, a gentleman who sipped martinis and reveled to "My Baby Just Cares for Me" on summer evenings. I was about 10. A few years later, after the sit-ins and boycotts in my home town, when Medgar Evers was killed in a series of ever more deadly reactions to our movement for self-determination, she appeared at the local black college to sing for the students. Simone, like Baldwin and others, was an artist who served willingly and long as a regal warrior for the civil rights movement. If they both became bitter and lived elsewhere later on, they stand as artists who cared enough to be that discouraged. These are rare now. That night, though, she had just written a new song, and as she sang the chorus, everyone jumped up in tears and laughter, and shouted it out with her.
Don't tell me, I'll tell you/Me and my people just about due/I've been there so I know/You keep on saying, "go slow."
?"Mississippi Goddam"
What Simone did for African American women was more liberating than the sweet elegance of her take on "I Love You, Porgy" (delivered without the fake dialect of all its predecessors), the thought-provoking militancy she added to spirituals like "Sinnerman," or the wicked humor of "Old Jim Crow" and "Go Limp," or the wonderfully ironic cover of Screamin' Jay Hawkins's kitsch hit, "I Put a Spell on You."
First of all, her songs, whether covers or original compositions, always privileged the black woman's point of view; they spoke for the dispossessed Sister Sadie who cleaned floors or raised children who would never in their lives again treat black women with respect.
Yes, you lied to me all these years/told me to wash and clean my ears/and talk real fine, just like a lady/and you'd stop calling me Sister Sadie.
"See Line Woman" viewed its exotic black female as an object of desire and admiration in a way unknown outside of the black poetry that was its source, or those raunchy blues songs that polite Negroes did not play, which nonetheless lauded the virtues of a full body and brown skin.
My skin is black/My arms are long/My hair is wooly/My back is strong/Strong enough to take the pain/Inflicted again and again/What do they call me?/My name is Aunt Sara. ?"Four Women"
But it was "Four Women," an instantly accessible analysis of the damning legacy of slavery, that made iconographic the real women we knew and would become. For African American women it became an anthem affirming our existence, our sanity, and our struggle to survive a culture which regards us as anti-feminine. It acknowledged the loss of childhoods among African American women, our invisibility, exploitation, defiance, and even subtly reminded that in slavery and patriarchy, your name is what they call you. Simone's final defiant scream of the name Peaches was our invitation to get over color and class difference and step with the sister who said:
My skin is brown/My manner is tough/I'll kill the first mother I see/ My life has been rough/I'm awfully bitter these days/Because my parents were slaves.
For African American women artists of my generation, "Four Women" became the core of works to come, notably Julie Dash's film of the same name, and it should be regarded a direct ancestor of Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf. This Simone song was a call heard by Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, and countless artists who come to mind as women who gave us a whole generation of the stories of Aunt Sara, Safronia, Sweet Thing, and Peaches.
May the High Priestess's cult widen to take in the unwise who made her as outrageous as she was."
# posted by scorpiorising : 1:23 PM |
Tuesday, April 29, 2003
A Nation Governed by Bullies and the citizen doth delight
The news is all bad. The killing of 13 protesters in Iraq, the ongoing question of the killing of journalists in Iraq, the war itself, the hatred it has spawned; it seems our leaders have no conscience, and have lost touch with their most basic humanity. Iraq has become the American killing fields, just like Vietnam before. We haven't learned, from our mistakes. How many time must we repeat them? How do our leaders hide their shame? In private worlds of our leaders, what games do they play with each other in order to shelter the truth from each other? I would imagine, blanketing the issue is a common tactic. Large, generalized, sweeping, blanket statements, such as, "The Iraqis needed to be brought kicking and screaming into the 20th century. Nevermind the 21st century." This was actually a statement I heard on a morning radio talk shock, I mean, show. No matter what rung the ladder, the war proponents still speak the same language, the same rationalizations, self-justifications, only the stakes are much higher as you travel up the ladder. We have become bullies, in the name of our beliefs. Dangerous bullies, intent on fullfilling our greedy coffers, and justify our obscene actions in terms of racist "they can't govern themselves" beliefs, refusing to look at ourselves in this house of mirrors while we lose control of our own economy. We have lost our way.
# posted by scorpiorising : 4:37 PM |
Monday, April 28, 2003
Make Love not War
Seems I got to have a, change of scene. Every night I have the strangest dream--Crosby, Stills and Nash, sung by Joe Cocker
I got a call from the Bywater, the ninth ward, yesterday about 2p.m. Two words came out of the phone speaker: "Joe Cocker".
"What???Joe Cocker," I said.
"Joe Cocker", my ninth ward friend and raconteur, Suzie, reported to me.
I was feeling roach-like all weekend, suffering first from an Absolute Vodka hangover from Friday night that evolved into a full-blown stomach virus. Yeecchh! I roamed the corners of my room all weekend and competed with my fat cat for bed space. Now finally the weekend was winding down, and so was the first weekend of jazz fest, and I had nothing to show for it.
"Joe Cocker, 5:30, at the Fair Grounds," she repeated, a little impatient.
I hesitated, ever so briefly. She felt my hesitation through the phone, and I heard her voice grow a little pleading and wistfull on me. That was it, I couldn't refuse.
"He's been a no show three times," she said. "I have a feeling this is going to be it."
I had a feeling too. If Joe were to show up, it would be this year, because this is when the freaks and hippies, the yippies and the neocons, the fascists and the liberals and everyone in-between, this is when we need him the most.
We threaded our way through traffic by taking the St. Bernard Highway, and then skipped into a pretty, middle/working-class black neighborhood for parking. The whole city was out, on the roads, on stoops on the front of houses, smiling, barbecueing. Jazz Fest is a party, wether you go to the fairgrounds or not. Young entrepreneurs sold cold bottled water and soft drinks, hawking their wares loudly, in the middle of the street.
Suzie walking barefoot, thongs tied to her small bag, eating some sort of corn and shrimp dish that she hunted down at the Fair Grounds with a predator's nose. We lounged our way past the American Indian tribe dancing on one of the stages, and I suddenly realized that the thump, thump, thump, thump of their beat is the beat of the heart of the earth, and if anyone can hear it, even today, they can.We languidly made our way along the outer track, Suzie enjoying the soft sand on her bare feet. She gave the rest of her corn and shrimp dish to a startled fireman. We rounded the back of the stage and realized Joe was up and running. He started early and played late. He sang all of his best songs, he sang some I didn't know. I leaped up and down for "She Came in Through the Bathroom Window", one of my all-time fav Beatles' songs. He sang a song about makin' love and not war, and I started crying. I cried several time, so did Suzie. The crowd was rapturous, relaxed. War was forgotten. A few people got shocked out of their fascism, I am sure, by the degree of love all around. Thank you Joe Cocker. Man, I needed that.
I got a call from the Bywater, the ninth ward, yesterday about 2p.m. Two words came out of the phone speaker: "Joe Cocker".
"What???Joe Cocker," I said.
"Joe Cocker", my ninth ward friend and raconteur, Suzie, reported to me.
I was feeling roach-like all weekend, suffering first from an Absolute Vodka hangover from Friday night that evolved into a full-blown stomach virus. Yeecchh! I roamed the corners of my room all weekend and competed with my fat cat for bed space. Now finally the weekend was winding down, and so was the first weekend of jazz fest, and I had nothing to show for it.
"Joe Cocker, 5:30, at the Fair Grounds," she repeated, a little impatient.
I hesitated, ever so briefly. She felt my hesitation through the phone, and I heard her voice grow a little pleading and wistfull on me. That was it, I couldn't refuse.
"He's been a no show three times," she said. "I have a feeling this is going to be it."
I had a feeling too. If Joe were to show up, it would be this year, because this is when the freaks and hippies, the yippies and the neocons, the fascists and the liberals and everyone in-between, this is when we need him the most.
We threaded our way through traffic by taking the St. Bernard Highway, and then skipped into a pretty, middle/working-class black neighborhood for parking. The whole city was out, on the roads, on stoops on the front of houses, smiling, barbecueing. Jazz Fest is a party, wether you go to the fairgrounds or not. Young entrepreneurs sold cold bottled water and soft drinks, hawking their wares loudly, in the middle of the street.
Suzie walking barefoot, thongs tied to her small bag, eating some sort of corn and shrimp dish that she hunted down at the Fair Grounds with a predator's nose. We lounged our way past the American Indian tribe dancing on one of the stages, and I suddenly realized that the thump, thump, thump, thump of their beat is the beat of the heart of the earth, and if anyone can hear it, even today, they can.We languidly made our way along the outer track, Suzie enjoying the soft sand on her bare feet. She gave the rest of her corn and shrimp dish to a startled fireman. We rounded the back of the stage and realized Joe was up and running. He started early and played late. He sang all of his best songs, he sang some I didn't know. I leaped up and down for "She Came in Through the Bathroom Window", one of my all-time fav Beatles' songs. He sang a song about makin' love and not war, and I started crying. I cried several time, so did Suzie. The crowd was rapturous, relaxed. War was forgotten. A few people got shocked out of their fascism, I am sure, by the degree of love all around. Thank you Joe Cocker. Man, I needed that.
# posted by scorpiorising : 5:50 PM |
Wednesday, April 23, 2003
Newt the toad is at it again.
