Monthly Archive for September, 2004

If you read blogs regularly you’ve likely read Letter To Our Enemies.

If you wonder why there’s a market for it or how someone would be able to conjure those images you might watch Planet of the Arabs. I found it on this page referenced by Lawrence of Cyberia. It’s difficult to do the first time. The second take wasn’t as alarming and creepingly familiar. That’s how it works, no?

Poetry. To put the sting back into that cold shower.

Must-Bomb-Credibility-At-Stake. If there’s an antiwar movement for insomniacs out there, one that doesn’t brake for Democrats, sign me up.

Thomas J. DiLorenzo reviews University of Pennsylvania political science professor Anne Norton’s new book, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire.

So much attention thus far has been focussed on Wolfowitz, Perle, Hadley, Feith, Kagan, and the Kristols that it’s a bit of shock to see how entrenched these ideologues are in the bowels of this administration. Thanks to scholars like Shadia Drury, whose interview in Hijacking Catastrophe is a must see, I’m not in the dark as to what their game is all about, their reasoning for operating behind a curtain, or why this particular administration has been so receptive to their ear whispering campaigns.

In my opinion, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld are personalities that were ripe for their picking. You have George who spent most of his life in the altered state of addiction going from one failed venture to another only to be “saved” from his own devices by an evangelical preacher who bestowed upon him the healing power and deeply intimate acquaintance of God. He now maintains a personal hotline to his creator through which he enjoys instantaneous forgiveness of his recurring transgressions, a pact of privilege and secrecy to which he figures he’s entitled as leader not only of the free world but of a Christian nation, and only by lying to the liberal, sinful masses will he get their support for his necessary and divine goals. Power has become this dry drunk’s drug of choice and it trumps the sort of power he was denied in his daddy’s boardrooms. His mission is God’s.

T.D. Allman’s profile of Cheney in Rolling Stone paints a picture of a serial blunderer whose ability to bullshit his investors is how he pulled his fat from the fires of his political failures. In his partisan-driven mania to create a one-party state it was his deceptive self-promotion that kept him in the game.

“Cheney’s manner and authority of voice far outstrip his true abilities,” says Chas Freeman, who served under Bush’s father as ambassador to Saudi Arabia. “It was clear from the start that Bush required adult supervision — but it turns out Cheney has even worse instincts. He does not understand that when you act recklessly, your mistakes will come back and bite you on the ass.”

When the election of Bill Clinton relieved Cheney of his second opportunity to influence an executive branch he sought refuge in neconservative think tanks. Someone like Cheney willing to employ any means necessary to achieve a fanatastical goal, one who survived his shortcomings by misrepresenting them as strengths, and in his privileged and guarded opinion believed the country needed ultimately to be saved from itself, he must have considered the neocons to be the ultimate mark. Rumsfeld, his comrade in arms for so many years, is an obsessive-compulsive who catalogues every bit of debris found on his ranch, is a hoarder of 9/11 artifacts, is a micro-manager who inundates his underlings with “snowflakes.” Is it any wonder he’s now shuffling human beings in the same manner? The “disorder” of the “untidy” world must make his brain boil.

Leo Strauss despised liberal democracy as the mechanism that brought Hitler to power so his work focussed on stripping the slovenly masses of their individual voices in govt., thereby destroying it, because they are too stupid to know what’s good for them. He taught his disciples, the neoconservatives, that in their role as society’s saviours and intellectual superiors they would find it necessary to employ the gullible, not-so-smart, “gentlemenly” quarters of the military and govt. to go forth and represent their propaganda as fact to the unwashed if their schemes to reorder the world could ever hope to succeed. But without a coalition of the willing at the top, in this case the harvest of George, Dick, and Don, they would fail.

Daniel Ellsberg has made yet another plea to those select, “gentlemenly” few (or to the Straussians’ chagrin, gentlewomenly fewer, who should be at home spitting out babies for perpetual warring) with access to damaging documents to bring them forth immediately and lay all doubts to waste Americans were intentionally misled into supporting the illegal occupation of Iraq.

Karen Kwiatkowski has been tireless in offering up first-hand accounts of the fiction mill that was operating in the Pentagon when she worked there as it was busily churning out propaganda the Bush administration coordinated and deployed.

Unfortunately, I think Ellsberg is correct that paper in hand cannot be denied, or as Kwiatkowski has experienced, be personally smeared for an allegedly racist agenda.

