Blowback

2002-11-24T19:17:00.000-08:00

This site has been suspended indefinitely by the miracle
of cryogenic freezing.

You are invited to visit me at Scribbler.

You can get the goods on this amazingly successful military campaign at...

Cursor
Dack
American Samizdat
Lying Media Bastards

...not to mention the other fine links on the sidebar.

[and now, a self-indulgent sign-off]

I didn't intend to start a warlog. I launched this page in hopes of creating a safe outlet for my frustration with an insipid and dangerous post-9/11 media landscape. The subsequent year-plus frenzy of posting has been an enriching experience, but my dwindling output forces me to acknowledge that I have neither the time nor the energy to keep up a decent topical weblog.

I will continue to post on our collective descent into madness, but within the broader context of my other page Scribbler, which I'm gently coaxing out of hibernation...

I want to sincerely thank people who regularly clicked by my little love nest of subversion for a visit, especially those who took the time to send encouragement, forward links or offer opinion. The hate mail was particularly gratifying.

A salute to the many smart and humane webloggers I've gotten to know via this page: I would have put Blowback into cold storage much earlier were it not for the inspiring work of people I came to think of as colleagues and friends.

Peace out.

2002-11-07T22:12:00.000-08:00

That assassination in Yemen is yet another one of those amazingly successful military triumphs -- with a catch:

Even those who applauded the strike said it was sure to inflame militant Muslims, including those belonging to the al-Qaeda network, and expose US diplomats and other overseas officials to possible retaliation. On Tuesday the US said it was closing its embassy in Yemen to the public indefinitely amid fears it might become a target for an attack to retaliate for the killings.

Then there are those icky moral issues raised by the attack...

Sweden's Foreign Minister, Anna Lindh, said: "If the USA is behind this with Yemen's consent, it is nevertheless a summary execution that violates human rights. If the USA has conducted the attack without Yemen's permission it is even worse. Then it is a question of unauthorised use of force."

While military experts said the incident could herald a new era of robotic warfare, lawyers debated the implications of the surprising turn in US strategy - killing specific individuals in countries where there is no war.

"To have a drone that engages and kills people - that is quite a threshold to cross," said Clifford Beal, editor of Jane's Defence Weekly. "This is the beginning of robotic warfare. There is underlying tension in the military about using it ... this is really the first success story of this system."

A US State Department spokesman, Richard Boucher, refused to discuss the attack and trod carefully around questions on whether US involvement in the strike contradicted Washington's long-standing disapproval of targeted killings.

Asked whether the US had altered its opinion, Mr Boucher replied, "Our policy on targeted killings in the Israeli-Palestinian context has not changed."

::Greg Miller, Sydney Morning Herald: US braces for retaliation after Yemen assassination via Lying Media Bastards

2002-11-04T21:48:00.000-08:00

Audio Funhouse

Scott Williams put together a characteristically excellent pinko anti-war set on WFMU not too long ago, selections included:

West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band - "Suppose They Give a War & No One Comes"
Aphrodite's Child - "Loud Loud Loud"
John Cale - "Fear is a Man's Best Friend"
Lee Ranaldo - "Isolation"
Cromagnon - "Caledonia"
Bonzo Dog Band - "We Are Normal"
Frank Sinatra & Tommy Dorsey - "War Bond Advertisement"
Beyond the Fringe: "The Aftermyth of War"
The Clash - "I'm So Bored With the USA"

::See the playlist for SW on September 30, 2002: The Air Turned to Poison
::Listen (RealAudio)

Also from WFMU, Stefan started off his Spiral Sun Plan set for October 17th with nearly an hour of Alexander Cockburn's spoken-word album Beating the Devil laid over a soundbed of recordings by Xiu Xiu and Merzbow.

::Playlist for Spiral Sun Plan - October 17, 2002
::Listen (RealAudio)

Hunter Thompson has been descending deeper into incoherence since 1972 or so, so I was surprised by how much I enjoyed listening to this interview he did with ABC radio in Australia just before the one year anniversary of 9/11. He's a little foggy at times, but mostly in fine form...

Interviewer: So in that sense, there’s not enough room for dissenting voices?

Hunter S. Thompson: There’s plenty of room there’s not just enough people who are willing to take the risk. It’s sort of a herd mentality, a lemming-like mentality. If you don’t go with the flow you’re anti-American and therefore a suspect. And we’ve seen this before, these patriotic frenzies. It’s very convenient having an undeclared war that you can call a war and impose military tribunals and wartime security and we have these generals telling us that this war’s going to go on for a long, long time. Maybe not so much the generals now, the generals are a little afraid of Iraq, a little worried about it, but it’s the civilians in the White House, the gang of thieving, just lobbyists for the military industrial complex, who are running the White House, and to be against them is to be patriotic, then hell, call me a traitor.

::Program page and partial transcript
::Listen (RealAudio - 37 minutes)

Naomi Klein (No Logo) and Sameena Ahmad, author of an Economist article entitled "Pro Logo: Why Brands Are Good for You", square off in a debate that gets genuinely nasty at times.

::Listen (RealAudio - 1hr, 23 min)

NPR interviews Rami Khouri, former editor of the Jordan Times and Youssef Ibrahim, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relation, who deliver a scathing assessment of reckless war-mongering and its effects.

A sample of their analysis from this article by Ibrahim:

Al Qaeda, according to the CIA and the Pentagon, is reconstituting itself. In fact every Middle East and Muslim affairs expert is saying that Al Qaeda's ranks will be fattened by new recruits right now and will have more of them when the United States attacks Iraq.

Those joining are no longer Muslim religious fanatics. They now include secularist young men and women angry at the impact of U.S. policies on the world's 1.2 billion Muslims.

In other words, a new Al Qaeda, far more dangerous than the existing one, is in the making. Witness the attack on the tourist resort of Bali, on U.S. Marines in Kuwait and on a French oil tanker off Yemen. In Afghanistan the United States' main enemies, Osama bin Laden's cadre of leadership, has disappeared, while his shock troops, the Taliban, are there in their homes and villages sitting on their weapons, patiently waiting for the right moment to go back into action when America gets busy attacking Iraq.

Thus far, all the arguments presented for sending American boys and girls into one of the world's most dangerous neighborhoods are half-truths, spurious assumptions and utter nonsense. Washington simply cannot prove the case that Iraq is tied to Al Qaeda.

::Listen (Real Audio - 7 min)
::Bush's Iraq adventure is bound to backfire

Those last links both via Dack.

::Header image stolen from WFMU

2002-11-04T00:34:00.000-08:00

It's revealing that Thomas Friedman's first question after arriving in Berlin is "where's the wall?", perhaps not quite comprehending the events of 1989... He's terribly dissappointed that the Germans haven't left it up, inexplicably suggests that its absence is at "the core of the crisis between America and Germany today", and finally asks "Would somebody please bring back the Berlin Wall?"

I haven't the strength of spirit to address each of the fatuous myths that Friedman goes on to render in hyperventilating prose, but pause to note his assertion that "Germany [is] to the left of Saudi Arabia, which at least says it will support an Iraq war if it is approved by the U.N."

We'll set aside that the United States is itself, like most countries, to the left of Saudi Arabia -- after all, Americans have sham elections from time to time, eschew beheading for the more humane electric chair, and even let their women drive cars. More to the point, what exactly is the extent of Saudi "support" for an attack on Iraq? Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal kindly elaborates:

"We will abide by the decision of the United Nations Security Council and we will co-operate with the Security Council," he told CNN.

"But as to entering the conflict or using facilities... that is something else."

He added: "Our policy is that if the United Nations takes a decision... it is obligatory on all signatories to co-operate, but that is not to the extent of using facilities in the country or the military forces of the country."

::Thomas Friedman, New York Times: Let Them Come to Berlin
::BBC News: Saudis snub US over Iraq attack

2002-11-01T01:29:00.000-08:00

I know media coverage of the attempted coup in Qatar has reached the saturation point, but allow me to join the mob:

Diplomatic circles in the Middle East are buzzing with rumors of a failed coup against the Qatari regime on the night of Oct. 13. At least two members of the royal family are said to have joined with officers of Yemeni and Pakistani background, along with individuals from Islamic organizations, all opposed to the growing U.S. military presence. American troops stationed at the Al Udeid Air Base supposedly helped thwart the coup attempt, which had been penetrated in advance by Qatar security officials, after which 140 people were arrested. The rumors go on to suggest that Qatar suspects that the Saudis were behind the plot. The United States has been feverishly upgrading the Al Udeid base, in anticipation of a Saudi refusal to allow use of its Prince Sultan Air Base for the upcoming assault on Iraq.

::United Press International: UPI hears ...

2002-10-29T21:56:00.000-08:00

Can you believe it? The CIA must be staffed by Islamofascist sympathizers. A recent report takes up the peacenik line on "root causes" and the motivation for terrorist acts.

"While we are striking major blows against al-Qaeda -- the pre-eminent global terrorist threat, the underlying causes that drive terrorists will persist," [the report] said.

"Several troublesome global trends -- especially the growing demographic youth bulge in developing nations whose economic systems and political ideologies are under enormous stress -- will fuel the rise of more disaffected groups willing to use violence to address their perceived grievances," added the agency.

I thought that terrorists hated us for our freedom.

Note that this "grim assessment was made available to members US Congress in the form of written answers to their questions last April and released to the general public on Monday." Yet insufficiently newsworthy to attract the attention of major American media.

::Times of India: War on terror missing root causes: CIA via Dack

2002-10-28T21:26:00.000-08:00

The Bush administration justifies a war by citing the illegal development of biological weapons. It's unsurprising to learn that the U.S. is itself not in compliance with international law. Some of the questionable initiatives:

* CIA efforts to copy a Soviet cluster bomb designed to disperse biological weapons

* A project by the Pentagon to build a bio-weapon plant from commercially available materials to prove that terrorists could do the same thing

* Research by the Defence Intelligence Agency into the possibility of genetically engineering a new strain of antibiotic-resistant anthrax .

* A programme to produce dried and weaponised anthrax spores, officially for testing US bio-defences, but far more spores were allegedly produced than necessary for such purposes and it is unclear whether they have been destroyed or simply stored.

. . . a clause in the biological weapons treaty forbids signatories from producing or developing "weapons, equipment or means of delivery designed to use such agents or toxins for hostile purposes or in armed conflict".

Furthermore, signatories agreed to make annual declarations about their biodefence programmes, but the US never mentioned any of those programmes in its reports. Instead, they emerged from leaks and press reporting.

The focus on Washington's biological and chemical weapons programme comes at an awkward time for the Bush administration, which is locked in negotiations at the UN for a tough resolution on arms inspections of Iraq. ...British and US research into hallucinogenic weapons such as the gas BZ encouraged Iraq to look into similar agents. "We showed them the way," he said.

Mr Dando added that the US was currently working on "non-lethal" weapons similar to the gas Russian forces used to break the Moscow theatre siege.

Yes, the Russians are undoubtedly on to something there...

::Julian Borger, Guardian: US weapons secrets exposed

2002-10-28T21:02:00.000-08:00

How a 'bulletproof' case is built...

You've got to hand it to Donald Rumsfeld and his E-Ring crew at the Pentagon. They know all the stratagems of bureaucratic politics, and they play the game well. In their latest maneuver, reported on the front page of last Thursday's New York Times, the secretary of defense has formed his own "four- to five-man intelligence team" to sift through raw data coming out of Iraq in search of evidence linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida terrorists.