Via TomPaine.com, Back by popular demand, the dark lord of American politics, the salamander-like, the slimey, the slinky, the frequently mundane, the loquacious Newt Gingrich, to wage war on the most venerable of our institutions, the State Department (last stop between here and armageddon):
"No sooner were the guns silenced in Baghdad than they opened up back in Washington with a blistering volley by Newt Gingrich on the State Department.
The former House Speaker's sweeping attack on Colin Powell's turf -- especially the department's Near East Bureau -- marks the boldest and most demagogic move yet by the neoconservatives who surround Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney. This maneuver was designed to gain control of policy and marginalize -- if not purge -- their perceived enemies in the government bureaucracy.
Speaking at Neocon Central, otherwise known as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Gingrich charged that the State Department was systematically subverting President George W. Bush’s policy in the Middle East and should be radically transformed. He singled out the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs -- long seen by the neocons as a bastion of anti-Israel, if not anti-Semitic, Arab lovers -- by suggesting that its appointees to the U.S. occupation authority in Iraq loomed as major threats to Bush’s regional agenda.
"The people the State Department has sent to Iraq so far represent the worst instincts of the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs," he declared. "They were promoted in a culture of propping up dictators, coddling the corrupt and ignoring the secret police. They have a constituency of Middle East governments deeply opposed to democracy in Iraq. Their instinct is to create a weak Iraqi government that will not threaten its Syrian, Iranian, Saudi and other dictatorial neighbors. This is the exact opposite of the president’s stated goals."
The harshness of the attack reminded some of the "Who Lost China" debate that helped launch Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy 50 years ago. "Frankly, my mind goes back to the 1950s and what was considered a vicious and unjustified and wrongheaded purge of the China hands in the State Department," said Richard Murphy, a career diplomat who served as head of the Near Eastern bureau under Reagan and has since been based at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. "I think it is designed to scare people into thinking that anyone who challenges the right wing is going to suffer for it." Richard Armitage, Powell's Deputy, had a different take on Gingrich's speech: "It's clear that Mr. Gingrich is off his meds and out of therapy," he told a USA Today reporter.
"I’ve never seen a wholesale attack on America’s entire diplomatic establishment like this," said Charles Kupchan, a National Security Council officer under Clinton who teaches at Georgetown University. "This is fundamentally about ideology and the efforts of the neocons to institutionalize their victories over the moderate and liberal internationalists."
Indeed, Gingrich, stressing that Powell himself was not a target, framed his attack in ideological terms, claiming that the State Department’s worldview -- one of "process, politeness and accommodation" was not compatible with the worldview of the Pentagon and presumably Bush himself, one of "facts, values and outcomes."
He went on to blame the State Department for failing to reduce popular opposition to Washington policies in Turkey, South Korea, Germany, France and other ally countries. In contrast, he applauded the performance of the Pentagon in lining up U.S. Gulf allies -- as if they were not part of the Near East Bureau’s "dictatorial" constituency -- behind the Iraq invasion. "The last seven months have involved six months of diplomatic failure and one month of military success," he said. "The first days after military victory indicate the pattern of diplomatic failure is beginning once again and threatens to undo the effects of military victory...."
He called Powell’s planned trip to Damascus "ludicrous" and the State Department’s commitment to the "Quartet" -- the European Union, United Nations and Russia, as well as the United States -- to implement its "road map" for Israeli-Palestinian peace a "clear disaster" and "a deliberate and systematic effort to undermine the president’s policies."
While Gingrich has a reputation for shooting from the hip, the fact that a written summary of his remarks were provided in advance to The Washington Post, which obligingly featured them on its front page, makes it clear that the attack was premeditated and probably cleared by top Pentagon officials whose war with the State Department has moved into high gear.
Gingrich is a member of Rumsfeld’s Defense Policy Board and is close not only to the Pentagon chief himself, but to Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and the powerful former Board chairman, Richard Perle who, like Gingrich, perches at AEI as a senior fellow.
Adding to the notion that Gingrich was not only speaking for himself, Frank Gaffney, the director of the ultra-hawkish Center for Security Policy, told CNBC Tuesday night, "There is a strong degree of concern [in the Pentagon] that the president’s direction is not faithfully implemented by the State Department. I’m delighted that Gingrich is bringing this into the public domain."
The neocons -- particularly those like Perle and Undersecretary for Defense Policy Douglas Feith who have strong ties to the right wing of the Likud Party in Israel -- appear to see victory in Iraq as an opportunity to push the State Department and its Near East bureau out of the game once and for all.
For them, the Quartet and any diplomatic re-engagement with Syria are seen as clear dangers to transforming the region according to their wishes. The road to an acceptable Israeli-Palestinian settlement runs, they think, not only through the domination of Baghdad, but through Damascus, Tehran and even Riyadh, as well.
Now that the CIA has been sufficiently cowed to go along with weak evidence about weapons of mass destruction and Al Qaeda connections in Iraq, only the State Department and its regional experts lie in the way.
As with much of neocon ideology, Gingrich's assertions of State Department responsibility for diplomatic failures were questionable at best. He blamed diplomatic gaffes with Turkey on the State Department, failing to recognize that Wolfowitz played a highly visible and central role in trying to line up Ankara’s support for the war.
Nor did Gingrich take into account the impact on foreign opinion of various statements by his comrades-in-arms, including Bush’s early reference to the anti-terrorism war as a "crusade," not to mention Rumsfeld’s allusions to "so-called occupied territories," "old Europe" or Wolfowitz’s tactless suggestion that "we need an Islamic reformation."
"Gingrich and company should look at themselves in the mirror," Kupchan said. "If you ask who is it who has set most of the world against the United States, it’s not the [State] Department; it’s the Pentagon and the neo-cons."
"No sooner were the guns silenced in Baghdad than they opened up back in Washington with a blistering volley by Newt Gingrich on the State Department.
The former House Speaker's sweeping attack on Colin Powell's turf -- especially the department's Near East Bureau -- marks the boldest and most demagogic move yet by the neoconservatives who surround Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney. This maneuver was designed to gain control of policy and marginalize -- if not purge -- their perceived enemies in the government bureaucracy.
Speaking at Neocon Central, otherwise known as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Gingrich charged that the State Department was systematically subverting President George W. Bush’s policy in the Middle East and should be radically transformed. He singled out the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs -- long seen by the neocons as a bastion of anti-Israel, if not anti-Semitic, Arab lovers -- by suggesting that its appointees to the U.S. occupation authority in Iraq loomed as major threats to Bush’s regional agenda.
"The people the State Department has sent to Iraq so far represent the worst instincts of the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs," he declared. "They were promoted in a culture of propping up dictators, coddling the corrupt and ignoring the secret police. They have a constituency of Middle East governments deeply opposed to democracy in Iraq. Their instinct is to create a weak Iraqi government that will not threaten its Syrian, Iranian, Saudi and other dictatorial neighbors. This is the exact opposite of the president’s stated goals."
The harshness of the attack reminded some of the "Who Lost China" debate that helped launch Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy 50 years ago. "Frankly, my mind goes back to the 1950s and what was considered a vicious and unjustified and wrongheaded purge of the China hands in the State Department," said Richard Murphy, a career diplomat who served as head of the Near Eastern bureau under Reagan and has since been based at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. "I think it is designed to scare people into thinking that anyone who challenges the right wing is going to suffer for it." Richard Armitage, Powell's Deputy, had a different take on Gingrich's speech: "It's clear that Mr. Gingrich is off his meds and out of therapy," he told a USA Today reporter.
"I’ve never seen a wholesale attack on America’s entire diplomatic establishment like this," said Charles Kupchan, a National Security Council officer under Clinton who teaches at Georgetown University. "This is fundamentally about ideology and the efforts of the neocons to institutionalize their victories over the moderate and liberal internationalists."
Indeed, Gingrich, stressing that Powell himself was not a target, framed his attack in ideological terms, claiming that the State Department’s worldview -- one of "process, politeness and accommodation" was not compatible with the worldview of the Pentagon and presumably Bush himself, one of "facts, values and outcomes."
He went on to blame the State Department for failing to reduce popular opposition to Washington policies in Turkey, South Korea, Germany, France and other ally countries. In contrast, he applauded the performance of the Pentagon in lining up U.S. Gulf allies -- as if they were not part of the Near East Bureau’s "dictatorial" constituency -- behind the Iraq invasion. "The last seven months have involved six months of diplomatic failure and one month of military success," he said. "The first days after military victory indicate the pattern of diplomatic failure is beginning once again and threatens to undo the effects of military victory...."
He called Powell’s planned trip to Damascus "ludicrous" and the State Department’s commitment to the "Quartet" -- the European Union, United Nations and Russia, as well as the United States -- to implement its "road map" for Israeli-Palestinian peace a "clear disaster" and "a deliberate and systematic effort to undermine the president’s policies."
While Gingrich has a reputation for shooting from the hip, the fact that a written summary of his remarks were provided in advance to The Washington Post, which obligingly featured them on its front page, makes it clear that the attack was premeditated and probably cleared by top Pentagon officials whose war with the State Department has moved into high gear.
Gingrich is a member of Rumsfeld’s Defense Policy Board and is close not only to the Pentagon chief himself, but to Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and the powerful former Board chairman, Richard Perle who, like Gingrich, perches at AEI as a senior fellow.
