Monthly Archive for June, 2005

At least since the 1880s, American politicians have been beguiled by the prospect of creating fiefdoms abroad indentured to oligarchies at home, and no administration since has won election that did not adhere to the pursuit of American empire. All of these administrations have deployed deception to gain popular support for these “advances”, tolerated and/or created many a totalitarian regime abroad, exported the means of terror and funded homegrown versions in foreign lands, likewise the repression of dissent here and elsewhere, and the excuse has always been the alternative would be much worse. In his speech Tuesday night, Bush kept that tradition alive, but his administration has so little respect for the intelligence of its subjects it trotted out old stalking horses rather than design fresh disinformation. The absolute contempt the government harbours for the “unwashed masses” has slowly advanced from the arena of speculative debate into the realm of spurious indictment but citisens waking up to its cold reality are adrift, compromised by an “opposition” party complicit in the crimes it claims to be exposing, whose best effort to date is corrupted by partisan interests and shackling to the very course Bush and nearly every administration before his has been chained. Americans who agree with Bush that there is no higher calling than military service forsake religion for the power makes right theory, blind to the draining of that strength and open to all worst case scenarios of its overreaching projection. To quote Bush, there is “no limit to the number of innocent lives they are willing to take” in the completion of this mission to command a global genuflection to America’s might.

American ballyhooing that Iraq is a terrorist battleground sparing it a fight on its own soil is the height of cowardice. When did Iraq ever agree to serve the United States in such a capacity? If in fact America takes pride in freeing Iraqis from the grips of tyranny, what stretch of the imagination excuses enveloping the country in a fight that was never theirs? Without a doubt America is the magnet drawing terrorists to it and so long as the United States imposes that burden upon Iraq it does not deserve praise for its liberation.

Bush said he sees the images of violence and bloodshed all of America sees. “Shocking images of Fallujah ambush fill US airwaves” America saw, the destruction of Fallujah ordered in retaliation it did not. America was allowed to see Saddam in his underwear, but not a one to prove the “success” of Operation Matador, or the carnage of Al-Qaem.

“maybe there was a party, for evil people also hold parties”

On Monday 5/24/2004, something happened that was not taken into consideration by the empire. A video tape that showed what happened in the Iraqi village on that day.

It was a real wedding … a bride and a groom, relatives and guests, musicians and dancers, nice dresses for the occasion … as usual, one of the relatives taped the party. After the U.S. raid that killed 45 people, the photographer died, but the video tape remained. On that day of the empire’s life, Arab and foreign TV stations broadcasted the video, which revealed to the world the whole truth.

Did America see these images so it too could know the truth? Do Americans ever see how dearly Iraqis suffer at the hands of their liberators in the name of America’s security? Where can images of Iraq’s freedom be found? At construction sites for permanent military bases, inside the Green Zone, does Operation Spear have a view to spare?

“People started to go back trying to get what is left from their destroyed homes. Based on information from our volunteers inside the village, near 40 percent of the village buildings have been partially or totally destroyed,” Mazeen Saloon, general secretary of the IRCS, said.

The offensive, named “Operation Spear”, was designed to root out insurgent strongholds. According to US forces, about 90 insurgents were killed and others detained for interrogation and they are calling the operation a complete success.

The IRCS reported 65 deaths and 85 injured as a result of the conflict, mainly civilians. But the bodies of many residents lie under the debris and rubble and their deaths have not been recorded, according to local officials.

“It is complicated to get exactly numbers of dead and injured because many people have already been buried and the hospital does not give the right number,” Sallon explained.

Utility services have been destroyed and now thousands of families are without power, clean water or sewage according to local officials.

“My husband was killed in the battle and I returned back to my house and found it dirty, without water and electricity. My two children are sick because of the dirty water and my baby is without milk and I don’t have anywhere to go to search for help,” Yasmin Rawi, a Karabila resident, told IRIN.

Bush was right that al Qaeda failed to break the coalition. The United States deserves all credit for accomplishing that mission. By what authourity is the U.S. building jail after jail, rounding up prisoners to fill them? The current government it says represents all of Iraq’s diverse population? Who vetted that remark? The same liar who passed Saudi Arabia and Egypt have been inspired by events in Iraq and Libya gave up its nuclear ambitions for the same reason?

3 new steps: 1.) coalition/Iraqi soldiering partnership 2.) embedding coalition teams within Iraqi units 3.) Iraqi ministries embedded with civilian and military advisors.

Sounds like death squads and government corruption to me.