Rumsfeld has publicly continued to push this link as a prime - or at least the most easily sellable - rationale for going to war with Iraq, even after the CIA and the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency have dismissed the connection as tenuous at best. But Rumsfeld contends that the spy bureaucracies may have missed something. As his top team member, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz, put it to the Times, there is "a phenomenon in intelligence work that people who are pursuing a certain hypothesis will see certain facts that others won't, and not see other facts that others will." Since Wolfowitz is one of Washington's most forceful advocates of a second Gulf War, we can safely predict that he will find the facts he needs to make his case.

It is an old story that bears the same lesson each time a new chapter unfolds: Intelligence analysis should be kept out of the hands of those who have a vested interest in the results.

::Fred Kaplan, Slate: The Rumsfeld Intelligence Agency - How the hawks plan to find a Saddam/al-Qaida connection
::Image stolen from WFMU

2002-10-28T20:28:00.000-08:00

Congratulations to those plucky Afghans. They're back on top again:

Opium production in Afghanistan soared to near-record levels in 2002, making the war-ravaged country again the world's leading producer of the drug, according to a United Nations estimate released on Saturday.

United Nations officials blamed "the total collapse of law and order" in the country during the American military campaign to oust the Taliban in the fall of 2001 for the increase, not the country's new government.

::David Rhode, New York Times: Afghans Lead World Again in Poppy Crop

2002-10-26T12:07:00.000-07:00

Arab nations are so backward and paranoid that they can't take on faith that American occupation can only make them happier and more free...

United States officials at one point said the Bush Administration was considering a plan for Iraq modeled after the occupation of Japan after World War II. An American military commander would assume control of the country for a year or more while the United States and allied forces would search for weapons of mass destruction and keep up oil production. But administration officials have also taken pains to say Iraqis would be treated as a liberated, not a conquered, people. President Bush has said the United States would not try to impose its culture or form of government on another nation.

You see? They needn't be concerned, because Bush has said they don't have to worry. But for some reason that's not good enough for them...

An American occupation of Iraq would feed into a sense of humiliation felt by many Arabs, said Rami Khouri, a political analyst and syndicated newspaper columnist who is Palestinian Jordanian.

"People are worried about the continued sense of degradation and humiliation that they are subjected to," he said in an interview from Amman, "just sitting around watching Americans and Israelis do whatever they want in the region."

Such sentiments give rise to talk that the United States and Israel are seeking to redraw the map of the Middle East, perhaps dividing up Saudi Arabia, or sending the Palestinians from the occupied territories to Jordan. "It's a hallucinatory perspective," Mr. Khouri said.

Where does the inward-looking Arab world get these notions? Clearly the deep thinkers in the administration are prepared to look beyond the narrow interests of the oil lobby in their quest to deliver the Iraqi people unto freedom. Only a pro-Islamofascist idiotarian could think otherwise.

[Ahmed Chalabi's, the London-based leader of the Iraqi National Congress] would hand over Iraq's oil to U.S. multinationals, and his allies in conservative think tanks are already drawing up the blueprints. "What they have in mind is denationalization, and then parceling Iraqi oil out to American oil companies," says James E. Akins, former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Even more broadly, once an occupying U.S. army seizes Baghdad, Chalabi's INC and its American backers are spinning scenarios about dismantling Saudi Arabia, seizing its oil and collapsing the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). It's a breathtaking agenda, one that goes far beyond "regime change" and on to the start of a New New World Order.

What's also startling about these plans is that Chalabi is scorned by most of America's national-security establishment, including much of the Department of State, the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He is shunned by all Western powers save the United Kingdom, ostracized in the Arab world and disdained even by many of his erstwhile comrades in the Iraqi opposition. Among his few friends, however, are the men running the Bush administration's willy-nilly war on Iraq. And with their backing, it's not inconceivable that this hapless, exiled Iraqi aristocrat and London-Washington playboy might end up atop the smoking heap of what's left of Iraq next year.

...Team Chalabi is led by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, the neoconservative strategist who heads the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board. Chalabi's partisans run the gamut from far right to extremely far right, with key supporters in most of the Pentagon's Middle-East policy offices -- such as Peter Rodman, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser and Michael Rubin. Also included are key staffers in Vice President Dick Cheney's office, not to mention Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former CIA Director Jim Woolsey.

Well, at least those guys don't have much pull with the President.

::Daniel J. Wakin, New York Times: Anger Builds and Seethes as Arabs Await American Invader
::Robert Dreyfus, American Prospect: Tinker, Banker, NeoCon, Spy

2002-10-24T00:41:00.000-07:00

Doesn't the New York Times style guide say anything about double negatives?

Some officials say the creation of [an intelligence unit that will say what the warmongers want] reflects frustration on the part of Mr. Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz and other senior officials that they are not receiving undiluted information on the capacities of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq and his suspected ties to terrorist organizations.

Hmm, dissension among the crew on the Good Ship Lollipop?

Tension between the defense secretary and the C.I.A., which has resented moves by Mr. Rumsfeld to beef up the Pentagon's role in intelligence gathering, has been intensifying, according to one defense official.

"There is a complete breakdown in the relationship between the Defense Department and the intelligence community, to include its own Defense Intelligence Agency," the official said. "Wolfowitz and company disbelieve any analysis that doesn't support their own preconceived conclusions. The C.I.A. is enemy territory, as far are they're concerned."

::Eric Schmitt and Thom Shankar, New York Times: Pentagon Sets Up Intelligence Unit

2002-10-23T00:07:00.000-07:00

Think about the parade of failure this report catalogues next time you hear some gasbag say western democracies will rebuild post-war Iraq as Denmark in the desert...

It is time for the international community to recognize that the deterioration of the security situation can, in part, be attributed to the failure of major donor states to fulfill the commitments they made to Afghanistan.

Four aspects of international involvement in Afghanistan illustrate the ineffectiveness, and at times irresponsibility, of aid donors: the slow pace of internationally directed security-sector reform, the flawed nature of the U.S. military strategy to eradicate Al Qaeda and Taliban forces, the slow and irrational disbursement of aid, and the seemingly innate reluctance to consider the expansion of peacekeeping operations outside Kabul.

The fear of many Afghans, that the international community will gradually lose interest in the country to the detriment of ongoing reconstruction efforts, appears to be justified. With a possible U.S. strike against Iraq looming, such a shift of global attention would have disastrous consequences for Afghan security and stability.

::Foreign Policy In Focus: Afghanistan: Donor Inaction and Ineffectiveness

Link via Dack, who is sporting a new/old look...

2002-10-22T09:23:00.000-07:00

In the Gulf War, just 3 percent of bombs were precision-guided. That figure jumped to 30 percent in the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, and to nearly 70 percent during the Afghan air campaign last year.

Yet in each case, the ratio of civilian casualties to bombs dropped has grown. Technology, say analysts, isn't the key issue. In Afghanistan, tough terrain, inability to discern combatants from civilians, and paucity of fixed military targets led to estimates of 850 to 1,300 civilian deaths. Red Cross food depots depots were hit twice, as well as some mosques, and so was a wedding party of mostly pro-US civilians last July.

By one estimate, the number of civilians killed per bomb dropped may have been four times as high in Afghanistan as in Yugoslavia.

::Scott Peterson, CS Monitor: 'Smarter' bombs still hit civilians via Dack
::Image from This Modern World

2002-10-21T23:36:00.000-07:00

Lest I inadvertently invoke the dread spectre of anti-Americanism, let me say right off the top that I'm sure there's a reasonable explanation for the facts I relate below:

* It was last September 26th that Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen since 1991, was apprehended by U.S. agents while changing planes at JFK Airport in New York, a stopover on his return trip from Switzerland back home to Montreal.

* Two weeks later he was deported to his native Syria, even though he was travelling on a Canadian passport and has lived in Canada since 1987. (Mr Arar had retained dual Syrian/Canadian citizenship, as is legal under Canadian law.)

* U.S. officials accused him of being a member of Al-Qaeda, but never charged him with any offense, and have not provided Canadian diplomats (who you may be sure asked very nicely) with evidence of such involvement or any other justification for the deportation.

* Syria's record on human rights and torture doesn't inspire hope for Mr. Arar's humane treatment, since he avoided that country's compulsory military service when he left for Canada as a teenager.

There's much more, and it only gets more confusing... I don't know what to think. Maybe Thomas Friedman can write a column explaining how this episode has America shining its singular beacon of democracy and human rights to the Arab world.

::Canadian Press via Globe and Mail: U.S. ships Canadian to Syria
::Globe and Mail editorial: The alarming case of Maher Arar
::Anne McIlroy, Guardian: Missing inaction
::Vijay Prashad, Counterpunch: The NYT's Thomas Friedman: A Columnist of Awesome Vulgarity

2002-10-21T22:54:00.000-07:00

George Monbiot on media complicity in a dangerous form of ignorance...

Since the jihadis arrived, Neles Tebay, a Papuan journalist, has been sending urgent messages to newspapers and broadcasters around the world, desperate to attract attention to this protected terrorist network. But even when eight Pakistani mojahedin arrived, his warnings failed to generate any response in the newsrooms of either Europe or North America. The Papuans, ignored and abandoned by the rest of the world, have been reduced to begging the Indonesian authorities to uphold the law and disarm the jihadis before they attack.

The victims of the Bali bombing could be said to have legitimate grounds for complaint not only against the intelligence services (whose efforts have been diverted from unpicking the terrorist networks into supporting two futile wars) but also against the media. Both of them could and should have warned westerners that Indonesia has become a dangerous place for them to visit.

Scarcely a month goes by without a travel feature on the country. One recent programme, about the nightlife in Bali, even featured the Sari club. But, before the bombing, there had been no recent documentary which could have given viewers any understanding of what was happening in the country. On Sunday night, the BBC broadcast a fine Panorama programme, seeking to discover who might have planted the bomb, and why the ample warnings the intelligence services received did not prevent the attack. But one of the features of investigative journalism is surely that it seeks to be wise before the event. There was, as Neles Tebay pointed out, plenty of opportunity for prior wisdom.

Nigerian activist Ken Wiwa goes further, and argues that this inability to see is decidedly not innocent, and carries a callous cruelty that fuels resentment.

One of the things that intrigued me about the descriptions of the Bali bombing was the inevitable Paradise Lost headlines and imagery -- for those reading and writing those headlines, a reference to Milton's 17th-century epic poem.

... But "paradise" is not exactly the word that springs to mind to describe the resort town where the car bomb exploded last week. Although Bali caters to everything from celebrities to hippies and artists who idolize the island's culture, the bombing targeted the hedonists who flock to the sun, sex and night-clubbing.

I suspect that, in this light, paradise was not lost on Oct. 12 but some time in the mid-1970s, when Bali became a popular retreat from the developed world's worries. Jawaharlal Nehru once described Bali as the "dawn of the world." This dawn is now a rush hour from civilization, with 1.5 million visitors annually passing through its international airport; the island is being prostituted to the tastes of this migration. Locals have not always been welcomed at the big tourist nightclubs; they may have been excluded from the ill-fated nightclubs in Kuta.

Any scenario of exclusion and degradation is fertile ground for everyone from cultural nationalists and environmental activists to religious fundamentalists. If the allegations that al-Qaeda or its alleged Indonesian offshoot, Jemaah Islamiyah, was responsible for the bombing, then Bali fits that pattern: rage against the Western machine fuelling the valid claims of disenfranchised and unrepresented people around the world.

It is fascinating how these Miltonian tendencies -- many paradises, multiple losses -- exercise such a powerful hold on our collective imagination. But they serve as a useful fable of the failings of the secular world. The notion of a "paradise lost" speaks to our deep need for nostalgia; it preys on guilt and our fears about the loss of a spiritual dimension. These are powerful, universal emotions that straddle boundaries of faith, nations and politics.