Adding to the notion that Gingrich was not only speaking for himself, Frank Gaffney, the director of the ultra-hawkish Center for Security Policy, told CNBC Tuesday night, "There is a strong degree of concern [in the Pentagon] that the president’s direction is not faithfully implemented by the State Department. I’m delighted that Gingrich is bringing this into the public domain."
The neocons -- particularly those like Perle and Undersecretary for Defense Policy Douglas Feith who have strong ties to the right wing of the Likud Party in Israel -- appear to see victory in Iraq as an opportunity to push the State Department and its Near East bureau out of the game once and for all.
For them, the Quartet and any diplomatic re-engagement with Syria are seen as clear dangers to transforming the region according to their wishes. The road to an acceptable Israeli-Palestinian settlement runs, they think, not only through the domination of Baghdad, but through Damascus, Tehran and even Riyadh, as well.
Now that the CIA has been sufficiently cowed to go along with weak evidence about weapons of mass destruction and Al Qaeda connections in Iraq, only the State Department and its regional experts lie in the way.
As with much of neocon ideology, Gingrich's assertions of State Department responsibility for diplomatic failures were questionable at best. He blamed diplomatic gaffes with Turkey on the State Department, failing to recognize that Wolfowitz played a highly visible and central role in trying to line up Ankara’s support for the war.
Nor did Gingrich take into account the impact on foreign opinion of various statements by his comrades-in-arms, including Bush’s early reference to the anti-terrorism war as a "crusade," not to mention Rumsfeld’s allusions to "so-called occupied territories," "old Europe" or Wolfowitz’s tactless suggestion that "we need an Islamic reformation."
"Gingrich and company should look at themselves in the mirror," Kupchan said. "If you ask who is it who has set most of the world against the United States, it’s not the [State] Department; it’s the Pentagon and the neo-cons."
# posted by scorpiorising : 2:54 PM |
Monday, April 21, 2003
The KGB Comes to America
Yikes!!(From Information Clearinghouse).
Get Ready for the USSA
(The United Soviet States of America)
(March 17) You will be happy to learn that the former head of the KGB (the secret police of the former Soviet Union), General Yevgeni Primakov, has been hired as a consultant by the US Department of Homeland Security. Do you think he will share his expertise in "security" to prepare US citizens for domestic internal passports under the pretense of fighting the never-ending "War on Terrorism"?
CAPPS II is the name of the new program which is technically under the auspices of the US Department of Transporation, but that's only technical and the only reaosn they did that was to use the Transportation Department's budget to buy the computer hardware and software they need.
The way it works is you give them your credit card and they slide it thorough like you would in a store and then they hit a button and the monitor reads: CAPPS II, SS CTF. The SS CTF evidently stands for State Security Citizen Threat File. But it has nothing to do with the Department of Transportation. It goes directly to a division, which has been established between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the CIA and several other federal agencies. This is a new division, referred to as the Office of Internal Security, which is coordinating the effort to establish citizen threat files on every US citizen. It will be a huge database including credit files, medical files, political and religious affiliation, military history, attendance at anti-government rallies,etc.
The newsclip didn't point out what information is being accessed.
The only thing they'll tell you is they're going to access your credit history, but like the guy giving the interview said they will be accessing a whole lot more. They just don't tell you what it is. When the Department of Homeland Security was asked about it, they wouldn't say but replied that it would defeat the purpose if we told you what it was we were looking for.
No announcement will be made to the public about what information exactly is being accessed or exactly how much information or what type of information is going to be included in each citizen's security threat file.
What I liked about this segment is that they interviewed General Yevgeni Primakov, who is now a consultant to the Department of Homeland Security along with General Alexander Karpov.
Primakov was laughing about it because he's getting paid a big fee to do it. He doesn't care, of course. Primakov speaks beautiful English, as you would expect a former head of the KGB to do. When he was asked what is this CAPPS II program really about, because obviously even "terrorists" could have credit ratings.
Primakov said that this is one of the steps now being employed along with NICA and new identity upgrade features which are coming to your driver's license. It is being used to get the people used to new types of documentation and carrying new types of identity cards pursuant to the United States instituting a formal policy of internal passports.And he actually used the words "internal passports."
It's like he said and he was pretty knowledgeable. When the NICA (National Identity Card Act) gets passed, the Posse Comitatus Act gets overturned, a few other pieces of legislation yet to be proffered get passed, the White House will have more control over the American people than the Kremlin had over the Russian people when Stalin was alive. He said that and then he laughed.
What Primakov finds funny are what he calls these "right wing flag wavers" that were so anti-communist and now they're supporting a state policy of internal passports.
The irony is deafening.
Old right wing farts -- turn up your hearing aids for the irony is deafening.
Primakov continued by saying that he had been hired as a consultant and he was consulting on other "security" matters, an ongoing policy in various agencies of government (some of these offices haven't even been created yet) to consistently narrow the rights of the American people and to expand the power of government. He professed not to know why, the reason for all this was, other than he admitted that "it doesn't have much to do with 'fighting terrorism.'"
In other words, it's funny that we need a commie to come over here and tell people the truth. And remember its not just any commie, it's the former head of the KGB, who is being (paid) for with taxpayers' money from all the (naive) flag wavers out there.
If you think about it - how ironic this whole thing is. And it's not only Primakov, who was, by the way the last general of the KGB, before the KGB was changed to RFSS. Look who else was hired. There's General Primakov.
Then there's General Karpov, former KGB station chief of their Washington station at their embassy and the first director of the Russian Federal Security Service.
You could call this the "Sovietization of America." Primakov said he can't wait to get on the payroll (he called it the "pay corps," referring to the Heritage Foundation, the PNAC and all the other right wing foundations in the United States) He cant get over how many ex-KGB generals and colonels still want to come over to the United States and become consultants to get on the pay corps.
It has been reported that Nikita Krushchev Jr works for the Heritage Foundation. Another right wing foundation has Elena Stalin. The Old Soviet Brand names are all coming to Washington to get on the gravy train and teach the Bush administration how to further restrict the rights of the American people.
And Primakov is waiting for the USSA, The United Soviet States of America. It'll probably make him feel right at home.
AL MARTIN is America's foremost expert on corporate and government fraud. A relentless whistleblower, he has written a book called, "The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran Contra Insider," which chronicles his adventures with the Bush Cabal (National Liberty Press, Order Line: 866-317-1390). This detailed account of government criminal operations, namely State-sanctioned fraud, drug trafficking and illicit weapons sales, is unprecedented in publishing history.
Al Martin is also well known for his great charm and profound insights into world events, and he is frequently interviewed on many talk radio shows across the nation. His weekly column "Behind the Scenes in the Beltway" is published regularly online at Al Martin Raw,
(http://www.almartinraw.com).
Get Ready for the USSA
(The United Soviet States of America)
(March 17) You will be happy to learn that the former head of the KGB (the secret police of the former Soviet Union), General Yevgeni Primakov, has been hired as a consultant by the US Department of Homeland Security. Do you think he will share his expertise in "security" to prepare US citizens for domestic internal passports under the pretense of fighting the never-ending "War on Terrorism"?
CAPPS II is the name of the new program which is technically under the auspices of the US Department of Transporation, but that's only technical and the only reaosn they did that was to use the Transportation Department's budget to buy the computer hardware and software they need.
The way it works is you give them your credit card and they slide it thorough like you would in a store and then they hit a button and the monitor reads: CAPPS II, SS CTF. The SS CTF evidently stands for State Security Citizen Threat File. But it has nothing to do with the Department of Transportation. It goes directly to a division, which has been established between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the CIA and several other federal agencies. This is a new division, referred to as the Office of Internal Security, which is coordinating the effort to establish citizen threat files on every US citizen. It will be a huge database including credit files, medical files, political and religious affiliation, military history, attendance at anti-government rallies,etc.
The newsclip didn't point out what information is being accessed.
The only thing they'll tell you is they're going to access your credit history, but like the guy giving the interview said they will be accessing a whole lot more. They just don't tell you what it is. When the Department of Homeland Security was asked about it, they wouldn't say but replied that it would defeat the purpose if we told you what it was we were looking for.
No announcement will be made to the public about what information exactly is being accessed or exactly how much information or what type of information is going to be included in each citizen's security threat file.
What I liked about this segment is that they interviewed General Yevgeni Primakov, who is now a consultant to the Department of Homeland Security along with General Alexander Karpov.
Primakov was laughing about it because he's getting paid a big fee to do it. He doesn't care, of course. Primakov speaks beautiful English, as you would expect a former head of the KGB to do. When he was asked what is this CAPPS II program really about, because obviously even "terrorists" could have credit ratings.
Primakov said that this is one of the steps now being employed along with NICA and new identity upgrade features which are coming to your driver's license. It is being used to get the people used to new types of documentation and carrying new types of identity cards pursuant to the United States instituting a formal policy of internal passports.And he actually used the words "internal passports."
It's like he said and he was pretty knowledgeable. When the NICA (National Identity Card Act) gets passed, the Posse Comitatus Act gets overturned, a few other pieces of legislation yet to be proffered get passed, the White House will have more control over the American people than the Kremlin had over the Russian people when Stalin was alive. He said that and then he laughed.
What Primakov finds funny are what he calls these "right wing flag wavers" that were so anti-communist and now they're supporting a state policy of internal passports.
The irony is deafening.
Old right wing farts -- turn up your hearing aids for the irony is deafening.