Fly the flag, break out the grill, send letters to soldiers who are blowing their own brains out. Tell them why they must remain in Iraq indefinitely. Bush couldn’t manage it. The Democrats can’t do it. Someone should.

An Israeli military court has found former IDF sniper Wahid Taysir guilty of manslaughter in the shooting death of British citisen/ ISM activist Tom Hurndall, as well, guilty of obstruction of justice and giving false testimony.

Tom Hurndall’s brother, William, was denied entry into Israel. Only after filing an emergency petition and agreeing to rigid conditions was he allowed to attend the reading of the verdict with his family.

From the BBC:

Mr Hurndall’s sister Sophie said she felt a “huge amount of anger” towards Hayb.

“Tom was rescuing a child,” she said, adding that what Hayb did “was the most despicable action you could carry out”.

But she added: “He’s been hung out to dry by the Israeli army who have not taken responsibility for the poor investigation and absolute lack of accountability.”

Mr Hurndall’s father, who had been sitting in court within touching distance of Hayb, said the guilty verdict was the right one.

But he also expressed concern about the “culture in which this incident took place”.

“We’re concerned that there is a policy which seems to be prevalent in Gaza, amongst the Israeli soldiers and army, that they feel able to shoot civilians really without any accountability whatsoever.”

Civil liberties group Human Rights Watch last week accused Israel of investigating less than 5% of hundreds of cases of Palestinians killed since 2000.

Israeli authorities say there is no policy of tolerating the shooting of civilians.

A film about the case, Shot on Camera: Tom Hurndall, will be shown on BBC Three on Monday 27 June at 2000 BST.

The ISM has more.

How is a sniper’s head shot anything but an intentional kill?

The Killing Zone is a film that can still be had using Bit Torrent, no telling how long, thanks to SCOTUS.

The public has 60 days to respond to a 500-page draft environmental impact statement posted last Friday by the gov’t related to its intent to produce plutonium 238, the first such production “since the 1980′s at the government’s Savannah River plant in South Carolina” where barrels of radioactive waste have piled up due the gov’ts failure to develop a reliable method for its disposal. The Energy Dept. wanted the drums to stay there forever:

March 16, 2004

For the federal government to leave the grouted tanks on site, the waste would have to be reclassified as less hazardous. But last year a federal court in Idaho rejected the Energy Department’s attempt do this through a federal rulemaking process.

The Bush administration is appealing the Idaho decision and asking Congress change federal law in order to the waste to be reclassified and left on site at nuclear weapons plants.

The Congress obliged 3 months later.

From today’s NYT:

Federal officials say the program would produce a total of 330 pounds over 30 years at the Idaho National Laboratory, a sprawling site outside Idaho Falls some 100 miles to the west and upwind of Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. Officials say the program could cost $1.5 billion and generate more than 50,000 drums of hazardous and radioactive waste.

Project managers say that most if not all of the new plutonium is intended for secret missions and they declined to divulge any details. But in the past, it has powered espionage devices.

The child refuses to clean its mess, renames it instead, and “asks” to make another 1,000 times bigger elsewhere. I know what I’d tell my child.

Surveillance techniques used to build a strong case against Egyptian cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, or Abu Omar, were used in the two year investigation that determined who took part in his abduction. According to the NYT, anonymous senior officials in Milan’s police and prosecutor’s offices felt betrayed by those CIA officers who were involved in their investigation of Abu Omar, and share the same frustration of other European counterintelligence agencies:

“The American system is of little use to us,” a senior Italian counterterrorism investigator said. “It’s a one-way street. We give them what we have, but we are given no useful information that can help us prosecute people.”

Sharing access has become a sore point between American and European officials in high-profile terrorism cases in Europe, including that of Mounir el-Motassadeq, a suspected associate of several Sept. 11 hijackers. On Feb. 19, 2003, he was convicted in Germany on charges related to the attacks in 2001 – the only conviction thus far – but the case crumbled on appeal. He was released in April 2004. German officials blamed American officials for failing to provide evidence. He is being retried.

And the Bush administration has refused to allow Spanish officials to interview Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a central Qaeda suspect, in their case against two men on trial in Madrid on charges of helping to plan the attacks in 2001.

Responding to interviews being given by former American intelligence officials and their claims political motivations may be behind the warrants, an Italian judicial official said,

“I think people in Washington may not understand that in Italy a prosecutor does not choose what to investigate. He has a legal obligation to investigate any crime.”

People in Washington understand it and find it ridiculous. Why respect the laws of others, when they have contempt for their own.