::George Monbiot, Guardian: Threat of unreality TV
::Ken Wiwa, Globe and Mail: The Bali bombing: many paradises, many losses

2002-10-21T22:07:00.000-07:00

Demonstrators burn an effigy of Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo during a rally outside the Malacanang palace in Manila on Monday. Thousands of people marched through Manila, warning that proposed government anti-terror measures could threaten human rights and democracy and create restiveness that terrorists could exploit. Photo: AP

::From the Globe and Mail's photo gallery...

2002-10-21T15:42:00.000-07:00

The long term benefits of that amazingly effective Afghan campaign...

George Tenet, the CIA director, cited the Bali bombing and the recent killing of a US marine in Kuwait as evidence that the terrorist network had recovered from its routing in Afghanistan. He also conceded that the CIA and the FBI could not prevent every attack.

At a hearing before the congressional intelligence committees to examine the events leading up to September 11 he said: "The threat environment we find ourselves in today is as bad as it was last summer, the summer before 9/11. It is serious, they've reconstituted, they are coming after us, they want to execute attacks."

But we had fun, didn't we?

:: David Teather, The Guardian: Al-Qaida 'has regrouped'

2002-10-18T00:45:00.000-07:00

President Bush has shown, across the board, an unwillingness for his country or himself to be bound by the rules.

A dramatic example of this resistance to rules is the administration's obsessive effort to destroy the new International Criminal Court, created under the leadership of our closest European allies to prosecute those suspected of genocide and crimes against humanity. Another is the avoidance of the Geneva Conventions governing the treatment of prisoners of war; rather than comply with the rules that have bound us and the world for decades, the administration unilaterally described the Afghanistan captives it is holding at Guant?namo Bay, Cuba, as "unlawful combatants." The conventions say that questions about the status of prisoners should be referred to a "competent tribunal." The administration has declined to do that. It might have argued that al-Qaeda fighters were so obviously unlawful that international law would not requite the useless gesture of reference to a tribunal. But the Bush administration did not even bother to make the argument; it was not interested in the law. (In any event, it is hard to see how the Geneva process could be avoided in the case of Taliban prisoners; they were soldiers in the army of a government that controlled nearly all of Afghanistan.)

That same rejection of the rules?of the law?can be found at home. One example is the President's order of November 2001 that noncitizens charged with terrorism or with "harboring" terrorists be tried by military tribunals. That order appeared to violate the holding of the Supreme Court in the great post?Civil War case of Ex parte Milligan that there can be no criminal trials by military tribunal in this country while the civil courts remain open. An even more astonishing assertion of presidential power is President Bush's claim of a right to hold any American citizen whom he designates as an "enemy combatant" in military prison indefinitely, without trial and without the right to speak with a lawyer. Two men are now being held in military prisons, in Virginia and South Carolina, under that theory, forbidden to speak to a lawyer. Government lawyers argue that no court can examine the lawfulness of their detention.

Respect for the rule of law has been an essential element from the beginning in the survival and success of this vast, disputatious country?and a reason for other people's admiration of American society. But George W. Bush, whatever else his qualities, seems to have no feeling for the law. That was evident when he was governor of Texas, in the cruel casualness of his handling of death penalty cases.

::Anthony Lewis, The New York Review of Books: Bush and Iraq

2002-10-16T20:56:00.000-07:00

Adventures in psychological projection...

President Bush warned European and Arab nations that are resisting a confrontation with President Saddam Hussein that "those who choose to live in denial may eventually be forced to live in fear."

Could there be two better phrases to describe the collective mindscape right now than "living in denial" and "living in fear"?

::Julia Preston, New York Times: Bush Garners Little Support at U.N. for an Attack on Iraq

2002-10-16T20:41:00.000-07:00

If the sniper turns out to be al-Qaeda, there will be tremendous hysteria and a flurry of activity. But if the gunman turns out to be a standard racist loner, everyone will relax. Why?

::Zizka's vanitysite.net via Slacktivist

2002-10-15T23:49:00.000-07:00

A look at the War Party's plan for occupying post-War Iraq, reeking of empire.

According to this plan, as reported, the United States would set up a military viceroy in the capital of an Arab state, having occupied its territory, and then proceed to build a new nation. We presumably would do this with some help from perhaps the British, if they have the stomach for that -- despite their experience of trying to hold on to empire beyond its time. We apparently would not conduct this operation under U.N. auspices, and therefore it would be a direct and unilateral extension of American military power. We would betray the Iraqi National Congress, which the Republicans championed in Congress, by making it clear that it would not be the next government of Iraq. We would take responsibility for suppressing Kurdish national ambitions, so as to keep Turkey calm. We would take control over decision-making for Iraq's oil resources, which would raise problems for Vladimir Putin, who would be seen to have lost Russia's stake in Iraq to the United States. We would have U.S. troops in all sorts of interesting places, including on the border with Iran. We would have assumed responsibility for the costs of reconstruction in Iraq. We would presumably be trying, convicting and punishing persons we deemed guilty of war crimes or crimes against humanity in courts of U.S. jurisdiction, most likely military, not before international tribunals.

. . . Granted, many have appealed to the administration to present its thoughts about follow-on after a war. And so in a way, this plan may be considered a step in the right direction. But it could well be a step toward a debacle, and a giant step at that.

::Intoxicated With Power

2002-10-15T12:31:00.000-07:00

Bush does not support the push for firearms "fingerprinting" that has grown from the unsolved Washington-area sniper shootings.

Such a system would require gun makers to file into a law-enforcement database the distinct markings that each gun leaves on a test-fired bullet casing. Police could then possibly use the recorded etchings to trace crime-scene slugs to the gun that fired them.

White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said Bush is unsure of the accuracy of the system.

Besides, he added , when it comes to new gun controls generally, "how many laws can we really have to stop crime, if people are determined in their heart to violate them no matter how many there are or what they say?"

Interesting bit of work on the philosophy of justice there, Ari. If people are going to break laws anyway, why have them?

Given the recurring attacks in Kuwait, Afghanistan, Yemen and Indonesia -- not to mention the homegrown variety currently on display in the suburbs of D.C. -- the disciplined deep-thinkers in the Bush foreign policy brigade will undoubtedly come to a similar conclusion. As Ari might put it, how many wars can we really have to stop terrorism, if people are determined in their heart to commit such acts, no matter how many wars there are or how we fight them?

Or, how many laws can we really have to stop drug use, if people are determined in their heart to take them...

I've never been so optimistic. Peace is at hand.

::AP via Toronto Star: FBI analyst latest sniper victim

2002-10-14T22:04:00.000-07:00

Afghanistan is the skunk at the Bush administration's Iraq party.

In a speech last week, President George W. Bush stressed that the lives of Iraqi citizens would improve dramatically if Saddam Hussein were no longer in power,
"just as the lives of Afghanistan's citizens improved after the Taliban."

The near-unanimity of international and domestic support for U.S. operations to overthrow the Taliban was matched only by the comprehensiveness of U.S. victory. When it came to rebuilding Afghanistan, however, Washington turned once again to the UN for legitimacy and to its European allies for capacity.

While U.S. troops were mopping up rear-guard actions by al-Qaeda and the Taliban, Washington resisted any attempt to expand the (essentially European) international peacekeeping force in Kabul to major provincial centres, as the Afghan government and UN officials had recommended. Now that U.S. attention is moving elsewhere, Washington argues that those contributing to the force should indeed extend the range of their activities throughout Afghanistan -- though the United States itself has no intention of joining them.

Much attention has been focused on American unwillingness to engage in "nation-building," but there is also some evidence that the United States is not well-suited to such activities. Perhaps due to the importance of domestic politics in the exercise of U.S. power, Washington has a short attention span with respect to most international crises -- far shorter than is needed to complete the long, complicated task of rebuilding a country that has endured more than two decades of war, sanctions, and oppression under brutal leaders. This describes both Afghanistan and Iraq.

More importantly, when the United States has engaged in aspects of nation-building in Afghanistan, this has been justified at home by linking it to the war on terror. U.S. forces at times provided military and economic support for local governors, not on the basis of their relations with the embryonic regime of the admirable national leader Hamid Karzai, but in exchange for their assistance in rooting out the remnants of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. It is for this reason that the United States is described -- correctly -- as having a military strategy in Afghanistan but not a political one.

::David Malone and Simon Chesterman, Globe and Mail: How quickly we forget

2002-10-14T21:53:00.000-07:00

Remember a year or so back, when we were all aghast at the indignity of women in burqas, and our papers were full of columnists opining that we had a duty to liberate them from the Taliban?

Schools for girls have reopened, re-education classes for adult women have sprung up, many women have returned to work, and some have been seen in public without the burqa -- the traditional cloak that covers a woman from head to toe.

But most women remain pale-blue silhouettes locked away in the dusty mud- brick compounds of their husbands and fathers, housewives who live in fear under strict rules in a country that still calls itself an Islamic state.

Outside the capital, Kabul, and large, once-cosmopolitan cities like Mazar- e-Sharif, parents continue to sell their daughters to future husbands, women are not allowed to run shops, and when they go to a restaurant, they must eat separately from men. Even in Kabul, where women travel by car more than by donkey, they are more likely to squat in the trunk than to sit comfortably inside the car like men.

"This is the life we are used to," said Nargiz, 30, an Imam Sahib native who has been living in the town of Dasht-e-Qaleh, in northern Takhar province, since 1999.

. . . In many cases, the new government is no better. Soldiers loyal to the powerful northern warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum are alleged to have repeatedly raped women and girls in northern Afghanistan. "Afghan women . . . have been compelled to restrict their participation in public life to avoid being targets of violence by armed factions and by those seeking to enforce repressive Taliban-era edicts," Human Rights Watch wrote in its recent report. "Afghan women, especially outside Kabul, continue to face serious threats to their physical safety."

::Anna Badkhen, SFGate via Afgha.com: Afghan women still shrouded in oppression

2002-10-09T23:36:00.000-07:00

"Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or C.B.W. against the United States," [CIA director] Tenet's letter read, referring to chemical and biological weapons. "Should Saddam conclude that a U.S.-led attack could no longer be deterred, he probably would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist actions."

... the White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, insisted that Mr. Tenet's letter did not undercut the White House's position.

Yeah, that's pretty much what the administration's been saying all along.

::Michael R. Gordon, New York Times: American Aides Split on Assessment of Iraq's Plans

2002-10-09T23:07:00.000-07:00

Take a look at the Atlantic charter that both Nato and the UN describe as being the foundation of their organisations. This document was issued by Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt and inspired the young Nelson Mandela. It was published in August 1941 at the lowest ebb of modern civilisation. The Soviet Union was on the verge of defeat by the Nazi armies, after which Hitler would have devoted his undivided attention to destroying Britain. But even at such a time, Churchill laid out the vision of a post-war world not just of free enterprise, but of the control of arms and that "all the nations of the world, for realistic as well as spiritual reasons, must come to the abandonment of the use of force by all nations".

Today, President Bush is seeking to adopt Churchill's aura, while overturning these principles and re-introducing anarchy into international relations. The attacks of September 11 were terrible, but materially they do not compare with the devastation of two world wars. We learned from those lessons that we had to evolve to a system of security for all through the UN. Until now Nato has operated, not always easily, within the UN context.

::Dan Plesch, Guardian: Why Nato should call Bush's bluff

2002-10-08T21:50:00.000-07:00

Who needs fact when The Truth is on your side?

In making his case on Monday, Mr Bush made a startling claim that the Iraqi regime was developing drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which "could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas".

