Monthly Archive for January, 2004

War on Peace continues

Published by Diane Warth on 29 January 2004 0 Comments

Iraq Activist Kathy Kelly Sentenced to Federal Prison

by Kathy Kelly
Voices in the Wilderness

Hogtied and Abused at Fort Benning,” her account of the inhumane treatment that she received by her arresting officers.

By visiting the SOA Watch website, you can find more information about the SOA/WHISC, which has trained many of the military dictators and soldiers who have massacred hundreds of thousands of people of Central and South America, especially indigenous people. You can also learn about other ways to support the project of closing the SOA/WHISC. Just as the US occupation in Iraq fails to provide for the security of ordinary Iraqis, the SOA/WHISC has, at the very least, failed in its stated task of ‘security’ for Latin America and, in actuality, created more insecurity and fear for millions of people in the Global South. Kathy’s act of crossing the line with 27 other witnesses for peace, including VitW friend Rev. Jerry Zawada, O.F.M., is a sign of the commitment to nonviolent direct action which Voices in the Wilderness clings to as a hopeful road to peace and social justice in our world.

Continue reading at AntiWar.com

Who needs facts when you can have saints

Published by Diane Warth on 29 January 2004 0 Comments

Lord Hutton’s ‘vindication’ of Tony B’liar’ was predictable.

Outrageous.

Eric Umansky of Slate reminds readers of The David Kelly Affair by John Cassidy which appeared in The New Yorker last month.

Umansky describes it as comprehensive and it is.

Maybe someone should send a copy of it to Lord Hutton.

“SAINT TONY?”

Davies, in his resignation letter, questioned Hutton’s conclusions while the nation’s press had a field day.

One newspaper splashed a picture of a grinning Blair on its front page with a halo over him and the headline “Saint Tony.” Another left its front page largely blank save for the question “Whitewash?” in red letters.

Diagnosing Benny Morris

Published by Diane Warth on 27 January 2004 0 Comments

Gabriel Ash comments on this interview which appeared in Haaretz.

“Israeli historian Benny Morris crossed a new line of shame when he put his academic credentials and respectability in the service of outlining the “moral” justification for a future genocide against Palestinians.”

Ali Abunimah comments as well:

interview with black South African playwright John Kani on National Public Radio. Kani recalled the frequent interrogations he endured from a white intelligence officer: “He used to tell us South Africa would never, ever change. This is a God-created situation. They (white South Africans) were the chosen people, not the Jews, and that South Africa was their country and we didn’t have the brains to become a free people, or even to think we could govern.”

Reflecting upon those experiences today, Kani said: “I am just laughing, because he was stupid. You can’t turn the tide of freedom … A people who fight for freedom will be free. They’ve got God on their side; they’ve got time on their side; they’ve got truth on their side. It doesn’t matter how strong the enemy is, it’s only delaying the inevitable.”

Palestine-Israel will, inevitably, become a democracy for all its people. Inevitable, because through the collective efforts of those who work for justice, we will make it so.

Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada. This article was first published in The Daily Star.

All The King’s Men

Published by Diane Warth on 26 January 2004 0 Comments

The corruption case against Ariel Sharon is building and if the Telegraph is reporting about it he must be in trouble.

The scale of the evidence has been revealed by the aide, David Spector, in an exclusive interview with the Telegraph. Mr Sharon is fighting for his political life over a long-running scandal about murky political payments and alleged illicit campaign financing.

Mr Spector, 50, who is credited with planning Mr Sharon’s successful attempt to become the leader of the Likud party in 1999, believes that his tapes could be important evidence in the police investigation into the Israeli leader and could possibly bring about his downfall.

For many years Mr Spector recorded four-way conversations involving himself, the prime minister and Mr Sharon’s sons, Gilad and Omri, on audio and video tapes.

UK intel agencies have pre-emptively warned Tony Blair not to blame them for his war.

BRITISH intelligence chiefs launched a pre-emptive strike against Tony Blair last night, ahead of the publication of the Hutton report, and blamed the government for pressurising them into cherry-picking intelligence to justify the war on Iraq.