Primakov continued by saying that he had been hired as a consultant and he was consulting on other "security" matters, an ongoing policy in various agencies of government (some of these offices haven't even been created yet) to consistently narrow the rights of the American people and to expand the power of government. He professed not to know why, the reason for all this was, other than he admitted that "it doesn't have much to do with 'fighting terrorism.'"
In other words, it's funny that we need a commie to come over here and tell people the truth. And remember its not just any commie, it's the former head of the KGB, who is being (paid) for with taxpayers' money from all the (naive) flag wavers out there.
If you think about it - how ironic this whole thing is. And it's not only Primakov, who was, by the way the last general of the KGB, before the KGB was changed to RFSS. Look who else was hired. There's General Primakov.
Then there's General Karpov, former KGB station chief of their Washington station at their embassy and the first director of the Russian Federal Security Service.
You could call this the "Sovietization of America." Primakov said he can't wait to get on the payroll (he called it the "pay corps," referring to the Heritage Foundation, the PNAC and all the other right wing foundations in the United States) He cant get over how many ex-KGB generals and colonels still want to come over to the United States and become consultants to get on the pay corps.
It has been reported that Nikita Krushchev Jr works for the Heritage Foundation. Another right wing foundation has Elena Stalin. The Old Soviet Brand names are all coming to Washington to get on the gravy train and teach the Bush administration how to further restrict the rights of the American people.
And Primakov is waiting for the USSA, The United Soviet States of America. It'll probably make him feel right at home.
AL MARTIN is America's foremost expert on corporate and government fraud. A relentless whistleblower, he has written a book called, "The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran Contra Insider," which chronicles his adventures with the Bush Cabal (National Liberty Press, Order Line: 866-317-1390). This detailed account of government criminal operations, namely State-sanctioned fraud, drug trafficking and illicit weapons sales, is unprecedented in publishing history.
Al Martin is also well known for his great charm and profound insights into world events, and he is frequently interviewed on many talk radio shows across the nation. His weekly column "Behind the Scenes in the Beltway" is published regularly online at Al Martin Raw,
(http://www.almartinraw.com).
# posted by scorpiorising : 4:53 PM |
Wednesday, April 16, 2003
Disorder in the Ranks of the Priesthood Over the War
Newsday reports there is trouble in paradise:
Archbishop Orders Priest to Raise Flag
By Associated Press
April 11, 2003, 11:11 AM EDT
SAN ANTONIO -- A Roman Catholic priest who removed the U.S. flag from in front his church was ordered to put it back up by the archbishop, who said anti-war views shouldn't be forced on the public.
Archbishop Patrick Flores issued his order after receiving inquiries about what some Our Lady of Grace congregants say the Rev. John Mannion's latest display of anti-United States sentiment.
Church members say that Mannion often criticized America during sermons and kept the flag at half-staff. Last week, he simply removed it from the church in La Coste, 20 miles southwest of San Antonio.
"I have advised Father Mannion that the American flag must be restored at full height to its usual place of honor immediately," Flores said Thursday.
"While I respect Father Mannion's passion for the dignity of all life and his right to his personal position on the war, nothing is accomplished by using the flag to force that view on those who are suffering the pain and uncertainty of knowing that America's men and women of the armed forces are in harm's way," Flores said.
Mannion, who has led the church since 2001, declined comment.
While Pope John Paul II is strongly opposed to the war, there have been other incidents of U.S. churches taking steps to rein in the anti-war efforts of their staffs.
Earlier this week, the Portland, Ore., archdiocese fired its 12-year peace and justice director after repeatedly warning the man to curtail his anti-war activism.
An archdiocese spokesman said Frank Fromherz was laid off because of budget cuts. But Fromherz, 49, said archdiocese officials told him he was fired because he violated his role as an "agent" for the archbishop and his views.
Fromherz had clashed with Archbishop John G. Vlazny over the war. For example, Fromherz sent an e-mail to hundreds of Catholics and others that encouraged anti-war protests and called on "the international criminal court to indict and prosecute our own President (Bush) as a war criminal."
Vlazny, meanwhile, recently told 350,000 Catholics to emphasize prayer, saying "divisiveness is not at all helpful."
In Des Moines, Iowa, pacifist priest Frank Cordaro said he has been uninvited from speaking at a memorial service and a parish mission.
"Being a pacifist between wars is like being a vegetarian between meals," he said.
Copyright © 2003, The Associated Press
Archbishop Orders Priest to Raise Flag
By Associated Press
April 11, 2003, 11:11 AM EDT
SAN ANTONIO -- A Roman Catholic priest who removed the U.S. flag from in front his church was ordered to put it back up by the archbishop, who said anti-war views shouldn't be forced on the public.
Archbishop Patrick Flores issued his order after receiving inquiries about what some Our Lady of Grace congregants say the Rev. John Mannion's latest display of anti-United States sentiment.
Church members say that Mannion often criticized America during sermons and kept the flag at half-staff. Last week, he simply removed it from the church in La Coste, 20 miles southwest of San Antonio.
"I have advised Father Mannion that the American flag must be restored at full height to its usual place of honor immediately," Flores said Thursday.
"While I respect Father Mannion's passion for the dignity of all life and his right to his personal position on the war, nothing is accomplished by using the flag to force that view on those who are suffering the pain and uncertainty of knowing that America's men and women of the armed forces are in harm's way," Flores said.
Mannion, who has led the church since 2001, declined comment.
While Pope John Paul II is strongly opposed to the war, there have been other incidents of U.S. churches taking steps to rein in the anti-war efforts of their staffs.
Earlier this week, the Portland, Ore., archdiocese fired its 12-year peace and justice director after repeatedly warning the man to curtail his anti-war activism.
An archdiocese spokesman said Frank Fromherz was laid off because of budget cuts. But Fromherz, 49, said archdiocese officials told him he was fired because he violated his role as an "agent" for the archbishop and his views.
Fromherz had clashed with Archbishop John G. Vlazny over the war. For example, Fromherz sent an e-mail to hundreds of Catholics and others that encouraged anti-war protests and called on "the international criminal court to indict and prosecute our own President (Bush) as a war criminal."
Vlazny, meanwhile, recently told 350,000 Catholics to emphasize prayer, saying "divisiveness is not at all helpful."
In Des Moines, Iowa, pacifist priest Frank Cordaro said he has been uninvited from speaking at a memorial service and a parish mission.
"Being a pacifist between wars is like being a vegetarian between meals," he said.
Copyright © 2003, The Associated Press
# posted by scorpiorising : 9:11 AM |
"Bloviating Pillars of American Empire"
Philip Weiss of the New York Observer takes aim at Thomas Friedman, columnist for the New York Times, and Tim Russert of Meet the Press fame:
"When the tank pulled Saddam’s statue down in Baghdad, and Iraqis—a small crowd of them, anyway—jumped on it, Tim Russert on MSNBC launched into a lecture to the Arab world. Will they show their people these pictures? he asked. Will they embrace democracy instead of terrorism?
There was something of a bullying tone to the lecture, a warning to Arab culture that it must change, or else. Mr. Russert was expressing an ideology as strong, and self-satisfied, as the anti-communist ideology that was all over the airwaves in the 50’s and 60’s.
The lecture was also a sign of the influence of Thomas Friedman. The New York Times columnist has become the principal interpreter of the Arab world for the well-informed. Everyone reads him; my liberal friends are always quoting him. He’s frequently on television, and Mr. Russert’s lecture could very well have been cribbed from Tom Friedman, and maybe even was. When former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger uses the term "stagnation" in The Washington Post, he’s piping a Friedman word...
...Thomas Friedman writes clearly and emphatically. He is obviously a liberal Beltway Democrat, I’m sure a good supporter of abortion rights, and he has a pleasant mustachioed presence on television.
The problem with Mr. Friedman is that for all his time in foreign lands, he has little ability to see things from someone else’s point of view. There is a secret xenophobia about him. He travels everywhere, and everywhere reports to his wife, according to the diary portion of his latest book, Longitudes & Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11. "You know, honey, the wheels aren’t on very tight out there." Somehow, nowhere are they tight enough for Mr. Friedman except home—when he is in the neat, clean Washington subway or at Camden Yards. (The No. 7 train would probably give him the willies.)
For all his time in the Arab world (including five years in Beirut), it is hard to read his work without concluding that he really is anti-Arab. He cannot abide Arab culture as it is; it is all of it infected by bin Laden–ism. "Mr. Hobbes’s neighborhood," he calls the Arab world in his latest book. "Backward," he said of young Arabs in a recent column. He writes dismissively of "the wall in the Arab mind."
It’s one thing when George W. Bush and the right-wingers demonstrate blanket insensitivity to Arab societies. They would be that way. They would, after all, heedlessly cause the destruction of the Iraqi museum, the dispersal and erasure of its cultural treasures.
But Thomas Friedman’s constituency is liberals, the museum audience. This makes his point of view more significant. For he is fostering a mistrust and disdain in this community for an entire culture and region of the world, precisely when it is the liberals and internationalists—the people who gave America the Peace Corps, the civil-rights movement, affirmative action and multiculturalism—who have a responsibility now to see the variations in that alien world and figure out other ways of relating to it than aggression. In the Peace Corps, at least, they have to speak the language; for all his expertise on the Arab mind, Mr. Friedman told me that he can get along in Arabic, even do an interview in a pinch, but "I’m not fluent—I would never describe myself as fluent."