"We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs for missions targeting the United States," he warned.

US military experts confirmed that Iraq had been converting eastern European trainer jets, known as L-29s, into drones, but said that with a maximum range of a few hundred miles they were no threat to targets in the US.

"It doesn't make any sense to me if he meant United States territory," said Stephen Baker, a retired US navy rear admiral who assesses Iraqi military capabilities at the Washington-based Centre for Defence Information.

Mr Cannistraro said the flow of intelligence to the top levels of the administration had been deliberately skewed by hawks at the Pentagon.

"CIA assessments are being put aside by the defence department in favour of intelligence they are getting from various Iraqi exiles," he said. "Machiavelli warned princes against listening to exiles. Well, that is what is happening now."

::Julian Borger, Guardian: White House 'exaggerating Iraqi threat'

2002-10-06T17:38:00.000-07:00

'Me too!' militarism is just political common sense

Never trust a Weenie.

It's no surprise that the Weenie Party has caved on Iraq. As ever, what's disappointing is how cheaply it has sold out.

It's tempting to dismiss the Weenies as useless. But of course they do serve a function -- to simulate political discourse, to co-opt dissent in order to dissipate it, and ultimately to legitimize the triumphant right under a fig leaf of phony debate. It may not be the intention but it is undeniably the effect. When things get contentious, you can count on a Weenie to surrender ostensible principle and then to justify doing so in the name of a high-minded national interest.

Anatole Lieven, in the course of a broader investigation, refers to how flag-sucking nationalism beats hand-wringing 'realism' every time...

On Iraq and the war against terrorism, [The Weenie Party's] approach seems to be to avoid at all costs seeming 'unpatriotic'. If they can avoid being hammered by the Republicans on the charge of 'weakness' and lack of patriotism, then they can still hope to win the 2004 elections on the basis of economic discontent. The consequence, however, is that the Party has become largely invisible in the debate about Iraq; the Democrats are merely increasing their reputation for passionless feebleness; whereas the Republican nationalists are full of passionate intensity - the passion which in November 2000 helped them pressure the courts over the Florida vote and in effect steal the election.

::David Corn, The Nation: Now, It's Gephardt's War, Too
::Anatol Lieven, London Review of Books: The Push for War

2002-10-06T17:17:00.000-07:00

Barbara Ehrenreich embeds the past year in a Hollywood plot, not 'Band of Brothers' but instead...

... innumerable horror films, in which the thoughtless teenagers party hard in some ramshackle, out of the way site until one of the group shows up dead and hideously mutilated. That is the point at which it dawns on them that they are not alone, that there is someone out there--some incomprehensible Other who wants them dead. But with the beer flowing and the hormones surging, they have no way of organizing against the threat.

::Barbara Ehrenreich, The Progressive: Not the War We Needed

2002-10-03T23:58:00.000-07:00

Dispatches from the front lines of chic dissent...

Sure, we were guilty of the crime of standing four feet outside of a gallery's door with open bags of coke, along with a small group of other people. So what if we were blaring very loud electroclash music into the night, punctuating our consumption with glorious chants of "WHOOOP! WHOOOP! WHOOOP! WHOOOP!"? It was early evening in a warehouse district, and all the working people had gone home to their sad partyless lives. But these three cops apparently didn't care. They patted us down. They took our driver's licenses. One of them went in the car and got on the radio. They filled out a bunch of forms.

Finally, one of them took me aside.

"You'd better not touch me," I said. "Through my work as a radical journalist, I know many human-rights lawyers."

"Buddy, I don't want to touch you," said the cop. "I want to give you this."

It was a flier, advertising an October 6 National Day Of Action against war in Iraq. "Most of the NYPD secretly believes that President Bush has gone too far," said the cop. "We do not want our government to commit acts of senseless violence in our name."

::This bit from Neil Pollack's The Maelstrom is just one of the many groovy links proferred by Noosphere Blues.

2002-10-03T07:30:00.000-07:00

Meanwhile, the Afghan mission descends into farce...

Every soldier I spoke to was the same, proud, committed, raring to go. But a few minutes later I was wandering towards a long line of plastic portable toilets.

I was hailed by two young soldiers lounging in one of those huge American Humvee jeeps.

Clearly these two were not part of the guided tour.

"Excuse me sir," they asked. "But do we really have to say this baloney?"

The actual word they used was a little more colourful.

"What baloney?" I asked. They handed me a small laminated card.

On it were instructions on how to deal with journalists. Every soldier had been given one.

These were not just general ground rules. It actually listed suggested answers:

"How do you feel about what you're doing in Afghanistan"?

Answer: "We're united in our purpose and committed to achieving our goals."

"How long do you think that will take?" Answer: "We will stay here as long as it takes to get the job done - sir!"

... No answers

But what of the actual military operations? The hunt for al-Qaeda?

I went to meet a colonel in the 82nd Airborne.

"It's all going extremely well," he told me. But when it came to specifics he was rather more equivocal.

"We have recently detained a number of important suspects."

"Who?" I asked. He couldn't say.

Where did he think the main body of Al Qaeda fighters now were? Again he couldn't say.

Then I asked him about the reports of growing resentment at the large US military presence in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan. Of the road blocks and house-to-house searches, and the growing list of accidental killings.

"Absolutely not," he insisted. "We are only here because the Afghan people want us to be here."

::Rupert Wingfield Hayes, BBC: Doubts set in on Afghan mission via Cursor

2002-10-03T07:02:00.000-07:00

Letters from Iraq... Voices in the Wilderness indeed.

... while walking through one of the narrow streets in Daniel Market (named after the OT Daniel whol is buried outside of Baghdad) one of the markets in this city (like the french quarter only much older and much more crowded) i came to a smaller place in the sidewalk where only one person could pass. i stepped back to let a tall man in long robes go first. he said in a low voice "you are visitor, you go first." I said thank you. he then asked "where are you from?" i hesitated for a second, and then said "united states.' he looked at me and said "you are welcome here" and then passed on.

... we went to a boys high school today, 1200 students, where we brought letters of friendship and peace from students in usa and peace ribbons signed by hundreds of others. they were in a square room seated in twos at wooden desks. they were all dressed in western clothes. (one in the front was in a dark blue aamco shirt with a name tag stitched on that said Darwin!) Many of the boys thanked us for them and we asked them for questions. Though they were reluctant at first, finally one very tall boy (who plays basketball) said, in english, "I only have one question. Is your country going to make war against us?"

... we met in the evening with the family of Uma Heider, who lost one 7 year old boy to a bombing error by a "smart" bomb, on january 25, 1999. one of their other children, mustafa, who must be about 7 now, still carries shrapnel in his back and foot. (voices people say the pentagon response to a question about the bombing was " a missle wetn astray and we have corrected that problem") kathy kelly and others from voices in the wilderness stayed with this family for several weeks and they are very warm to peace visitors. the family lives in a very poor neighborhood called al-jumerriya. because of the bombing everyone knows their street as missle street. the mothher of this extended family of 25, who all live in one small house, welcomed us and gave us little cups of hot sweet tea. their many children played with us and were excited because we brought a polaroid camera and took their pictures and gave them copies. when we left the family gave me a chalk drawing that i will share with you when i get back.

... finally, while we were waiting in the lobby to leave, a man about 25 or 30 came up to us and introduced himself to us. he said his name was Adil Hameed Raheem, an English teacher and translator. He said that when he learned we were there he came to offer condolences on behalf of the iraqi people to the american people for the tragedy of september 11. he said, "we know suffering and we feel the suffering of the people in the united states. please on my behalf and on behalf of the iraqi people put a white flower on the site in new york city." he had tears in his eyes. then he reached into his satchel, and pulled out a small color picture of a little blue eyed girl with dark hair and a ribbon around her head. this was his daughter, he said, and he wanted us to have the picture and the words on the back. on the back, her father had printed: "Dear US administration mems. I am Sala Adil. I am 8 months. I am iraqi. I would be very grateful if you let me live peacefully away of bombing and sanctions like all the children of the world. Sala."

This episode illustrates the danger of open societies allowing citizens to travel to enemy states. Man, was that guy ever duped. He actually believes that Iraqis are feeling human beings! Can you believe the gall of Saddam's regime, orchestrating such blatant appeals to pity, hiding behind the lives of children? It's all as absurd as that conceit of the 8 month old child that can write -- obviously, any sane human being would prefer being ripped apart by high explosives to the indignity of living under dictatorship.

Bill Quigley, LA Indymedia: Reflections from Iraq via Lying Media Bastards

2002-10-03T06:25:00.000-07:00

U.N. Weapons Inspectors Seek Open Access in Iraq

Chief inspector Hans Blix said that the talks would operate under the assumption that nothing in Iraq would be off-limits to inspectors.

"Haven't you ever felt the urge to burn some distribution factory -- i.e. supermarket, giant store or warehouse -- to the ground?" Blix asked.

"The real pollution is the pollution by universal commodity intruding into every area of life. Every commodity on the supermarket shelf is a cynical hymn to the wage-slave oppression of the lie which places it on sale, and of the barter system of the boss and the cop whose function it is to protect that lie.

::NY Times via Arras: U.N. Weapons Inspectors Seek Open Access in Iraq (found via the master of cut-and-paste lyricism -- Riley Dog)

2002-10-02T06:59:00.000-07:00

Your hapless correspondent surveys mid-day London foot traffic

One highlight of my just-completed trip to England was last Saturday's walking tour of London, seeing the sights with somewhere between 150,000 and 400,000 friends.

Getting started at Embankment

The mighty Thames glistens as you stroll along, gazing upon London's historic landmarks and skyscrapers, exultant in their spectacle and finery. Be sure to stop in at Blackfriars pub for a pint of bitter...

Big Ben

The Luftwaffe did their best to level Big Ben in 1941, but the 320 foot tower stands tall, symbol of the heart and soul of England.

10 Downing Street

Through Whitehall you enter official London. Turn down unpretentious Downing Street to the modest little town house at no. 10, flanked by those charming low-key bobbies.

The Cenotaph may soon have more glorious dead to honour

Trafalgar Square

One of the landmarks of London, Trafalgar Square honours one of England's great military heroes, the seasick admiral Horatio, Viscount Nelson.

Piccadilly Circus

Hyde Park

Our tour concludes in Hyde Park. Covering 636 acres, it was once a hunting ground for Henry VIII. The velvety lawns interspersed with ponds, flower beds and trees offer a lovely backdrop to rest and check out some of those famous British eccentrics...

UPDATE: Brendan O'Neill offers his own characteristically iconoclastic take on the event here. My British sojourn was bookended by massive marches... it began with a 'countryside' protest against the impending ban on fox-hunting. The evidence of discontent across the political spectrum in England brought home to me the curious dichotomy that is the British PM: Tony Blair -- anti-hunting warmonger. [FAIR notes how the Stateside press gave markedly different treatment to these comparable events.]

::Euan Ferguson, Guardian: A big day out in Leftistan
::Sarah Left, Guardian: Body Count
::Brendan O'Neill, Spiked-Online: Anti-war - but what for?

2002-09-25T05:45:00.000-07:00

The loud little handful -- as usual -- will shout for the war.

The pulpit will -- warily and cautiously -- object -- at first; the great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, ¡®It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it.'

Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will out shout them, and presently the anti-war audiences will thin out and lose popularity.

Before long you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers -- as earlier -- but do not dare to say so. And now the whole nation -- pulpit and all -- will take up the war-cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to open.

Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception."

--Mark Twain, "The Mysterious Stranger," 1910

I've always admired that story. Thanks to Harry Spetnagel for the timely reminder.