The UK’s leading spies believe the political fallout from the publication on Wednesday of the Hutton Inquiry’s report will result in an attempt by the Prime Minister and his senior Cabinet colleagues to blame the intelligence services for the shoddy information which was used by the government to convince the British people and parliament that Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were a threat to the UK.

While here in the US Kay puts all of the blame on the CIA and other agencies.

Dr. Kay said he was convinced that the analysts were not pressed by the Bush administration to make certain their prewar intelligence reports conformed to a White House agenda on Iraq.

Last year, some C.I.A. analysts said they had felt pressed to find links between Iraq and Al Qaeda to suit the administration. While Dr. Kay said he has no knowledge about that issue, he did believe that pressure was placed on analysts regarding the weapons programs.

“All the analysts I have talked to said they never felt pressured on W.M.D.,” he said. “Everyone believed that they had W.M.D.”

Assuming ‘he did believe’ in the sentence preceding the direct quote is a typo on the NYT’s part, and it appears that Dr. Kay hasn’t bothered talking to these other people, could it be said he’s cherry-picking intelligence?

Sore Loser?

Published by Diane Warth on 25 January 2004 Closed

While I think Dean’s been treated too roughly over his caucus speech, he gets no empathy from me on this:

Critical of Caucuses, Dean Demands Changes in Iowa

His complaints concern the internal debate that unfolds in each precinct after the initial round of voting, when supporters of different candidates try to sway one another. Dr. Dean said he had been surprised to learn that aides to one of his rivals, Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, circulated booklets to Iowa precinct captains with instructions to paint Dr. Dean as “an elitist from Park Avenue” and Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts as “part of the failed Washington politics.”

Senator Edwards, who condemned the booklet when it surfaced on Wednesday, said Saturday that Iowans “don’t need instructions from me” on how to run the caucuses.

Why did Dean lose Iowa? I’m no expert but negative campaigners who complain when others play a smarter game come off like sore losers. It was the impression I formed when he ran to Terry McCauliffe before the caucuses and this complaint doesn’t help dispel that suspicion.

Dean’s call for the caucus process to be monitored suggests he considers Iowans uninformed and easily manipulated.

Maybe we’re more intuitive than he thinks.

It Was A Rally, Stupid

Published by Diane Warth on 25 January 2004 0 Comments

I saw Dean’s infamous caucus speech once on C-Span the night he delivered it.

I’ve been very critical of Howard Dean but the attention being given this just seems stupid and contrived.

My 19-year old, a college student who watches much more tv than I do, tells me she’s lost count of the people rebroadcasting it. She’s not as stumped as I am why it’s been getting so much play. In her opinion, desperate comedians just want something to talk about. The speech itself, she said, impressed her as “someone trying to rally a crowd.” Her opinion is noteworthy as she doesn’t follow politics closely yet hasn’t been able to escape this to the point she’s sick of seeing it. She also doesn’t have a favourite in the race and isn’t tainted by preconceived notions of how a politician is ‘supposed’ to act.

That makes sense for the comedians looking for a laugh. But what excuse can be made for the media and others who ignore much bigger stories and focus on this instead?

Desperate doesn’t fit their reasoning. Manipulative does.

Exploitive too, it seems:

Iowa scream has Dean looking like a real doll

Did Kay State That Iraq Did Not Have WMDs…

Published by Diane Warth on 25 January 2004 0 Comments

Well yes he did and here are just two examples.

He stated it before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the House Committee on Appropriations, Subcommittee on Defense, and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence:

KAY LEAVES AFTER FINDING NO WMDs: The WP reports Bush’s personal weapons inspector David Kay is leaving his post after finding no WMDs in Iraq. While the Administration previously tried to spin Kay’s interim report as proof that Iraq was interested in acquiring WMD, Kay was firm in pointing out that no proof that Saddam had WMD had been found. As Kay said, We have not uncovered evidence that Iraq undertook significant post-1998 steps to actually build nuclear weapons or produce fissile material…We have not yet been able to corroborate the existence of a mobile biological weapons production effortIraq did not have a large, ongoing, centrally controlled chemical weapons program after 1991 Iraq’s large-scale capability to develop, produce, and fill new chemical weapon munitions was reduced – if not entirely destroyed – during Operations Desert Storm and Desert Fox, 13 years of UN sanctions and UN inspections.