There is always the sense about Mr. Friedman that he is playing "Gotcha!" with the Arabs, and there is never any subtlety. This is best demonstrated by an incident in his latest book. His plane from London is about to arrive in Riyadh, and an "attractive raven-haired" Saudi woman in the seat beside him begins to fret. She has left her veil at home. She is calling home madly on her cell phone to make sure someone has come to the plane with her veil.
To Mr. Friedman, this is a great sadness. What a waste of time—she is so attractive. Think of all the useless energy she and other Saudi women who seem to actually like the veil are expending, putting on the chains of servitude ….
But Mr. Friedman never really talked to the woman, and the resulting observations are facile and self-serving. A subtle mind, a truly inquiring mind, would be forced to different observations. Like: She is from a very different culture from my own, and she sees a value in this thing that seems hateful and pointless to me. But then, think of all the energy that women in our culture spend to deal with the same essential condition—men stare at them—by prettifying themselves with expensive makeup. Is that a waste of time and resources? Is a free-speech culture inevitably one of public pornography, as these Arabs often say? And what does that do to civilization?
No, Mr. Friedman can be counted on to go into any situation and come back with a hosanna to globalization. He is a sort of modern-day Babbitt. At the dinner table, he advises his girls that they can believe anything they want, but they can never not love America and not thank God that they were born Americans. He repeatedly calls the World Trade Center a "temple" of our "civic religion," which apparently is invention and making money."
"When the tank pulled Saddam’s statue down in Baghdad, and Iraqis—a small crowd of them, anyway—jumped on it, Tim Russert on MSNBC launched into a lecture to the Arab world. Will they show their people these pictures? he asked. Will they embrace democracy instead of terrorism?
There was something of a bullying tone to the lecture, a warning to Arab culture that it must change, or else. Mr. Russert was expressing an ideology as strong, and self-satisfied, as the anti-communist ideology that was all over the airwaves in the 50’s and 60’s.
The lecture was also a sign of the influence of Thomas Friedman. The New York Times columnist has become the principal interpreter of the Arab world for the well-informed. Everyone reads him; my liberal friends are always quoting him. He’s frequently on television, and Mr. Russert’s lecture could very well have been cribbed from Tom Friedman, and maybe even was. When former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger uses the term "stagnation" in The Washington Post, he’s piping a Friedman word...
...Thomas Friedman writes clearly and emphatically. He is obviously a liberal Beltway Democrat, I’m sure a good supporter of abortion rights, and he has a pleasant mustachioed presence on television.
The problem with Mr. Friedman is that for all his time in foreign lands, he has little ability to see things from someone else’s point of view. There is a secret xenophobia about him. He travels everywhere, and everywhere reports to his wife, according to the diary portion of his latest book, Longitudes & Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11. "You know, honey, the wheels aren’t on very tight out there." Somehow, nowhere are they tight enough for Mr. Friedman except home—when he is in the neat, clean Washington subway or at Camden Yards. (The No. 7 train would probably give him the willies.)
For all his time in the Arab world (including five years in Beirut), it is hard to read his work without concluding that he really is anti-Arab. He cannot abide Arab culture as it is; it is all of it infected by bin Laden–ism. "Mr. Hobbes’s neighborhood," he calls the Arab world in his latest book. "Backward," he said of young Arabs in a recent column. He writes dismissively of "the wall in the Arab mind."
It’s one thing when George W. Bush and the right-wingers demonstrate blanket insensitivity to Arab societies. They would be that way. They would, after all, heedlessly cause the destruction of the Iraqi museum, the dispersal and erasure of its cultural treasures.
But Thomas Friedman’s constituency is liberals, the museum audience. This makes his point of view more significant. For he is fostering a mistrust and disdain in this community for an entire culture and region of the world, precisely when it is the liberals and internationalists—the people who gave America the Peace Corps, the civil-rights movement, affirmative action and multiculturalism—who have a responsibility now to see the variations in that alien world and figure out other ways of relating to it than aggression. In the Peace Corps, at least, they have to speak the language; for all his expertise on the Arab mind, Mr. Friedman told me that he can get along in Arabic, even do an interview in a pinch, but "I’m not fluent—I would never describe myself as fluent."
There is always the sense about Mr. Friedman that he is playing "Gotcha!" with the Arabs, and there is never any subtlety. This is best demonstrated by an incident in his latest book. His plane from London is about to arrive in Riyadh, and an "attractive raven-haired" Saudi woman in the seat beside him begins to fret. She has left her veil at home. She is calling home madly on her cell phone to make sure someone has come to the plane with her veil.
To Mr. Friedman, this is a great sadness. What a waste of time—she is so attractive. Think of all the useless energy she and other Saudi women who seem to actually like the veil are expending, putting on the chains of servitude ….
But Mr. Friedman never really talked to the woman, and the resulting observations are facile and self-serving. A subtle mind, a truly inquiring mind, would be forced to different observations. Like: She is from a very different culture from my own, and she sees a value in this thing that seems hateful and pointless to me. But then, think of all the energy that women in our culture spend to deal with the same essential condition—men stare at them—by prettifying themselves with expensive makeup. Is that a waste of time and resources? Is a free-speech culture inevitably one of public pornography, as these Arabs often say? And what does that do to civilization?
No, Mr. Friedman can be counted on to go into any situation and come back with a hosanna to globalization. He is a sort of modern-day Babbitt. At the dinner table, he advises his girls that they can believe anything they want, but they can never not love America and not thank God that they were born Americans. He repeatedly calls the World Trade Center a "temple" of our "civic religion," which apparently is invention and making money."
# posted by scorpiorising : 7:40 AM |
Bill Clinton for President
NEW YORK (AFP) - Former US President Bill Clinton (news - web sites) blasted US foreign policy adopted in the wake of the September 11 attacks, arguing the United States cannot kill, jail or occupy all of its adversaries.
"Our paradigm now seems to be: something terrible happened to us on September 11, and that gives us the right to interpret all future events in a way that everyone else in the world must agree with us," said Clinton, who spoke at a seminar of governance organized by Conference Board (news - web sites).
"And if they don't, they can go straight to hell."
The Democratic former president, who preceded George W. Bush at the White House, said that sooner or later the United States had to find a way to cooperate with the world at large.
"We can't run," Clinton pointed out. "If you got an interdependent world, and you cannot kill, jail or occupy all your adversaries, sooner or later you have to make a deal."
He said he believed Washington overreacted to German and French opposition to US plans for military action against Iraq (news - web sites) and suggested that the current administration had trouble juggling foreign and domestic issues.
"Since September 11, it looks like we can't hold two guns at the same time," Clinton said. "If you fight terrorism, you can't make America a better place to be."
Clinton said that if he were at the White House right now he would scrap a 726-billion dollar tax cut proposal made by the president in January to stimulate the flagging economy.
Congress has since cut the proposal to 550 billion dollars in the case of the House of Representatives and 350 billion under a Senate version of the plan.
"Our paradigm now seems to be: something terrible happened to us on September 11, and that gives us the right to interpret all future events in a way that everyone else in the world must agree with us," said Clinton, who spoke at a seminar of governance organized by Conference Board (news - web sites).
"And if they don't, they can go straight to hell."
The Democratic former president, who preceded George W. Bush at the White House, said that sooner or later the United States had to find a way to cooperate with the world at large.
"We can't run," Clinton pointed out. "If you got an interdependent world, and you cannot kill, jail or occupy all your adversaries, sooner or later you have to make a deal."
He said he believed Washington overreacted to German and French opposition to US plans for military action against Iraq (news - web sites) and suggested that the current administration had trouble juggling foreign and domestic issues.
"Since September 11, it looks like we can't hold two guns at the same time," Clinton said. "If you fight terrorism, you can't make America a better place to be."
Clinton said that if he were at the White House right now he would scrap a 726-billion dollar tax cut proposal made by the president in January to stimulate the flagging economy.
Congress has since cut the proposal to 550 billion dollars in the case of the House of Representatives and 350 billion under a Senate version of the plan.
# posted by scorpiorising : 6:45 AM |
Monday, April 14, 2003
Robber Barons
Stolen from the Iraqis, and from all the peoples of the world who value the civilizations of others, is the ancient Babylonian heritage that is part of the story of the beginning of civilization on this planet, in the looting of the Baghdad museum. Stolen from the American middle and lower classes is their hard-earned money that will go to pay the tax bill of the rich who will benefit from the 350 billion dollar tax cut, and the rich who pay no taxes because they base their corporate home in Bermuda in order to avoid paying any taxes at all. Stolen from our children is possibly their safe and peaceful existence in the probable future, now that so many hate us for our aggression. Stolen from us is the respect of the majority of the world's people, for now, until we are able to acknowledge our current mistakes, and this war was a colossal mistake, from its conception to its violent unfolding. Stolen from Arabs everywhere is a sense that we value the integrity of their identity as a people. We will steal their oil in the payments given to the American Companies that will rebuild what we have destroyed with our bombs. Stolen is their identity as a nation in these ravages of war, that is why the museum was looted. Their very sense of self has been severely damaged. How do you bandage a psyche? Stolen from the poor and needy of this country is the good-will money that will now be used to pay for the actual carrying out of this war. The leaders of this country are robber barons who will take and take and take until there is no more to take, or possibly destroy us all in the process.