2002-09-20T13:13:00.000-07:00

I'll be away until the end of the month. I recommended some other weblogs in this posting.

2002-09-14T23:10:00.000-07:00

From Commonplace Book

In a scheme so wacky, it could only be COINTELPRO, the FBI sent something called The Black Panther Coloring Book to families across the United States, in an effort to subvert white support for black civil rights. The drawings are fabulously blaxploitation-meets-the-revolution. Oh, for a reader response survey of the original recipients!

This coloring book, which was purported to be from the Black Panthers, had actually been rejected by them when it was brought to them by a man later revealed to have intelligence connections. Not to be troubled by the fact that the Panthers found the coloring book revolting, the FBI added even more offensive illustrations, and mass mailed it across America... [The truth was revealed] in the Congressional inquiry into COINTELPRO.

See the pictures

From Social Design Notes:

Uncle Sam Wants You

::The National Security Agency Kids' Page
::CIA's Homepage for Kids
::Whitehouse Kids
::NORAD Tracks Santa
::Department of Justice for Kids & Youth
::FBI for K-5th,and 6-12th grades
::Air Force Link Jr.
::Overseas Private Investment Corporation for Kids
::U.S. Department of the Treasury for Kids
::IRS's Tax Interactive
::Social Security Administration Youth Link
::Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Kid's Page
::The Army's free video game America's Army: Operations. (Article here.)

Found via American Samizdat

2002-09-13T01:43:00.000-07:00

Farewell to a fashion statement

U.S. special operations forces in Afghanistan have been ordered to shave and wear regular uniforms to look more like U.S. soldiers rather than locals, according to an official at the U.S. Special Operations Command in Tampa, Florida.

"Ted Nugent would fuckin' love it here!"

The order to shave facial hair and to "re-adapt uniform and grooming standards" came after a special operations commander, Maj. Gen. Geoff Lambert, saw numerous photographs of troops operating on the ground in Afghanistan with full beards and partial uniforms, the official said.

A heavy heart of darkness trip

The decision came after the perception that the grooming standard of the troops was out of hand and that the time had passed for the need of the soldiers to blend in.

The official said that the leadership put the highest priority on the security of its forces and would not give an order for grooming if it would put the troops at harm.

Rest assured that the Generals won't issue any reckless haircut orders.

Today's Special Forces: not afraid to be stylish

Oh yes, and there's also this:

Four rockets were launched early Thursday near U.S. special operations forces outside Gardez in the southeastern Paktia province, said Col. Roger King at Bagram Air Base, the U.S. military headquarters in Afghanistan.

One of the rockets landed about 400 meters (440 yards) north of the U.S. position. The other three landed in a nearby village, but there were no reported casualties, King said.

On Wednesday, three rocket-propelled grenades were fired at a convoy of U.S. special operations forces moving through the northeastern Kunar province, King said, without specifying the convoy's exact location.

And while we're at it, this too:

United States intelligence officials say Qaeda operatives who found refuge in Pakistan are starting to regroup and move back into Afghanistan, less than a year after a successful American military campaign forced them to flee their onetime sanctuary by the thousands.

...While American military might smashed Al Qaeda's training camps and terrorist infrastructure in Afghanistan after last September's attacks on New York and Washington, officials throughout the American government say that Al Qaeda has quickly adapted. It is in the process of transforming itself into a more mobile, flexible and elusive force than ever before.

"Management books talk about learning organizations," said one American intelligence official. Osama bin Laden, the official said, "built something that is a learning organization. It is changing and adapting to the loss of its infrastructure."

Osama bin Laden: management guru.

::Mike Mount, CNN: Close shave for special ops forces in Afghanistan
::Associated Press: U.S. forces in Afghanistan come under fire in two separate incidents
::James Risen and Dexter Filkins: Though Scattered, Qaeda Fighters Said to Return to Afghanistan

2002-09-13T01:09:00.000-07:00

That much-anticipated document the White House released yesterday, sporting the catchy title "A Decade of Deception and Defiance", was a real smash-hit...

The Critics Rave:

"Given the high priority for knowing what is going on in Iraq, I'm stunned by the lack of evidence of fresh intelligence," said Gary Milhollin, executive editor of Iraq Watch, a Washington-based nonprofit institution that tracks developments in Iraq's weapons program. "You'd expect that, for the many billions we are spending on intelligence, they would be able to make factual assertions that would not have to be footnoted to an open source."

... "This is a glorified press release that doesn't come close to the information the U.S. government made available on Soviet military power when we were trying to explain the Cold War," said Anthony Cordesman, a Middle East expert who has participated in many major studies of Iraq's capabilities. "It's clumsy and shallow when what we need is sophisticated and in-depth . . . as an overall grade, I'd give it a D-minus."

This document is based on "reports by U.N. weapons inspectors who scoured Iraq for outlawed weapons programs from 1991 to 1998" -- you know, those same inspectors that Smilin' Dick Cheney keeps trashing as worse than useless, mere pawns to be manipulated by Saddam's gamesmanship ...

Then again, they have little choice but to rely on this data, given that the last thorough intelligence review of Iraq's weaponry was compiled two years ago.

::Dana Priest and Joby Warrick, Washington Post: Observers: Evidence For War Lacking
::Eric Schmitt and Alison Mitchell, New York Times: U.S. Lacks Up-to-Date Review of Iraqi Arms

2002-09-12T08:39:00.000-07:00

One benefit of economic downturns is finding frank analysis on the business pages of major newspapers. When financial well-being is at stake, self-satisfied delusion is a luxurious liability ...

From the paper read by Canada's ruling elite:

Sept. 11 directly spawned the war in Afghanistan, which was mercifully brief and largely successful -- if you don't count the fact it may have failed to eliminate Osama bin Laden and certainly hasn't dismantled his al-Qaeda terror network or that the country remains as unstable and dangerous as ever.

Other than that, it's been a big success.

Then there's the prospect of war in Iraq, and the potential economic effects...

The Bush team appears convinced it can fight a war relatively quickly and cheaply, much as it did in Afghanistan, using air might and elite Special Forces units. But most experts disagree. They warn that the United States will have to commit to a large and costly military presence on the ground, including armoured divisions, for a lengthy period, even if they are able to wipe out the Iraqi command structure in a single powerful strike.

"The danger is that the U.S. will wind up with military and security spending draining the economy, holding down private investment and consumer spending, and forcing Draconian choices that will destabilize domestic political peace," BusinessWeek notes in its latest edition.

Some economists fear all this will plunge the United States and the rest of the world into a major recession while only increasing the risks of further terrorist attacks.

Other than that, it's a great idea.

::Brian Milner, Globe and Mail: Iraq war could prove an economic minefield

2002-09-12T08:38:00.001-07:00

Nobody was in command of the situation. The president scuttled about the country from one obscure location to another, and those self-assured experts admitted they hadn't any better idea of what was happening than anybody else did. The sense of inevitability that lends purveyors of spectacle their authority was ripped away. As Thomas Homer-Dixon writes, the event was an assault on the very fabric of consensus reality. One year later ...

... we've busily stitched over the tear in reality's fabric. Alas, the stitches aren't strong. Events are multiplying that our conventional categories and theories can't easily explain. Moreover, our leaders' pronouncements and our experts' prattle seems less and less reassuring, because it's dawning on us that, much of the time, these people don't really know what's going on at all. Most importantly, they rarely have clear or useful solutions to the truly tough problems.

The Middle East is aflame and no one really has a clue any more how to bring durable peace to the region. India and Pakistan remain on the brink of a war that could escalate into a nuclear exchange; again, there's a dearth of credible solutions to the underlying crisis in Kashmir. The United States is planning to attack Iraq, but its plans are widely opposed, even by staunch allies, largely because no one can really predict the downside risk. (Will oil prices go through the roof? Will Saddam Hussein release smallpox when U.S. forces are at the gates of Baghdad?)

On the economic front, the world is a mess, and critical economic policymakers -- such as the heads of national central banks, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank -- seem flummoxed. Many of the richest economies are stagnating, while in poor countries nearly three billion people still live on less than $2 a day. The U.S. economy -- critical to world growth -- is sliding sideways. European growth is also almost non-existent, and Germany's unemployment rate is nearing double digits. The Japanese Nikkei Index has dropped to levels unseen in two decades, with renewed doubts about the stability of the country's banking system. Latin America is in financial crisis; a decade of market liberalization on the continent has produced growth rates half those of the 1960s and a rise in the number of poor people. Africa and its 700 million inhabitants aren't even on the economic map.

But it's on environmental issues that our leaders and experts have proved most inadequate. In the last century, humankind's total impact on the planet's environment (measured, principally, by the flow of materials through our economies and our output of wastes) has multiplied about 16-fold. We're now disrupting fundamental flows of energy and materials within the biosphere -- that layer of life on Earth's surface as thick, proportionately, as an apple's skin -- and we're producing profound changes in cycles of key elements, like nitrogen, sulfur and carbon.

These changes will have immense consequences for life, industry and agriculture across the planet. Yet, just when we need, more than ever, aggressive policies to deal with our common environmental challenges, the recent summit in Johannesburg produced a pathetic spectacle of cacophony and global gridlock.

This combination of intractable political, economic, and environmental challenges is not a recipe for a humane and peaceful world society. Looking at them together, one gets the dismaying sense that deep and inexorable forces are building within the global system. At some point, these forces could combine in unforeseeable ways to cause a sharp breakdown of world order.

::Thomas Homer-Dixon, Globe and Mail: There's no going back

2002-09-12T08:38:00.000-07:00

The decision whether or not to invade Iraq will be made on an assessment of the best intelligence that is not available.

The White House still has not requested that the CIA and other intelligence agencies produce a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, a formal document that would compile all the intelligence data into a single analysis. An intelligence official says that's because the White House doesn't want to detail the uncertainties that persist about Iraq's arsenal and Saddam's intentions. A senior administration official says such an assessment simply wasn't seen as helpful.

::USA Today, Iraq course set from tight White House circle

2002-09-10T22:10:00.000-07:00

"next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn's early my
country 'tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?"

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

-- e. e. cummings

2002-09-10T00:55:00.000-07:00

An agitated Vice President Cheney, in a tête-à-tête with NBC's Tim Russert on Sunday, said it was "reprehensible" that people would think the administration had "saved" its ammunition on Iraq to bring it out now, 60 days before an election. "So the suggestion that somehow, you know, we husbanded this and we waited is just not true," Cheney said.

Now where would people get such a cockamamie idea? Well, maybe from White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. and Bush political adviser Karl Rove, who made the case to the New York Times's Elisabeth Bumiller last week that they pretty much did what Cheney said they didn't do -- waited patiently and deliberately to launch a long-planned rollout. "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August," Card said. Added Rove: "The thought was that in August the president is sort of on vacation."

::Dana Milbank, Washington Post: No Crawfishing From a Unique Vernacular

2002-09-09T17:59:00.000-07:00

The Asia Times updates us on the HIA, a radical Muslim group that appears to gearing up for a Jihad against the foreign occupiers, led by former Afghan leader and notorious mujahideen warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar:

Sources in the Hezb-i-Islami Afghanistan maintain that it has restructured its command and control systems across Afghanistan, with key commanders in Ghazni, Hekmatyar's home town, Gardez, Logar, Kunar and Kandahar being given specific tasks for action against foreign troops. Further, the local administration in eastern Afghanistan, including the police and the Afghan army, is completely at the mercy of these HIA commanders. Even the powerful commander of Jalalabad, Malik Hazrat Ali, who is a confidant of Afghan Defense Minister General Qasim Fahim, has given assurances to local HIA commanders that he will remain neutral in the next offensive, which is likely to be launched in Jalalabad and the southern Kabul region. The HIA is also in the process of making contact with commanders in northern Afghanistan, where new "activities" can be expected to start soon.