And on Friday night he stated this:

that this Telegraph interview makes sense despite these prior statements.

Senators were told Iraqi weapons could hit U.S.

alleged embezzler Conrad Black‘s former newspaper, apparently still a conduit for Bush propaganda!

Predictable more like it. Apparently you can fool some of the people with the same elusive ‘evidence’ twice.

One Dance: The People’s Summit

Published by Diane Warth on 21 January 2004 0 Comments

Must read post by Richard Oxman.

While you’re at Press Action don’t miss Mark Hand’s The Anybody-But-Bush Movement .

Comparing Travel Notes

Published by Diane Warth on 21 January 2004 0 Comments

In this post I excerpted the following conversation Sean Penn had during his November trip to Iraq.

Institute for Public Accuracy e-mail:

RAHUL MAHAJAN, rahul@tao.ca, http://www.empirenotes.org/sou.html,
www.progressive.org/sept03/maha0903.html

Mahajan, author of the book “Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond,” is just back from Iraq. He said today: “I saw no evidence of any reconstruction worthy of mention in all of Baghdad, a city of six million people. Not only has nothing been rebuilt, even the rubble from bombed-out buildings hasn’t been swept up. The new government of Iraq has been deliberately given no power and no authority; the talk of ‘transfer of sovereignty’ is nonsense. The claim that the United States does not seek to dominate or to be an empire is hardly compatible with long-term plans to leave over 100,000 American troops in Iraq. The claim that these new imperial policies have anything to do with fighting al-Qaeda is particularly hollow, and it’s no accident that there was no mention of Osama bin Laden in Bush’s speech. The proposal to double the budget of the National Endowment for Democracy poses a clear and present danger to democracy everywhere; in the past four years, the NED was involved in buying the 2000 Yugoslavia elections and plotting toward and funding the 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela….”

Caged Behind Razor Wire?

Published by Diane Warth on 21 January 2004 0 Comments

A. J. LIEBLING & EARL LONG

CHENEY PROTESTERS ARE CAGED BY POLICE

PORTLAND TRIBUNE – President of Vice Dick Cheney made a fundraising tour through the Pacific Northwest this week, with a stop in Portland, Oregon, on Jan. 13. Cheney charged $1,000 a plate for dinner, and $5K for a photo-op with supporters. The Vice President also exploited a recent Federal court decision, in the criminal case of U.S.A. v. Bursey to expand the use of euphemistically dubbed Free Speech Zones, to literally cage protesters at the event.

Protesters were not allowed to approach the event at a hotel near the Portland Airport, but were directed by police to a muddy field at least 100 yards away, {where, after they assembled, they were enclosed behind an eight-foot-high chain-link fence topped with razor wire.} Will Seaman, of the Portland Peaceful Resource Coalition, said of the caged area, “It was completely inaccessible,” and a half-mile from the nearest public transit. . .

[Referrer]

SOTU: First impressions

Published by Diane Warth on 21 January 2004 0 Comments

He lied about the state of the union, spun the war on terror lying explicitly about the constitutional process in Afghanistan and what it portends for its citizens, proposed more and more spending while calling for severe budget cuts insinuating he’ll be tapping into SS to pay for his war programmes, and speaking of ‘programmes’ could his rhetoric have been any more shameless with respect to Iraq’s potential to harm based on them?

I don’t know what offended me more. The obviously staged applause or George’s curious smirk no matter what subject he was talking about, including the troops and the situation in Iraq. There were times he appeared he could barely stifle an outright laugh. Was he medicated or is his sense of propriety really equivalent to a two-year old’s?