Whether there is a true patriot in possession of such facts willing to come forward is a lot to hang the future of a democracy on.

There has to be another way.

A commenter in this thread writes “Radio Israel reported today that widespread peaceful demonstrations took place all across Iran yesterday in favor of Dr. Ahura Pirouz Khaleghi Yazdi.” I’ve found one report carried by Reuters that describes the events:

TEHRAN (Reuters) – A rare pro-democracy protest in Tehran gained momentum late on Sunday with hundreds of cars pouring onto the streets, blaring horns and provoking an appearance from hardline vigilantes, witnesses said.

Local residents said Persian-language television channels from the United States had been broadcasting callers throughout the day who had exhorted Iranians to turn out for demonstrations.

Two hundred riot police were drafted into central Tehran earlier in the day when more than 2,000 people started milling round the streets after a minor protest inspired by the U.S.-based channels, witnesses said.

“There have been callers from all over the place, even from places like Montreal, telling people to go out onto the streets,” said one with access to satellite television.

[...]

Earlier in the day, motorists tooted horns in support of what they perceived as a demonstration. A witness said scores of people had been chanting “freedom,” clapping and handing out pastries.

He said police had used their batons to push people from the scene but added there had been no fighting.

The ILNA labor news agency labeled the protesters monarchists, loyal to the shah toppled in the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Some of the crowd said they had turned out because of a call by the mystic Ahura Pirouz Khalegi Yazdi, who has predicted the fall of Iran’s government on Oct. 1. He broadcasts on a California-based channel and promised to charter aircraft to bring home the Iranian diaspora from the United States.

I don’t know if an Aristide administration would have handled this crisis any better but the goons George installed are a disgrace.

PORT-AU-PRINCE: Gunmen raided homes and stole food from Haitians outside aid distribution centres as UN troops struggled yesterday to maintain order in the chaos left by floods in which 2000 people may have died.

MSNBC runs an AP report that falls short of accurately portraying the history of peace talks in Sudan and states that the gov’t alone is now standing in the way of autonomy for Darfur. David Brooks has a grand ole time at Darfurians expense blaming everything left of Colin Powell for the continuing deaths but doesn’t deem it important enough to mention that most Darfurians are dying today, right now, in large part due a selectively benevolent, surgically inhumane gov’t that can send ‘smart bombs’ to Israel but can’t figure out how to air lift them the resources they need.

One has to wonder why Rummy has decided to adopt Israel’s way of doing things in Iraq. 50 years of failure apparently isn’t lesson enough. AA’s meme for insanity: “Taking the same action over and over again expecting different results.”

“A woman rescued from the rubble of destroyed houses is rushed to hospital in Fallujah, Iraq, Saturday Sept. 25, 2004. U.S. warplanes, tanks and artillery units bombed the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah on Saturday, killing at least eight people and wounding 15, hospital officials and witnesses said. (AP Photo/Bilal Hussein)”

Hepatitis spreads in 2 Iraqi districts

Collapse of water and sewage systems is believed to be at root of the illness

BAGHDAD A virulent form of hepatitis that is especially lethal for pregnant women has broken out in two of Iraq’s most troubled districts, Iraqi Health Ministry officials said in interviews here this week, and they warned that a collapse of water and sewage systems in the country is probably at the root of the illnesses.

The disease, called Hepatitis E, is caused by a virus that is often spread by sewage-contaminated drinking water.

The officials said that their limited ability to test for the virus had already been overwhelmed by the hepatitis outbreaks, suggesting that only a fraction of the actual cases have been diagnosed. But in Sadr City, a Baghdad slum that for months has been convulsed by gun battles between a local militia and American troops, as many as 155 cases have turned up.

The second outbreak is in Mahmudiya, a town 56 kilometers, or 35 miles, south of Baghdad that is known as much for its kidnappings and drive-by shootings as for its poverty, where 60 suspected cases have been seen. At least nine pregnant women are believed to have been infected, and one has died. There have been five reported deaths overall. “We are saying that the real number is greatly more than this, because the area is greatly underreported,” said Dr. Atta-alla Mekhlif al-Salmani, head of the viral hepatitis section at the Health Ministry’s Center of Disease Control.

The World Health Organization is rushing Hepatitis E testing kits, water purification tablets, informational brochures and other materials to Iraq to help with the outbreaks, said Dr. Naeema al-Gasseer, the health agency representative for Iraq and a UN health official, who is now based in Amman, Jordan.