The new fight being led by the HIA will be named a freedom struggle against the occupation of foreign troops and tyranny against Pashtuns, and it is expected to gather widespread support among different Afghan factions, irrespective of their political affiliations. An important strategy will be to fan the flames of Pashtun dissatisfaction with the Tajik ascendancy in the Kabul government.

::Syed Saleem Shahzad, Asia Times: The new Afghan jihad is born

2002-09-08T14:15:00.000-07:00

"Anyone who claims the US media didn't censor itself is kidding you. It wasn't a matter of government pressure but a reluctance to criticize anything in a war that was obviously supported by the vast majority of the people.

And this isn't just a CNN issue--every journalist who was in any way involved in 9/11 is partly responsible."

-- Rena Golden, executive vice-president and general manager of CNN International

And they're about to do it again in Iraq.

::The Memory Hole: Senior CNN Executive Admits News Media Distorted Afghanistan War

2002-09-08T00:31:00.000-07:00

Paul William Roberts wrote a useful and very funny book about the Gulf War, The Demonic Comedy, and is likely the only person to interview Saddam Hussein while tripping on Ecstasy. Though thanks to the tell-all books, we now know Koppel was completely coked up when he hosted the Iraqi dictator on Nightline in 1991, though in fairness to Ted, at the time blow-fuelled broadcast journalism was the norm... back then Buzz Rather used to snort long white rails off his desk during commercial breaks. CBS staffers (who boasted of possessing the 'hardest working noses for news') took to calling a gram of coke '60 Minutes' , because typically that's how long it would take for one to disappear up through Morley Safer's nostrils.

But I digress. I had set out to introduce Mr. Roberts' reflection on the September 11th attacks and the subsequent war on terror:

To adapt Oscar Wilde, no one wishes to shake hands with Liberty when her hands are daubed in blood. "Wild liberty," Emerson wrote, "develops iron conscience. Want of liberty, by strengthening law and decorum, stupefies conscience." America has ultimately shown no grace under pressure.

How can we reconcile the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity with the necessities of security? Why did this happen? How can we address the causes in such a way that it will not happen again? To what extent are we to blame? These were the appropriate responses for which one waited largely in vain, while Liberty was put back in her crate and shipped off home. Aside from Harper's magazine editor and essayist Lewis Lapham, the media voices of reason and objectivity were nearly all either bullied into silence or else drafted into that vast choir chanting day and night for God and America the Beautiful, as consent -- for an endless revenge -- was manufactured. It was frightening to behold.

But it was also understandable. What the whole situation was not was "unexpected" -- a term frequently used to characterize the suicide-hijackings. Given America's greedy, 40-year romp through the world -- the wars and sponsored coups d'etat of self-interest, the tide of cultural trash -- it is only surprising that it didn't happen sooner.

:: Paul William Roberts, Globe and Mail Books: Islamists and their enemies
::Image from Samuel Rose, Parallel Journal: "Welcome to the cradle of civilization..."

2002-09-08T00:30:00.000-07:00

President Bush has said from the outset that the terrorists responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks hated America because "they hate our freedoms." But the available evidence does not support this explanation. Bin Laden's own statements and the personal histories of participants in the Sept. 11 plot suggest there are more specific reasons for the terrorists' hatred. They include American support for regimes that they detest in the Arab world; American bases on Arab territory, especially in Saudi Arabia; and American support for Israel's occupation of Palestinian territory and for Israel's military campaign against the Palestinians. Psychological alienation from modern Western culture and a radical interpretation of Islam add spice to this deadly stew.

By ignoring the items on this list and denouncing an enemy that hates us for what we are, not for what we say and do -- or what they think we do -- President Bush has created an all-purpose bad guy whose existence allows him to sidestep any examination of American policy. But al Qaeda is led by Arabs from the Middle East and is deeply rooted in Middle Eastern politics and intrigue. Its grievances, however irrational, come from there.

::Robert Kaiser, Washington Post: The Long and Short of It

2002-09-07T19:11:00.000-07:00

We're assured decisions will be made based on the 'best' intelligence:

Shortly before US strikes began in the Gulf War, for example, the St. Petersburg Times asked two experts to examine the satellite images of the Kuwait and Saudi Arabia border area taken in mid-September 1990, a month and a half after the Iraqi invasion. The experts, including a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst who specialized in desert warfare, pointed out the US build-up - jet fighters standing wing-tip to wing-tip at Saudi bases - but were surprised to see almost no sign of the Iraqis.

"That [Iraqi buildup] was the whole justification for Bush sending troops in there, and it just didn't exist," Ms. Heller says. Three times Heller contacted the office of Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney (now vice president) for evidence refuting the Times photos or analysis - offering to hold the story if proven wrong.

The official response: "Trust us."

. . . John MacArthur, publisher of Harper's Magazine and author of "Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War," says that considering the number of senior officials shared by both Bush administrations, the American public should bear in mind the lessons of Gulf War propaganda.

"These are all the same people who were running it more than 10 years ago," Mr. MacArthur says. "They'll make up just about anything ... to get their way."

On Iraq, analysts note that little evidence so far of an imminent threat from Mr. Hussein's weapons of mass destruction has been made public.

. . . in the fall of 1990, members of Congress and the American public were swayed by the tearful testimony of a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, known only as Nayirah.

In the girl's testimony before a congressional caucus, well-documented in MacArthur's book "Second Front" and elsewhere, she described how, as a volunteer in a Kuwait maternity ward, she had seen Iraqi troops storm her hospital, steal the incubators, and leave 312 babies "on the cold floor to die."

Seven US Senators later referred to the story during debate; the motion for war passed by just five votes. In the weeks after Nayirah spoke, President Bush senior invoked the incident five times, saying that such "ghastly atrocities" were like "Hitler revisited."

But just weeks before the US bombing campaign began in January, a few press reports began to raise questions about the validity of the incubator tale.

Later, it was learned that Nayirah was in fact the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington and had no connection to the Kuwait hospital.

She had been coached – along with the handful of others who would "corroborate" the story – by senior executives of Hill and Knowlton in Washington, the biggest global PR firm at the time, which had a contract worth more than $10 million with the Kuwaitis to make the case for war.

Thankfully we don't have to worry about that sort of manipulation this time round, what with honour and integrity restored in the Oval Office and all...

::Scott Peterson, Christian Science Monitor: In war, some facts less factual: Some US assertions from the last war on Iraq still appear dubious

2002-09-07T18:20:00.000-07:00

Oh my. Don't let the Killbloggers see this... they'll be calling for B-52's over Vancouver to complement the ones smashing Baghdad.

[An] Ipsos-Reid survey - which polled 1,000 Canadians last week - [found that] 69 per cent of respondents said the U.S. shares some of the responsibility for the attacks [because of U.S. policies in the Middle East and around the globe], while 15 per cent said all of the responsibility sits on American shoulders. The attacks killed thousands of civilians and U.S. military personnel at the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington.

Fourteen per cent said the United States does not bear any responsibility for the attacks.

In the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, critics were pilloried for suggesting the United States bore some responsibility for the attacks, and Mr. Wright said U.S. pollsters will not ask the question.

As a Canadian who received a fair amount of hate mail for asserting historical context in the wake of the September 11th attacks (note weblog title), I feel compelled to add a couple notes of clarification.

* I don't think that the result of this poll indicates that 15 per cent of Canadians are followers of Michael Ruppert or David Icke.

* "Some responsibility for" does not equal "deserved it". My father's sedentary lifestyle and love of booze and rich food does not mean he had that heart attack coming (hedonistic bastard). But neither was the attack completely unexpected or inexplicable, or the handiwork of a shadowy, inhuman Evil. This is an obvious distinction, and those who claim not to see it are either dishonest or morally retarded.

No memory is honoured by willful ignorance of pertinent history.

And yes, I know Americans don't give a rat's ass what Canadians think.

::Shawn McCarthy, Globe and Mail: Most think U.S. partly to blame for Sept.11

2002-09-07T17:33:00.000-07:00

When was the last time the U.S. Bombed Iraq?

::U.S. Bombing Watch

2002-09-06T15:28:00.000-07:00

At first, it was only a whisper, a guarded remark in the days after 11 September. For Afghans and expatriates who had long followed Afghanistan's misfortunes, the international campaign which gathered pace after the attacks on the US had "a silver lining in very dark clouds".

After three decades of political instability, there was a new chink of hope. Many feared it was - and still is - Afghanistan's last hope.

But one year on, that hope is fading.

. . . And, if a military campaign is launched against Iraq, the focus on Afghanistan will shift even more dramatically - troops, money and hope will move on.

::BBC via Afgha.com - Analysis: Afghanistan miracle turns to muddle

2002-09-03T11:16:00.000-07:00

It's nowhere near as pessimistic as some other assessments out there, but Geoffrey York of the Globe and Mail presents a balanced and detailed summary of how things stand in Afghanistan, with special emphasis on the near-intractable ethnic rivalries...

Although Mr. Karzai was given the presidency, the most powerful man in the new government is Mohammed Fahim, the shadowy Defence Minister from the Panjshir Valley, who has accumulated vast influence in the new regime. A former boss of the Afghan secret police in the early 1990s, he was promoted to head the Northern Alliance's military command after last year's assassination of fabled guerrilla leader Ahmed Shah Masood. (It is widely believed the assassination, on Sept. 9, was ordered by Osama bin Laden in an effort to regain favour with his Taliban hosts before the terrorist attacks.)

This year, Mr. Fahim promoted himself to the rank of marshal, assuming command over the entire Afghan military and also acquiring the title of Vice-President. He has consolidated his power by filling the upper ranks of the military and secret police with fellow Panjshiris.

Mr. Fahim is widely suspected of involvement in the Qadir assassination because the vice-president was under military guard when he was shot. It was only after the assassination that Mr. Karzai got rid of his own Afghan military guards and replaced them with Americans.

A month earlier, in June, when the country held its loya jirga (grand council) to select a new government, Mr. Fahim insulted the husband of the only woman candidate for president, saying she should quit because her candidacy was not Islamic. According to some reports, he also threatened to use military power to reverse the council's outcome if he disapproved.

"Fahim was rewarded for his bullying with the deputy presidency," the International Crisis Group said in a report this summer. "His brazenness, and the apparent acquiescence of the U.S. and the UN, has made President Karzai look weak."

::Stratfor, via Afgha.com: Analysis: Situation Deteriorating Rapidly in Afghanistan
::Geoffrey York, Globe and Mail: 'I lost everything I had, but it was worth the sacrifice'

2002-08-15T12:09:00.000-07:00

I'll be away from my cozy confines and high-speed connection until the end of the month. I may post occasionally, but will more likely be quaffing ale and caring for the new baby boy. I expect to resume my ranting in September.

Until then, I recommend the linkmongers on the left-hand sidebar -- my half-dozen readers have likely figured out that Dack, Brendan O'Neill, Cursor, Busy Busy Busy, Lying Media Bastards, Gordon Coale, BookNotes, Warblogger Watch, my fellow harbingers at American Samizdat and the others cover pretty much the same beat, and usually with better results.

Enjoy what's left of the summer. Peace.

2002-08-11T00:05:00.000-07:00

Hard to get good help these days

Presidential proxy Hamid Karzai was reported to have been chosen leader at last June's Loya Jirga by overwhelming acclamation. A couple months later he needs to be guarded by U.S. Special Forces on his tentative forays about his putative realm.