The Bush administration will have a difficult time making the political motivation smear stick. On Oct. 6, 2004, PBS Frontline conducted an interview with Armando Spataro, the senior prosecutor in Milan who led the investigation of the CIA officers, and he was asked what could be done to improve cooperation with the Americans:

Look, I am fairly convinced that we already have many conventions, international resolutions, by the United Nations, the European Union. We have agreements among police forces, and we also have physical places where we meet. I believe that it is important to really keep alive this cooperation. This means to blindly trust mutual reliability of the systems.

I also have to say, though, that with respect to Italy, our relationship is excellent, our requests have always been answered quickly, and we did the same when it was the other way around. Also, with respect to Rabei’s case, we immediately notified the Americans, as well as other main European countries that were involved in the investigation, with copies of conversations, recordings, interviews, because it is good that the knowledge of these phenomena grows everywhere in the same way and at the same time.

The United States betrayed that trust.

When Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar blamed the Madrid bombings on the ETA knowing it was an al Qaeda operation, many Americans reviled the Spanish people for voting Aznar out and the Socialist Party in, mimicking the Bush administration’s ravings they were “rewarding terrorism“.

The greater terror, more than a gov’t that has no respect for justice and the informed consent of those it governs, are the people willing to be represented by those who betray that trust time and again.

Bush Vows He’s ‘Not Giving Up’ in Iraq

With polls showing that Americans’ support for the war in Iraq is declining, Mr. Bush’s insistence that he will stay the course sets up a delicate political task for Tuesday night, when the president has asked the major networks to broadcast a prime-time address from Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, N.C. The speech is timed to mark the first anniversary of the end of the American occupation and the transfer of power to the Iraqis.

Spokesmen for the networks said Friday that they had not decided whether to carry Mr. Bush’s remarks live.

The networks consider whether it’s appropriate to give the GOP free air time? What’s to consider? The smells-like-occupation, looks-like-war, claiming civilian and military casualites daily?

Mr. Bush seemed to preview the speech a bit on Friday when he said the development of political institutions in Iraq gave him optimism about the future.

So why did he and Rummy swarm the media warning Iraqis against any delays in adoption of a constitution. It can take Congress years to pass gas, but Iraq must have a constitution in 6 weeks?

He acknowledged the political fragility of the moment when he was asked by a reporter whether he was “in something of a second term slump,” and he shot back with “a quagmire, perhaps.” The line drew laughter.

Hysteria abounds in this country.

A Thirty Years War?
by George Hunsinger

Recently the International Institute of Strategic Studies, a prominent London-based think tank, concluded that the U.S. will be in Iraq until 2010, because of the difficulties in establishing law and order. University of Michigan expert Juan Cole sees this estimate as optimistic. “The guerrilla war,” he writes, “is likely to go on a decade to 15 years.” But Paul Rogers, a diffident Oxford military expert, now echoes James Webb. His “ostensibly rash” conclusion is that “a thirty-year war is in prospect.” On June 19 Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acknowledged that America’s involvement in Iraq is indeed “a generational commitment.”

Webb had warned about our not having an exit strategy. In an August 2002 television interview, Charles Krauthammer, the well-connected columnist, explained why not. “We don’t speak about exit strategies,” he noted. “We are going to stay.” Responding to concerns about the cost, he explained, “If we win the war, we are in control of Iraq, it is the second largest source of oil in the world, it’s got huge reserves. . . . We will have a bonanza, a financial one, at the other end.”

The shoe is in midair, the press buoys it, but eventually it will drop. Why not hurry that process along? I cringe every time the Republicans and Democrats engage in another pissing contest. How old are these wankers? Tell Mr. Durbin to please find his balls, the Republicans aren’t nice? You can’t grow a man that’s already growed.

Dan Froomkin claims “Karl Rove didn’t get George W. Bush this far just by luck. Rove has a brilliant and so far unbeatable strategy when it comes to political warfare: He doesn’t defend his candidate’s weaknesses, he attacks his opponent’s strengths. Unapologetically.”

fer fuck’s sake, what strengths? They would appropriate Iraq’s resources more politely? The unspoken truth why millions of Americans are still on the fence about Iraq is greed; the pipe dream of owning those oil fields soothes their fears, not from terrorist invasion of the homeland but of independent players controlling the resources that run it; blistering racism and ingrained religiosity feeding the belief it’s “our” manifest destiny to do so are coals in the fire. Poke a supporter of “staying the course” and the beast proudly rears its ugly head, a beast that is alive and well in the Democrat party and Joe Blow on main street knows it. They don’t want to free Iraqis, or a party that will initiate anything resembling the Marshall Plan that Dr. Jaafari urged Mr. Bush to “redo” in Iraq, which should suggest to anyone paying attention that the war is going miserably and/or Iraq is not in controll of its own resources if it must beg Master Bush for funds to rebuild.