But viral hepatitis comes in numerous forms, and another ominous set of statistics suggests that the quality of water supplies around the country has deteriorated since the American-led invasion last year, Salmani said. In 2003, there were 70 percent more cases of hepatitis of all types reported across Iraq than in the year before, he said.

During the first six months of 2004, there were as many cases as in all of 2002.

In yet another indication of the deteriorating safety of both water and food in Iraq, the number of reported cases of typhoid fever is up sharply this year, said Dr. Nima S. Abid, the ministry’s director general of public health and primary health. Hospitals across the country are also full of children with severe forms of diarrhea, Abid said.

The reports have come just as the Bush administration has proposed shifting $3.46 billion in reconstruction money for Iraq to programs that would train and equip tens of thousands of additional security forces. The training would include police officers, border guards and national guardsmen in hopes of regaining control of a security situation that has spiraled out of control. The shift would have to be approved by Congress.

The financing transfer would gut what had been an ambitious program to rebuild Iraq’s crumbling water and sewage systems, forcing the cancellation or delay of most of the projects that had been planned. Last autumn, Congress approved $18.4 billion for Iraq’s reconstruction. So far, only about $1 billion has been spent.

“The problem is the whole infrastructure,” Abid said of the mounting health problems. Abid added that many of them stemmed from neglect that began long before last year’s invasion. But he said: “Definitely no major intervention has been done in this last one and a half years to repair the problem.”

(read more in extended entry)

Torture and Rape Rampant in Iraq Prisons

HUNTINGTON WOODS, MICH. – American legal investigators have discovered evidence of abuse, torture and rape throughout the U.S.-run prison system in Iraq. A Michigan legal team meeting with former detainees in Baghdad during an August fact-finding mission gathered evidence supporting claims of prisoner abuse at some 25 U.S.-run detention centers, most of them so far not publicly mentioned as being embroiled in the Iraq torture scandal.

“That list was something that we came back with � we only knew of three prisons going there,” investigator Mohammed Alomari told The NewStandard, referring to the few detention centers in Iraq where concerns over treatment of prisoners have already been raised publicly.

The list includes some actual prisons, such as al-Salihiya Prison in Baghdad, the notorious prison in Abu Ghraib, and a prison at Camp Bucca, a Coalition-built POW camp in the southern port city of Um-Qasr. Other detention centers have been established at military bases, such as the U.S. military compound at al-Dhiloeia, north of Baghdad; a U.S. base outside Fallujah; and the Hilla military compound, a joint U.S.-Polish base where Alomari said he has recently been informed of allegations against U.S. and Polish personnel.

“Nobody talks about it. All everyone talks about is Abu Ghraib because of the pictures,” said Alomari. “But in these other places, there’s tons of acts of torture, abuse, rape.”

read more @ AntiWar.com

Radioactive material widespread in Iraq

BAGHDAD, 21 September (IRIN) – While the Coalition has not found any weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has lots of radioactive pollution, especially at a known nuclear research site, a new survey conducted by the Ministry of Environment shows.

Tuwaitha, some 18 km south of the capital, Baghdad, is a site of previous nuclear weapons research and experiments. It appears to have the highest ambient radiation in the country, Bushra Ali Ahmed, author of the radiation survey, told IRIN.

Residents of the area looted containers holding radioactive materials in the days immediately following the US-led invasion of Iraq in April 2003. They dumped the radioactive contents on the ground at the site and used the containers to carry water, milk and other household materials and foodstuffs.

US troops and nuclear organisation workers paid about 4,500 dinars (US $3) per container to buy them back in May. Officials at the time said they were not sure they had managed to get all of the containers back.

“This site was polluted by looting and destroying research materials,” Ahmed wrote in the survey. “We found a number of containers which had traces of radiation. We also found it in houses and villages nearby.”

At least four surrounding villages are contaminated, the report said. Ministry officials took 190 samples at Tuwaitha: 70 for soil, 50 for water, 50 for dairy milk and 20 for other environmental items.

In addition, more than 4,000 people in Tuwaitha were tested. Employees who worked in radiation-related fields were also monitored by officials for the survey, although no conclusions were drawn.

While no specific numbers are available in the secretive military industry ministry, an estimated 5,000 workers may have been exposed to various radioactive materials in recent years, according to Mohammed Abed Ali, a doctor at the Baghdad Radiation Hospital.

read more @ Electronic Iraq
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