An AP article and accompanying photo published August 3 said it all. It reported that Karzai "dismissed allegations yesterday that the United States tried to cover up a deadly airstrike [which Afghan officials claimed occurred south of Kabul August 1] and said a continued American presence was crucial to Afghanistan's future. Flanked by U.S. special forces bodyguards, Karzai said he visited one of the villages attacked in the July 1 air raid and when asked if he believed there had been a cover-up, said, 'I don't think so. People would have told me.'"

::Gary Leupp, Outlook India: Karzai's Bodyguards

2002-08-11T00:04:00.000-07:00

Meanwhile, the factional fighting among warlords in Afghanistan is starting to boil over...

... the refusal by [Pacha Khan] Zadran to cease his attempts to assert power in the east and surrender to the government represents the first instance of Washington's Afghani allies coming into direct, sustained conflict. In this case, U.S. short-term tactical considerations have collided with a long-term strategy.

Zadran, a staunch supporter of the U.S. war against the Taliban and al Qaeda, so far has proven beyond Washington and Kabul's ability to handle. After Karzai's interim government appointed Zadran governor of Paktia province and head of the southern zone in January, he was prevented from taking the provincial seat by local tribal leaders who had little more than disdain for him and rejected his rule outright.

After Zadran tried to capture the provincial capital of Gardez and left scores dead in the bloodiest example of internecine fighting in Afghanistan so far, Karzai cut a deal with the local tribal leaders and replaced the problematic Pushtun leader.

Since then, Zadran and his brother Kamal -- the former governor of Khost -- have sought to take what Karzai would not give: Paktia and Khost provinces. Zadran's efforts have centered on rallying Pushtun ethnic sentiments and calling for the overthrow of Karzai's government, which he claims is overrun by the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance.

As Afghanistan steadily slides into marginal anarchy -- competing factions cannot be separated, contained or policed by peacekeeping forces -- Zadran is fighting to take as large as piece of the pie as possible. However, Karzai cannot and will not allow a competing Pushtun leader to rise in the predominantly Pushtun-populated country, particularly in the eastern region -- the epicenter of Pushtun power.

Now the United States has been caught in the middle of clan warfare as it continues to carry out operations in the region. Within the past weeks there has been an upsurge in attacks on U.S. and Afghan government troops in eastern Afghanistan, including the ambush of U.S. troops in Khost at the end of July and the Aug. 7 attack on an army base in the Bagram district in Kabul.

The Zadran-inspired protest rallies against the Karzai government continue.

::STRATFOR: Afghanistan: Yesterday's Friends May Be Today's Enemies
::Reuters: Rebel Warlord Backers Protest Against Afghan Govt.

2002-08-10T23:32:00.000-07:00

Not that many Americans care, but war in Iraq will complicate relations with its #1 trading partner.

As Secretary of State Colin Powell, a voice of reason on the Potomac, dejectedly reports, the hard-liners have taken control at the White House. History suggests that when they have the reins, it's bad times for bilateral relations. The hard-liners deride our puny military, as well they might. They have no time for moralistic lectures from Mexicans in sweaters, as Canadians are sometimes called.

Ottawa's position opposing an invasion of Iraq is unlikely to change. Mr. Chrétien has stated that there must be some proof linking Iraq to the Sept. 11 terror before he will support an all-out war. So far there is no proof, nor is there likely to be.

After the September catastrophe, it looked to many observers as though the two neighbours might draw closer together. Mr. Chrétien never thought so. "Wait for six months until the emotions have died down," he told an adviser. "You will see that not much has changed."

He was correct. There came Washington's softwood lumber duties, crippling agricultural subsidies and a raft of other disputes. But as tough as some of these issues may be, there is nothing, as Vietnam demonstrated, that can prompt a big split in relations like opposing positions on a major war. If Ottawa holds to its line against an invasion of Iraq, there will likely be a price to be paid. Canada could be hit with more stiff measures on trade, on security, on any number of fronts.

...The hard-liners have a long and contentious history in the United States and Canada has been wise to oppose them. It wasn't wrong to question Mr. Kennedy over taking the world to the brink over the placing of missiles in Cuba. It was hardly naive of Lester Pearson to take a courageous stand against escalated bombing in Vietnam -- he was vindicated. It was hardly wrong for Mr. Trudeau to launch an idealistic peace mission to encourage an East-West thaw. The U.S. and Soviet leaders eventually came together on some of the very terms Mr. Trudeau had set out.

Friends don't let friends wage stupid wars. Unless this friend is way bigger and violently belligerent. In which case Canada can be expected to mouth some pieties about international protocol before falling in line dejectedly with whatever America wants.

::Lawrence Martin, Globe and Mail: History's on Canada's side

2002-08-08T10:57:00.000-07:00

Jack Shafer of Slate does some follow-up on the PowerPoint presentation that rocked the Pentagon by designating Saudi Arabia as an American enemy. Presented by a former 'LaRouchie' with Strangelovian ambitions, it advises the U.S. to target Saudi 'Holy Places', and to 'let it be known that alternatives are being canvassed.' (Like Nazareth, maybe?)

The concluding slide:

Grand strategy for the Middle East

Iraq is the tactical pivot

Saudi Arabia the strategic pivot

Egypt the prize

Egypt?

This is a fine example of what the Richard Perle set considers 'grand strategic thinking.' Who better to command the world's biggest military machine with impunity?

::Jack Shafer, Slate: The PowerPoint That Rocked the Pentagon
::David Corn, TomPaine.com: The Loyal Opposition: Talking Iraq With The 'Prince of Darkness'

2002-08-07T17:23:00.000-07:00

Maybe those survivalist types aren't the nutbars I always took them for...

A day after President Bush's release of a homeland defense strategy calling for the possible domestic use of U.S. military forces, Alabama activated a 300-soldier Army National Guard tank battalion as part of a homeland defense force.

In a statement released Wednesday, Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman said the Ozark, Ala.-based 1st Battalion, 131st Armor "is equipped with modern battle tanks, the M1A1 Abrams" and "will serve in the homeland defense role within the United States."

Siegelman, commander-in-chief of the state's national guard, did not say what role the tank battalion would serve in homeland defense.

::Columbus Ledger-Enquirer: Alabama Activates Tank Unit via This Modern World (I recommend each "this" he has...)

2002-08-07T13:05:00.000-07:00

Watching America careen towards an inevitable attack on Iraq is like reading that someone is filming a big-budget remake of Ishtar starring Jerry Lewis and Michael Jackson. Attempts to halt the progress with appeals to decency or logic are clearly useless. The sheer depth of the madness too profound to fathom...

War in Iraq and its unpredictable effects will undoubtedly increase levels of carnage and misery throughout the world, of course, and as Paul Koring argues it undermines the real and necessary war on terror:

There is a threat to America's security out there. It is composed of wrong-headed adherents of a twisted religio-ideology who claim divine authority for death and destruction. The way to fight the immediate threat is to find them and capture them. The key to that, in the short term, is not military force, but rather intelligence and police work.

Over the long haul, the United States must work far harder to promote tolerance, democratic values and economic opportunity for the masses in the Muslim world, so as to demonstrate the futility of the al-Qaeda vision. Spinning yarns about Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, and lavishing favours on decrepit Middle Eastern allies to secure their help against Mr. Hussein, are not the way to begin.

Iraq is worse than a distraction. It's an invitation to a two-front quagmire, à la Bonaparte. If enough people in the right places remind Mr. Bush to keep his eye on the ball, perhaps the hubris-driven scheming of the hard core can be stopped. To do so is crucial; the alternative is a world held hostage to both the shadow of al-Qaeda and the fantasy of U.S. omnipotence.

As usual, members of the Weenie Party in Congress are so afraid of looking like weenies that they are acting like total weenies. Weenies believe that capitulating to lunatic militarism demonstrates that they are 'realists.' That backing down from a fight is a sign of toughness and resolve.

That leaves a handful of Republicans to shoulder a heavy load on their own...

Legislators have yet to be briefed - even in closed hearings - on the reasons why regime change is imperative and why now. For example, does the administration have firm evidence that Iraq has links with terrorists or is handing them biological or chemical weapons?

..."We need evidence on this issue, or we could base governmental action on a supposition," says [Sen. Richard] Lugar. Yet all that has come out of the administration is leaks and hints.

Lugar was troubled by the risk of going into another Iraq war without allies. "Ten years ago," he said, "the United States had done the military and diplomatic spadework in the region. Allies in the region permitted U.S. forces to launch attacks from their territory."

Our allies also footed 80 percent of the war costs that have been variously estimated at between $60-80 billion.

This time, we will be going it virtually alone, with Europeans skeptical and Arab allies urging us to focus first on the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Without the use of Saudi bases and air space, military planners fear the operation will be far more risky.

Without allies, moreover, American taxpayers will be footing the whole war bill - along with a possible spike in oil prices. This, at a time when deficits are rising and the Bush administration won't consider rescinding large tax cuts for the wealthy.

What also distressed Lugar was testimony by experts that Iraq will require a long and large U.S. presence in Baghdad to ensure democracy. Some administration sources compare this to the U.S. occupation of Germany and Japan after World War II.

Lugar wants to know whether the administration has plans for such a long-term commitment of people and treasure. "The parallel with Germany and Japan is a real leap, absent institutions that might produce real democracy," he contended.

On the up-side, we'll be able to watch lots of bitchin' stock military footage on CNN. And the production values should be way better than in 1992.

::Duncan Campbell, Guardian: Detailed war plan handed to Bush via Dack
::Paul Koring, Globe and Mail: Invitation to a two-front quagmire
::Trudy Rubin, Philadelphia Inquirer:Vague Bush Case for Iraq War Spurs Worry in GOP, Pentagon
::Image from the Ministry of Homeland Security

2002-08-05T10:47:00.000-07:00

The mainstream press is reporting -- if gingerly and with undue deference -- the disoriented nature of the American occupation of Afghanistan. The Washington Post summarizes a strategy that appears to be: a) prop up a figurehead government; b) play footsie with the warlords who are undermining this government; c) eschew humanitarian engagements, and continue with an aggressive attack posture against an enemy that is no longer there, presumably in hopes of further alienating the local population with more civilian massacres.

Supported by the Bush administration and recently elected president by an assembly of delegates from throughout the country, Karzai nevertheless has been unable to extend his authority much beyond Kabul, the capital.

In particular, sources said, the Afghan president has repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, sought U.S. military help in curbing such regional militia leaders as Bacha Khan, an ethnic Pashtun tribal chief whose forces have squared off against the Karzai-appointed governor in the eastern province of Khost. [U.S. commander Lt. Gen. Dan K. ] McNeill said he has no intention of intervening.

"Clearly, there's a problem there," he said. "It's a problem that Afghans should solve."

The Karzai adviser said, however, "We can't do it. We don't have the resources. If they don't get involved, we're going to be starting '92 all over again." He was referring darkly to a return to the civil war that dismembered Afghanistan in the early 1990s.

...As the Americans continue to grapple with such political issues, Afghan leaders have been adamant in urging the United States not to press ahead with a military strategy better suited to the early days of the war. From Karzai down, they say they are tired of the Americans treating Afghanistan as a free-fire zone at a time when the war is yielding diminished results.

"It's very necessary for the Americans to change their strategy for their operations," said Gen. Anwar Kohistani, an Interior Ministry official who was part of a team that flew to Uruzgan province to investigate the July 1 U.S. airstrike there that killed about 48 villagers, most of them women and children at a wedding party.