# posted by scorpiorising : 6:01 PM |
Wednesday, April 09, 2003
HAPPY END OF WAR
Bono and Pavarotti are going to sing for the Iraqi refugees. Its great to hear these two names paired, but where were they when the fighting started? Is this the safe road taken, wait for the war to end and then give a benefit concert? If they each gave a fraction of their personal fortunes to the cause, that might help also. I am worn out. I close my eyes and all I see right now is buildings falling, crumbling; I know there are people in those buildings, but I choose to see just the outlines, no faces of figures running from the bombs.
I know that in the rubble of parts of Karbala, Basra, and Baghdad, are children dead and dying, children suffering. There is no cause worth the suffering of children.
I know that Americans are celebrating, jubilant; some Iraqis are celebrating the fall of Saddam. I bet the families who just lost loved ones from the shelling aren't celebrating. But I state the obvious, I hope. Americans are celebrating, all ages and spread all over this country. Some, perhaps a very small minority, are celebrating for the fortune that will be made there.
Americans everywhere are assuming a victory has been accomplished. "We were right all along, because we have won". Somewhere in the hearts of Americans, there is that schrapnel of doubt, so that when you bring up the war, many react very angrily, much of their venom directed at peace protesters. That schrapnel of doubt is going to fester, and possibly poison the whole system. Much of the system is already poisoned. While you support their war they are going to screw you with massive tax cuts for the rich. And unemployment is growing. Happy end of war.
Anyone who asks that you kill in the name of beliefs, anyone who asks you to kill in the name of their beliefs, run, run as fast as you can, and avoid this person always. Because they are asking you to sell your soul for the sake of beliefs. Once sold, it cannot be bought back. Avoid the military. At all costs. Because eventually you will be called upon to sacrifice life and limb, and it may be yours, in the name of beliefs you may or may not share with those asking for your sacrifice.
What do you think the chickenhawkes who ordered up this war did during Vietnam? They avoided service, anyway possible that their family's money would allow.
When a life is taken, for any cause, that cause ought to be examined thoroughly, for the taking of life throws great question on any cause. We can play rationalization games with numbers: it was only 69 killed in this battle, it was only 2000 soldiers killed yesterday, it was a total of 6000 killed, which is 994,000 less than a million. Put a face to one or two of those. Put a child's face. I know that American media doesn't run pictures of dead children. I have a link to those pictures. Do you dare to look?
Unbelievably, it is in "bad taste" to run pictures of dead children in wars. That is the gift of "civilization": bad taste to run pictures of dead children. It is our refusal to look which allows this killing to continue.
Is it possible to get used to the pictures of dead children? I have read of doctors and nurses crying, marines crying, in response to the dead and injured in this war. You might think you are impervious to the scenes of battle; you might think yourself hardened in some way, but all it takes is one image, one image that might remind you of a child in your life, a relative perhaps, or the child of a friend.
Why do we choose to not protect the children of the world from violence? We have instead chosen to put our own personal agendas before children, wether it be to make profit in Iraq, wether it be to further the Republican party because it represents our beliefs, wether it be to justify the war we have waged in other countries, in other times, wether it be to not pay attention, to purposefully keep information concerning the war away from our personal knowledge, so that we don't have to feel anything about it, then we don't have to be inconvenienced in any way.
A woman wrote a rather irate article in the Guardian Unlimited today. She asked, "Why do they have to publish pictures of dead children all over the newspaper?" I'm sorry that I can't find the article to link to, lost somewhere in the endless, seemingly random links on the Guardian Unlimited. But I would say to her, that you can choose not to look, but I am hoping that you will choose otherwise, because, obviously, from your reaction, it is very important to look, because looking will allow the issue to not rest, and you don't sound very rested right now after looking.
I know that in the rubble of parts of Karbala, Basra, and Baghdad, are children dead and dying, children suffering. There is no cause worth the suffering of children.
I know that Americans are celebrating, jubilant; some Iraqis are celebrating the fall of Saddam. I bet the families who just lost loved ones from the shelling aren't celebrating. But I state the obvious, I hope. Americans are celebrating, all ages and spread all over this country. Some, perhaps a very small minority, are celebrating for the fortune that will be made there.
Americans everywhere are assuming a victory has been accomplished. "We were right all along, because we have won". Somewhere in the hearts of Americans, there is that schrapnel of doubt, so that when you bring up the war, many react very angrily, much of their venom directed at peace protesters. That schrapnel of doubt is going to fester, and possibly poison the whole system. Much of the system is already poisoned. While you support their war they are going to screw you with massive tax cuts for the rich. And unemployment is growing. Happy end of war.
Anyone who asks that you kill in the name of beliefs, anyone who asks you to kill in the name of their beliefs, run, run as fast as you can, and avoid this person always. Because they are asking you to sell your soul for the sake of beliefs. Once sold, it cannot be bought back. Avoid the military. At all costs. Because eventually you will be called upon to sacrifice life and limb, and it may be yours, in the name of beliefs you may or may not share with those asking for your sacrifice.
What do you think the chickenhawkes who ordered up this war did during Vietnam? They avoided service, anyway possible that their family's money would allow.
When a life is taken, for any cause, that cause ought to be examined thoroughly, for the taking of life throws great question on any cause. We can play rationalization games with numbers: it was only 69 killed in this battle, it was only 2000 soldiers killed yesterday, it was a total of 6000 killed, which is 994,000 less than a million. Put a face to one or two of those. Put a child's face. I know that American media doesn't run pictures of dead children. I have a link to those pictures. Do you dare to look?
Unbelievably, it is in "bad taste" to run pictures of dead children in wars. That is the gift of "civilization": bad taste to run pictures of dead children. It is our refusal to look which allows this killing to continue.
Is it possible to get used to the pictures of dead children? I have read of doctors and nurses crying, marines crying, in response to the dead and injured in this war. You might think you are impervious to the scenes of battle; you might think yourself hardened in some way, but all it takes is one image, one image that might remind you of a child in your life, a relative perhaps, or the child of a friend.
Why do we choose to not protect the children of the world from violence? We have instead chosen to put our own personal agendas before children, wether it be to make profit in Iraq, wether it be to further the Republican party because it represents our beliefs, wether it be to justify the war we have waged in other countries, in other times, wether it be to not pay attention, to purposefully keep information concerning the war away from our personal knowledge, so that we don't have to feel anything about it, then we don't have to be inconvenienced in any way.
A woman wrote a rather irate article in the Guardian Unlimited today. She asked, "Why do they have to publish pictures of dead children all over the newspaper?" I'm sorry that I can't find the article to link to, lost somewhere in the endless, seemingly random links on the Guardian Unlimited. But I would say to her, that you can choose not to look, but I am hoping that you will choose otherwise, because, obviously, from your reaction, it is very important to look, because looking will allow the issue to not rest, and you don't sound very rested right now after looking.
# posted by scorpiorising : 9:56 AM |
Sunday, April 06, 2003
Watching this war that is a turkey shoot. 2000 Iraqi soldiers killed in one battle. As one CNN correspondent said, "This is like a slaughter."
# posted by scorpiorising : 11:15 AM |
Friday, April 04, 2003
THE DEEP SEA MONSTER
A creature is discovered deep in the ocean, whose long, elegant tendrils reach many lengths behind the massive, unusual, bulbous body. It probably doesn't see so much as it senses. It is very dark down there, where little light bleeds from the surface, having been swallowed by the massive depths above it. Why, why this creature? Why does it exist? What delicate role does it play in the underwater ecosystem? Does it play any role, directly or indirectly, in the ecosystem that we inhabit? Does the probable death of one species affect the probable reality of another? Why should we care that this species exists?
When I looked at this remarkable creature, with a head designed for flying underwater, I felt the touch of love. This creature exists to experience existence, and it exists to cause wonderment in the human species that now gaze upon it. Its synchratic appearance now, at this time, asking for our notice, and we, the human species, looking for beauty in deep, dark spaces. For beautiful it is, meant to strike such wonderment in the heart of the observer, that instantly is communicated an emotional attachment that can only be called love. This creature now is meant to communicate the wonder of creation, so that we may work harder to preserve and protect it. Behold!!
When I looked at this remarkable creature, with a head designed for flying underwater, I felt the touch of love. This creature exists to experience existence, and it exists to cause wonderment in the human species that now gaze upon it. Its synchratic appearance now, at this time, asking for our notice, and we, the human species, looking for beauty in deep, dark spaces. For beautiful it is, meant to strike such wonderment in the heart of the observer, that instantly is communicated an emotional attachment that can only be called love. This creature now is meant to communicate the wonder of creation, so that we may work harder to preserve and protect it. Behold!!
# posted by scorpiorising : 4:13 PM |
Thursday, April 03, 2003
CLUSTER BOMBS USED IN HILLAH
Robert Fisk, writing for the Independent.co.uk, discusses the use of cluster bombs in the village of Hillah, and possible violations of international law. The Dissident Voice offers a link to the article:
"The wounds are vicious and deep, a rash of scarlet spots on the back and thighs or face, the shards of shrapnel from the cluster bombs buried an inch or more in the flesh. The wards of the Hillah teaching hospital are proof that something illegal – something quite outside the Geneva Conventions – occurred in the villages around the city once known as Babylon.
The wailing children, the young women with breast and leg wounds, the 10 patients upon whom doctors had to perform brain surgery to remove metal from their heads, talk of the days and nights when the explosives fell "like grapes" from the sky. Cluster bombs, the doctors say – and the detritus of the air raids around the hamlets of Nadr and Djifil and Akramin and Mahawil and Mohandesin and Hail Askeri shows that they are right.