Karl Rove has his fat finger on their pulse:

Rove on Bolton

Rove also made some news. Until now, White House officials have been noncommittal about whether or not Bush will give John R. Bolton a recess appointment if he’s not confirmed by the Senate. Rove made it pretty clear.

“ROVE: John Bolton is going to be the United States ambassador to the United Nations. We will get either an up-or-down vote or he will be the ambassador one way. . . .

“SCARBOROUGH: A recess — possible recess appointment?

“ROVE: Well, I’m not going to — we have got plenty of options. . . . “

Bring Bolton On. UN compliance with Bolton directives will expose the institution for the indentured escort it is, no more than it has been, and in the best of scenarios should force a confrontation with the United States and the United Kingdom. It’s a slap in the face of all Iraqis to suggest the UN can fairly administrate policy in Iraq so long as it’s a handmaiden of the U.S., beyond the obvious insult that Iraqis are incapable of governing themselves.

The World Tribunal on Iraq taking place in Istanbul this weekend has posted opening day speeches. H.C. von Sponeck‘s “The Conduct of the UN before and after the 2003 Invasion” should be sobering gruel for those appealing for UN peacekeepers to assume the occupation, as if they need reminding.

Since the illegal invasion of Iraq, there has not been a debate in the Security Council about the fundamental disregard by the coalition forces of existing conventions created to ensure that the occupation armies act in accordance with the Hague and Geneva Conventions to which they are parties. Looting and burning of the national museum and the national library, the damaging of archeological sites and the humiliating treatment of civilians by the US armed forces, provoked no protest in the Security Council. The Security Council watched impotently when the soul and ethos of Iraq was attacked. The detention of political figures for indefinite periods and the unimaginable brutality and sadism with which detainees were treated not just in Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca but also in other prisons were not subject of Security Council concern. Carpet destruction of towns such as Al Fallujah, Tel Afar and Al Qaim did not ruffle the Security Council and lead to emergency meetings. There were no protests in the Council that CPA administrator Paul Bremer and other CPA officials represented an allegedly liberated and sovereign Iraq at major international meetings such as the World Economic Forum in Amman and the WTO in Geneva. The Security Council took no note that the assignment of a human rights rapporteur for Iraq was abruptly terminated by the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva following the illegal war. The Security Council agreed in 2003 to the continuation of payments by the UN Compensation Commission even though it had earlier agreed to discontinue the entertainment of claims.

The Security Council did play an important role in the preparations for an interim Iraqi administration and elections but ultimately succumbed to US heavy handedness in deciding the details of the process.

In the history books of the United Nations the handling of the Iraq conflict by the Security Council will be recorded as a massive failure of oversight responsibility.

The Security Council should rectify these egregious errors. That it won’t speaks to its relevancy. John Bolton, Daffy Duck, who cares? U.S. policy isn’t decided by its ambassador.

Appealing to the United States gov’t, Democrats or Republicans, to dismantle years of foreign policy and build anew on a foundation of peace and justice is like asking the schoolyard bully to play nice. And it will take more than demonstrations that amount to little more than temporary distractions, as Anthony Alessandrini’s “The Violation of the Will of the Global Anti-War Movement as a Crime against Peace” reminds so well. This is the slide presentation (pdf) that accompanied his speech, a collection of photos gathered from the web of worldwide antiwar protests that took place on February 13, 2003.

But it was a tremble, unlike other apparitions.

The Film Connection is a “national public film library” that distributes DVDs free-of-charge to groups throughout the United States under a Creative Commons non-commercial non-derivative license, which means, the screening must be free-of-charge to the public.

Tami Fairweather notes that when the Board of Directors of the Vanity Theater in Crawfordsville, IN decided to take advantage of this arrangement to screen the third and fourth annual Media that Matters Film Festivals, it generated a flurry of op-eds in the local paper that started with this comment from someone opposed to the screening:

“The listing of the 32 film shorts and a brief description of each shows an extremely politically correct, Third World bias. Deriding everything from President George W. Bush to the eating of meat, this presentation seems to fly in the face of Montgomery County values.”

Meaning it’s politically INcorrect to criticise George.

Whatever possessed these justices to make a decision that for years to come will bolster a legitimate argument that liberals have no place on the Supreme Court, it’s not a stretch to envision emboldened conservatives ruling for local “values” over the rights of theater owners if a good number of groups were to take The Film Connection up on its offer.