Were they American or British aircraft that showered these villages with one of the most lethal weapons of modern warfare? The 61 dead who have passed through the Hillah hospital since Saturday night cannot tell us. Nor can the survivors who, in many cases, were sitting in their homes when the white canisters opened high above their village, spilling thousands of bomblets into the sky, exploding in the air, soaring through windows and doorways to burst indoors or bouncing off the roofs of the concrete huts to blow up later in the roadways.
Rahed Hakem remembers that it was 10.30am on Sunday when she was sitting in her home in Nadr, that she heard "the voice of explosions" and looked out of the door to see "the sky raining fire". She said the bomblets were a black-grey colour. Mohamed Moussa described the clusters of "little boxes" that fell out of the sky in the same village and thought they were silver-coloured. They fell like "small grapefruit," he said. "If it hadn't exploded and you touched it, it went off immediately," he said. "They exploded in the air and on the ground and we still have some in our home, unexploded."
Karima Mizler thought the bomblets had some kind of wires attached to them – perhaps the metal "butterfly" that contains sets of the tiny cluster bombs and springs open to release them in showers.
Some victims died at once, mostly women and children, some of whose blackened, decomposing remains lay in the tiny charnel house mortuary at the back of the Hillah hospital. The teaching college received more than 200 wounded since Saturday night – the 61 dead are only those who were brought to the hospital or who died during or after surgery, and many others are believed to have been buried in their home villages – and, of these, doctors say about 80 per cent were civilians.
Soldiers there certainly were, at least 40 if these statistics are to be believed, and amid the foul clothing of the dead outside the mortuary door I found a khaki military belt and a combat jacket. But village men can also be soldiers and both they and their wives and daughters insisted there were no military installations around their homes. True or false? Who is to know if a tank or a missile launcher was positioned in a nearby field – as they were along the highway north to Baghdad? But the Geneva Conventions demand protection for civilians even if they are intermingled with military personnel, and the use of cluster bombs in these villages – even if aimed at military targets – thus crosses the boundaries of international law."
"The wounds are vicious and deep, a rash of scarlet spots on the back and thighs or face, the shards of shrapnel from the cluster bombs buried an inch or more in the flesh. The wards of the Hillah teaching hospital are proof that something illegal – something quite outside the Geneva Conventions – occurred in the villages around the city once known as Babylon.
The wailing children, the young women with breast and leg wounds, the 10 patients upon whom doctors had to perform brain surgery to remove metal from their heads, talk of the days and nights when the explosives fell "like grapes" from the sky. Cluster bombs, the doctors say – and the detritus of the air raids around the hamlets of Nadr and Djifil and Akramin and Mahawil and Mohandesin and Hail Askeri shows that they are right.
Were they American or British aircraft that showered these villages with one of the most lethal weapons of modern warfare? The 61 dead who have passed through the Hillah hospital since Saturday night cannot tell us. Nor can the survivors who, in many cases, were sitting in their homes when the white canisters opened high above their village, spilling thousands of bomblets into the sky, exploding in the air, soaring through windows and doorways to burst indoors or bouncing off the roofs of the concrete huts to blow up later in the roadways.
Rahed Hakem remembers that it was 10.30am on Sunday when she was sitting in her home in Nadr, that she heard "the voice of explosions" and looked out of the door to see "the sky raining fire". She said the bomblets were a black-grey colour. Mohamed Moussa described the clusters of "little boxes" that fell out of the sky in the same village and thought they were silver-coloured. They fell like "small grapefruit," he said. "If it hadn't exploded and you touched it, it went off immediately," he said. "They exploded in the air and on the ground and we still have some in our home, unexploded."
Karima Mizler thought the bomblets had some kind of wires attached to them – perhaps the metal "butterfly" that contains sets of the tiny cluster bombs and springs open to release them in showers.
Some victims died at once, mostly women and children, some of whose blackened, decomposing remains lay in the tiny charnel house mortuary at the back of the Hillah hospital. The teaching college received more than 200 wounded since Saturday night – the 61 dead are only those who were brought to the hospital or who died during or after surgery, and many others are believed to have been buried in their home villages – and, of these, doctors say about 80 per cent were civilians.
Soldiers there certainly were, at least 40 if these statistics are to be believed, and amid the foul clothing of the dead outside the mortuary door I found a khaki military belt and a combat jacket. But village men can also be soldiers and both they and their wives and daughters insisted there were no military installations around their homes. True or false? Who is to know if a tank or a missile launcher was positioned in a nearby field – as they were along the highway north to Baghdad? But the Geneva Conventions demand protection for civilians even if they are intermingled with military personnel, and the use of cluster bombs in these villages – even if aimed at military targets – thus crosses the boundaries of international law."
# posted by scorpiorising : 7:27 AM |
HILLA, IRAQ IS THIS WAR'S MAI LAI MASSACRE
Hilla, just south of Baghdad, and scene of recent carnage by American bombing, is going to become this war's Mai Lai Massacre. There will be an international investigation, no, there must be an international investigation. The description of the physical carnage done to the villagers of Hilla, provided by Tyler Hicks and John Burns of the New York Times in the link above, will be a cry for justice. Who perpetrated this indecent bombing and why?
Then again, all of war is indecent, and it remains to be seen that in the face of what is a looming coalition "victory", will the rest of the world that opposed this war dig deep in its gut to continue to express outrage and demand change, change that will possibly prevent another war like this from happening? Will the rest of the world have the courage to stand up to the imperialist aggression of the United States? Will Americans have any interest in hearing about, and demanding an explanation for civilian deaths in this war? Are Americans capable of feeling the pain of any who aren't their own?
It is my belief that it was this indifference to the pain of others, notably, the Palestinians, that originally led to another group of people targeting our country for attack. Are we destined to repeat this pattern, over and over again, like the Isrealis and Palestinians, trapped on the treadmill of war and destruction? Who is next after Iraq? Iran? Syria? North Korea? And the countries that dare to disagree with us, will we continue to react in such a juvenile fashion and continue to erode international relations, and continue this path towards isolation? We're the bully on the block, and eventually the bully gets socked in the nose; its only a question of how, and when.
Then again, all of war is indecent, and it remains to be seen that in the face of what is a looming coalition "victory", will the rest of the world that opposed this war dig deep in its gut to continue to express outrage and demand change, change that will possibly prevent another war like this from happening? Will the rest of the world have the courage to stand up to the imperialist aggression of the United States? Will Americans have any interest in hearing about, and demanding an explanation for civilian deaths in this war? Are Americans capable of feeling the pain of any who aren't their own?
It is my belief that it was this indifference to the pain of others, notably, the Palestinians, that originally led to another group of people targeting our country for attack. Are we destined to repeat this pattern, over and over again, like the Isrealis and Palestinians, trapped on the treadmill of war and destruction? Who is next after Iraq? Iran? Syria? North Korea? And the countries that dare to disagree with us, will we continue to react in such a juvenile fashion and continue to erode international relations, and continue this path towards isolation? We're the bully on the block, and eventually the bully gets socked in the nose; its only a question of how, and when.
# posted by scorpiorising : 6:46 AM |
Wednesday, April 02, 2003
Where have I been?
My last entry is dated March 27. I've been in the blogsphere since then, documenting the war casualties, or as much info on as many as I could find. It has been difficult, and lonely. Not many seem to want to hear about the way that civilians are dying in Iraq. But I have received quite a number of hits. This tells me there are some hungry for the information as to how people are dying in Iraq. If not hungry, they are at least willing , or seeking.
How does it affect one to hear such news, to hear of babies losing their limbs, or being blown apart. To hear that the Red Cross said today the hospitals in a recently "liberated" southern city in Iraq "are filled with horror"?. I tell you, it grounds you, like no other events that you could hear. Well, this is it , the world we created. Priorities fall away and new ones created. It is as though you were there by osmosis, when you start paying attention. You learn, when you pay attention. Yes, there is turmoil. There is anger. There is gnashing of teeth and fury directed at the knowns and unknowns who brought this about. There is sobering reality that this is real, and everything was changed, forever, when the first bomb was dropped.
The re-ordering of priorities can be momentous and life-changing and subtle, compelling and explosive all at once. Folks, I'll say it out loud. The rich gotta go. And please, I do not advocate violence. What I am advocating is a completely new system of economics, so that no one will ever have the power, through their money, to wage war again. Because, as far as I can see it, this is a war by the people with money, who want more of it, and don't care how they get it.
I do not attack all of those with money. I direct my words towards the ones who will make a profit from this war, and who advocated this war with not so secret intentions: to make themselves more powerful, with more control over more of the world's resources, and money. I don't need to name them. You are probably too many to name. You know who you are. You are being exposed daily in the media that is the true expression of democracy in this country, the internet.
I will say this to rich folks who don't support this war, who won't make a profit from it: Have you spent a portion of your wealth to help the needy causes for social, economic and environmental justice in this county? Because these causes sure do need a helping hand right now. The poor, the middle and lower classes, peace loving peoples, animals, the environment are all under attack from greedy, me-firsters, who have no clue what it means to share. If you aren't sharing a portion of your wealth with the people in need, the worthy causes in need, then you may be part of the problem. I can't tell you what portion of your wealth you ought to be sharing; you will have to decide that for yourself. I will say this, the causes are struggling to take form right now, and they need your help. Perhaps this war would not have happened if we had had more of your help, much earlier on, when the first dangerous signs of the rise of the christian far right came into focus.
I can remember when that happened. I was in my last year of college, studying sociology, in 1979. Reagan had just been elected, and the despair among the liberals in our little department was palpable. My radical, lesbian sociology professor called a meeting, of all concerned. In that meeting, I tried to reassure her the pendulum would one day swing back, to social sanity. I think of her now, and my need to reassure her, and her complete resistance to feeling any hope.
Here we are now, in the midst of a human tragedy and disaster, brought on by my country, with eggheads everywhere proclaiming we are in the process of liberating Iraq. Is there hope?
We no longer have the option of apathy; we no longer have the option of daydream of utopia; we no longer have the option of let someone else do it; we no longer have the option to escape into our entertainment, our harmless diversions. If our diversions keep us from seeing the nightmare the greedy ones are making of this country, of this world if they have their way, then our diversions are no longer harmless.
The antidote to the poison that is infecting this country is energetic action towards the good. Nothing magical, unless you measure the consequences of good works, which can sometimes seem like a kind of magic. There is so much that needs be done. The environment, civil rights, economic justice to name a few. Get busy.
How does it affect one to hear such news, to hear of babies losing their limbs, or being blown apart. To hear that the Red Cross said today the hospitals in a recently "liberated" southern city in Iraq "are filled with horror"?. I tell you, it grounds you, like no other events that you could hear. Well, this is it , the world we created. Priorities fall away and new ones created. It is as though you were there by osmosis, when you start paying attention. You learn, when you pay attention. Yes, there is turmoil. There is anger. There is gnashing of teeth and fury directed at the knowns and unknowns who brought this about. There is sobering reality that this is real, and everything was changed, forever, when the first bomb was dropped.
The re-ordering of priorities can be momentous and life-changing and subtle, compelling and explosive all at once. Folks, I'll say it out loud. The rich gotta go. And please, I do not advocate violence. What I am advocating is a completely new system of economics, so that no one will ever have the power, through their money, to wage war again. Because, as far as I can see it, this is a war by the people with money, who want more of it, and don't care how they get it.
I do not attack all of those with money. I direct my words towards the ones who will make a profit from this war, and who advocated this war with not so secret intentions: to make themselves more powerful, with more control over more of the world's resources, and money. I don't need to name them. You are probably too many to name. You know who you are. You are being exposed daily in the media that is the true expression of democracy in this country, the internet.
I will say this to rich folks who don't support this war, who won't make a profit from it: Have you spent a portion of your wealth to help the needy causes for social, economic and environmental justice in this county? Because these causes sure do need a helping hand right now. The poor, the middle and lower classes, peace loving peoples, animals, the environment are all under attack from greedy, me-firsters, who have no clue what it means to share. If you aren't sharing a portion of your wealth with the people in need, the worthy causes in need, then you may be part of the problem. I can't tell you what portion of your wealth you ought to be sharing; you will have to decide that for yourself. I will say this, the causes are struggling to take form right now, and they need your help. Perhaps this war would not have happened if we had had more of your help, much earlier on, when the first dangerous signs of the rise of the christian far right came into focus.
I can remember when that happened. I was in my last year of college, studying sociology, in 1979. Reagan had just been elected, and the despair among the liberals in our little department was palpable. My radical, lesbian sociology professor called a meeting, of all concerned. In that meeting, I tried to reassure her the pendulum would one day swing back, to social sanity. I think of her now, and my need to reassure her, and her complete resistance to feeling any hope.
Here we are now, in the midst of a human tragedy and disaster, brought on by my country, with eggheads everywhere proclaiming we are in the process of liberating Iraq. Is there hope?
We no longer have the option of apathy; we no longer have the option of daydream of utopia; we no longer have the option of let someone else do it; we no longer have the option to escape into our entertainment, our harmless diversions. If our diversions keep us from seeing the nightmare the greedy ones are making of this country, of this world if they have their way, then our diversions are no longer harmless.
The antidote to the poison that is infecting this country is energetic action towards the good. Nothing magical, unless you measure the consequences of good works, which can sometimes seem like a kind of magic. There is so much that needs be done. The environment, civil rights, economic justice to name a few. Get busy.
# posted by scorpiorising : 4:38 PM |
Links
- Google News
- HOME
- Contact Me
- WAR CASUALTIES(MY OTHER BLOG)
- BAGHDAD BURNING
- UNQUALIFIED OFFERINGS
- JUAN COLE*INFORMED COMMENT*
- BRAD DELONG
- TOMPAINE.COM
- THE DAILY HOWLER
- DISSENT MAGAZINE
- CENTER FOR PUBLIC INTEGRITY
- BLAH3.COM
- BLACK SUNDAE
- WAMPUM
- ESCHATON
- ARMS AND THE MAN
- MILL ON LIBERTY
- GERMANY IN WORLD WAR 2
- VEILED 4 ALLAH
- BUSY, BUSY, BUSY
- UNENVIABLE SITUATION
- HOW TO SAVE THE WORLD
- MATTHEW GROSS
- WHISKEY BAR
- WAR AND PIECE
- DAILY KOS
- GREG PALAST
- BLACK COMMENTATOR
- SURPRISING PATTERN OF FLORIDA'S ELECTION RESULTS
- THE BRAD BLOG
- THE OPEN VOTING CONSORTIUM
- BLACK BOX VOTING
- THE FREE PRESS
- VOTERGATE.TV
- STOLEN ELECTION. AMERICA HIJACKED
- An examination of the Florida election
- blueflu.us
- U.S. Election Controversies and Irregularities
- MY DD
- SEEING THE FOREST
- THERE IS NO CRISIS
- VELVET REVOLUTION
- 02/02/2003 - 02/09/2003
- 02/09/2003 - 02/16/2003
- 02/16/2003 - 02/23/2003
- 02/23/2003 - 03/02/2003
- 03/02/2003 - 03/09/2003
- 03/09/2003 - 03/16/2003
- 03/16/2003 - 03/23/2003
- 03/23/2003 - 03/30/2003
- 03/30/2003 - 04/06/2003
- 04/06/2003 - 04/13/2003
- 04/13/2003 - 04/20/2003
- 04/20/2003 - 04/27/2003
- 04/27/2003 - 05/04/2003
- 05/04/2003 - 05/11/2003
- 05/11/2003 - 05/18/2003
- 05/18/2003 - 05/25/2003
- 05/25/2003 - 06/01/2003
- 06/01/2003 - 06/08/2003
- 06/08/2003 - 06/15/2003
- 06/15/2003 - 06/22/2003
- 06/22/2003 - 06/29/2003
- 06/29/2003 - 07/06/2003
- 07/06/2003 - 07/13/2003
- 07/13/2003 - 07/20/2003
- 07/20/2003 - 07/27/2003
- 07/27/2003 - 08/03/2003
- 08/03/2003 - 08/10/2003
- 08/10/2003 - 08/17/2003
- 08/17/2003 - 08/24/2003
- 09/07/2003 - 09/14/2003
- 09/14/2003 - 09/21/2003
- 09/21/2003 - 09/28/2003
- 09/28/2003 - 10/05/2003
- 10/05/2003 - 10/12/2003
- 10/12/2003 - 10/19/2003
- 10/19/2003 - 10/26/2003
- 10/26/2003 - 11/02/2003
- 11/02/2003 - 11/09/2003
- 11/09/2003 - 11/16/2003
- 11/16/2003 - 11/23/2003
- 11/23/2003 - 11/30/2003
- 11/30/2003 - 12/07/2003
- 12/14/2003 - 12/21/2003
- 01/11/2004 - 01/18/2004
- 01/18/2004 - 01/25/2004
- 01/25/2004 - 02/01/2004
- 02/01/2004 - 02/08/2004
- 02/08/2004 - 02/15/2004
- 02/22/2004 - 02/29/2004
- 05/23/2004 - 05/30/2004
- 09/26/2004 - 10/03/2004
- 10/03/2004 - 10/10/2004
- 10/10/2004 - 10/17/2004
- 10/17/2004 - 10/24/2004
- 10/24/2004 - 10/31/2004
- 10/31/2004 - 11/07/2004
- 11/07/2004 - 11/14/2004
- 11/14/2004 - 11/21/2004
- 11/21/2004 - 11/28/2004
- 11/28/2004 - 12/05/2004
- 12/05/2004 - 12/12/2004
- 12/19/2004 - 12/26/2004
- 12/26/2004 - 01/02/2005
- 01/02/2005 - 01/09/2005
- 01/09/2005 - 01/16/2005
- 01/23/2005 - 01/30/2005
- 01/30/2005 - 02/06/2005
- 02/06/2005 - 02/13/2005
- 02/13/2005 - 02/20/2005
- 02/20/2005 - 02/27/2005
- 02/27/2005 - 03/06/2005
- 03/06/2005 - 03/13/2005
- 03/13/2005 - 03/20/2005
- 03/20/2005 - 03/27/2005
- 03/27/2005 - 04/03/2005
- 04/03/2005 - 04/10/2005
- 04/24/2005 - 05/01/2005
- 06/05/2005 - 06/12/2005
- 06/26/2005 - 07/03/2005
- 07/31/2005 - 08/07/2005
- 08/07/2005 - 08/14/2005