McNeill said the U.S. forces were acting on information that the fugitive Taliban leader, Mohammed Omar, might have been in the area that night, but Afghan officials have said the disastrous attack was simply another case of Americans relying on bad intelligence.

"The fundamental problem is that the Americans do not respect anybody except themselves," said Col. Mir Jan, a spokesman for the Afghan Defense Ministry. "They say, 'We are the God of the world,' and they don't consult us."

A picture which bears little resemblance to that 'staggeringly effective' operation that exists in America's collective consciousness. Having perpetuated a mass hallucination of a successful war that never was, the elite press now finds itself unable to break the spell.

::U.S. Challenged To Define Role In Afghanistan

2002-08-03T14:55:00.000-07:00

Some recent history that raises questions Rummy won't have to answer anytime soon...

With the Iran-Iraq war escalating, President Ronald Reagan dispatched his Middle East envoy, a former secretary of defense, to Baghdad with a hand-written letter to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and a message that Washington was willing at any moment to resume diplomatic relations.

That envoy was Donald Rumsfeld.

Rumsfeld's December 19-20, 1983 visit to Baghdad made him the highest-ranking US official to visit Iraq in 6 years. He met Saddam and the two discussed "topics of mutual interest," according to the Iraqi Foreign Ministry. "[Saddam] made it clear that Iraq was not interested in making mischief in the world," Rumsfeld later told The New York Times. "It struck us as useful to have a relationship, given that we were interested in solving the Mideast problems."

... In 1988, Saddam’s forces attacked Kurdish civilians with poisonous gas from Iraqi helicopters and planes. U.S. intelligence sources told The LA Times in 1991, they “believe that the American-built helicopters were among those dropping the deadly bombs.”

In response to the gassing, sweeping sanctions were unanimously passed by the US Senate that would have denied Iraq access to most US technology. The measure was killed by the White House.

Senior officials later told reporters they did not press for punishment of Iraq at the time because they wanted to shore up Iraq's ability to pursue the war with Iran. Extensive research uncovered no public statements by Donald Rumsfeld publicly expressing even remote concern about Iraq’s use or possession of chemical weapons until the week Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, when he appeared on an ABC news special.

... In 1984, Donald Rumsfeld was in a position to draw the world’s attention to Saddam’s chemical threat. He was in Baghdad as the UN concluded that chemical weapons had been used against Iran. He was armed with a fresh communication from the State Department that it had “available evidence” Iraq was using chemical weapons. But Rumsfeld said nothing.

Washington now speaks of Saddam’s threat and the consequences of a failure to act. Despite the fact that the administration has failed to provide even a shred of concrete proof that Iraq has links to Al Qaeda or has resumed production of chemical or biological agents, Rumsfeld insists that “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

But there is evidence of the absence of Donald Rumsfeld’s voice at the very moment when Iraq’s alleged threat to international security first emerged. And in this case, the evidence of absence is indeed evidence.

::Jeremy Scahill, Common Dreams: The Saddam in Rumsfeld’s Closet

2002-08-03T14:41:00.000-07:00

They're still acting cocky, but Thomas Ricks reports that Rumsfeld & Co. are engaged in some hand-wringing and finger-pointing in private, in an attempt to shake off the present "lull in the war on terrorism."

In the first months of the war, as the fighting in Afghanistan captured much public attention, the U.S. effort appeared to be expanding, with anti-terrorism missions beginning in Yemen, Georgia and the Philippines. U.S. and allied forces also monitored Somalia, and Pentagon officials repeatedly indicated that action there was possible if al Qaeda members tried to create a sanctuary there.

But the Philippine training exercise ended this week, at least temporarily. Little progress has been reported in Georgia and Yemen, and no action appears to have taken place in Somalia.

Meanwhile, even some Afghans who support the United States contend that the U.S. mission there is languishing. U.S. forces have recorded few apprehensions of al Qaeda members or senior Taliban leaders in several months and, in the process of hunting for them, made a major mistake on July 1. In an attack on suspected Taliban positions, U.S. aircraft mistakenly killed at least 48 civilians at a wedding.

Five days later in Kabul, one of the new government's vice presidents, Abdul Qadir, was assassinated, shaking the sense of security in the capital.

If things are going so amazingly well, as we still hear in most references to the military action, why the need to 'revitalize' the tactics?

::Thomas Ricks, Washington Post: Aggressive New Tactics Proposed for Terror War

2002-08-01T10:30:00.000-07:00

"Better bombing through chemistry"

The Toronto Star does an in-depth study on what U.S. pilots are flying on while they're flying...

A spokesperson for the U.S. Air Force Surgeon-General's Office in Washington confirmed pilots are given the stimulant Dexedrine, generically known as dextroamphetamine, to stay alert during combat missions in Afghanistan.

Pilots refer to Dexedrine as "go-pills." The sleeping pills they are given, called Ambien (zolpidem) and Restoril (temazepam), are referred to as "no-go pills."

"When fatigue could be expected to degrade air crew performance, they are given Dexedrine in 10 mg doses," air force spokeswoman Betty-Anne Mauger told The Star.

It is not known whether Dexedrine was involved in the friendly fire incident in which an American fighter jet dropped a 500-pound laser-guided bomb that killed four Canadian soldiers early on April 18. But the possibility did come to the mind of one defence analyst.

"Better bombing through chemistry," remarked John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org, a Washington-area defence policy think-tank.

"This was certainly one of my first thoughts after the Canadian friendly fire accident," he said in an interview. "The initial depiction made it seem as if the pilot was behaving in an unusually aggressive fashion."

The 24-page Top Gun document, entitled Performance Maintenance During Continuous Flight Operations, reports that in an anonymous survey among pilots who flew in Desert Storm, the 1991 Persian Gulf War, 60 per cent said they used Dexedrine. In units that saw the most frequent combat missions, usage was as high as 96 per cent.

During that war, Dexedrine was administered in doses of 5 mg each, as opposed to the 10 mg pills now offered to pilots in Afghanistan.

So far, amphetamine use has not been mentioned in the summaries made public of either the Canadian or U.S. probes into the accident, which killed Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry soldiers Sgt. Marc Léger, Pte. Nathan Smith, Pte. Richard Green and Cpl. Ainsworth Dyer.

But according to a leaked transcript of radio communications, Schmidt — after reporting that he was being fired at from the ground but being told by air controllers to "hold fire" — suddenly declared he was "rolling in" and dropped the bomb.

It was only after Schmidt hit his target that he asked the controllers to confirm he was being fired at. The dispatcher responded: "You're cleared. Self-defence."

The U.S. military appears to view pilots as machines. Under the heading "Basic Principles" in the Top Gun document, it says: "We manage maintenance, we manage fuel and weapons; we can also manage fatigue."

Pilots are allowed to "self-regulate" the amounts of Dexedrine they take. They carry the pills in the single-person cockpit of their F-16s and take them as they wish.

But medical literature indicates that amphetamines can have severe side effects. The worst is called "amphetamine psychosis." It causes hallucinations as well as paranoid delusions.

"Dexedrine also leads a person to build a tolerance level for the drug and when higher doses are offered, anything at that level develops addictive tendencies among those who continue to use it regularly," said Dr. Joyce A. Walsleben, director of the Sleep Disorder Centre at the New York University School of Medicine. "The threat of abuse and addiction is definitely higher with Dexedrine."

... Air force insiders say the pilots really do not have a choice in taking the drug. The form states that "should I choose not to take it under circumstances where its use appears indicated ... my commander, upon advice of the flight surgeon, may determine whether or not I should be considered unfit to fly a given mission."

::William Walker, Toronto Star: U.S. pilots stay up taking 'uppers'
::Image from the Ministry of Homeland Security

2002-07-31T22:36:00.000-07:00

The questions being debated now, officials said, are whether to move against Hussein with overt military action and, if so, when and how.

The lack of answers to those questions is producing new stresses within the administration, some defense experts said. Two people involved in the debate -- one inside the Pentagon, one outside it -- said Cheney and others at the White House are growing concerned that the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other military leaders have fought Rumsfeld and other civilian hawks to a standstill. "I'm picking up a concern that people at the top of the Pentagon are overwhelmed," said one Republican foreign policy expert.

::Thomas Ricks, Washington Post: Timing, Tactics on Iraq War Disputed

2002-07-31T22:31:00.000-07:00

My favorite bald-faced bullshit denial of the day:

While Bush served on Harken Energy's board of directors in 1989, the company set up an offshore subsidiary in the Cayman Islands, the White House acknowledged. But spokesman Ari Fleischer denied it was a scheme to avoid paying taxes in the United States.

::CNN.com: Bush, Cheney under fire over offshore subsidiaries - July 31, 2002

2002-07-31T10:29:00.000-07:00

The family of nations resolves a squabble. Everybody is happy.

Lakhdar Brahimi, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's special representative to Afghanistan, said that avoiding civilian casualties must be "paramount" and that the Pentagon must conduct the war so "that protection of civilian lives becomes a primary concern in the fight against terrorism."

[Note Brahimi's use of the future tense.]

Meanwhile, the world body scrapped plans to make public its assessment of the attack, in which an AC-130 gunship called in by U.S. ground forces killed 48 revelers and wounded at least 100 more. A final version of the report was given only to U.S. and Afghanistan officials, who are conducting their own formal investigation into the attack.

A draft version of the report that was leaked on the weekend casts doubts about U.S. claims of anti-aircraft fire and suggested an even higher death toll, but UN officials quickly disowned it as incomplete and "unsubstantiated."

::Paul Koring, Globe and Mail: U.S. warned about civilian casualties

2002-07-31T10:13:00.000-07:00

Rolf Ekeus, head of United Nations weapons inspections in Iraq from 1991-97, on the politics of weapons inspections:

... the US and other members of the Security Council pressed the teams to inspect sensitive areas, such as Iraq's ministry of defence when it was politically favourable for them to create a crisis situation. "They, [Security Council members] pressed the inspection leadership to carry out inspections which were controversial from the Iraqis' view, and thereby created a blockage that could be used as a justification for a direct military action," he said.

In a separate interview with Svenska Dagbladet, the Swedish newspaper, Mr Ekeus said that he had learnt after he left his position that the US had placed two of its own agents in the group of inspectors.

With the US determined to topple the Iraqi regime, officials in Baghdad argue that the return of inspectors at this time is certain to lead to intelligence gathering and to deliberate provocation on their part, thus giving legitimacy to a US attack.

::Carola Hoyos, et al, Financial Times: Weapons inspections were 'manipulated' via Cursor

2002-07-30T22:29:00.000-07:00

Friedman's megalomania is getting out of hand -- now he's talking like a James Bond supervillain...

. . . give me sustained $10-a-barrel oil and I'll give you revolutions from Iran to Saudi Arabia, and throw in Venezuela.

::Thomas Friedman, New York Times: $6 or $60

2002-07-30T17:20:00.000-07:00

Alexander Cockburn takes a few kicks at the New York Times:

The pertinent question is whether the Times is a good newspaper, and the answer there is, all too often it isn't. Part of the reason the prose of Paul Krugman and Frank Rich seems so lively is that they shine amid darkness. The news pages are clogged with prose that is either pedestrian or arch, the latter being the besetting vice of journalists trying to turn in quality writing.

...The Times spent so many years through the 1990s printing stupid stories about the triumph of neoliberalism and of the free market that even if its foreign and economic correspondents had suspicions that all might be well, they prudently suppressed their doubts. So the Times missed what was actually happening in the former Soviet Union, or in Argentina, Brazil and the other kleptocracies of Latin America. The only reason more isn't made of the stupidity of the Times' editorial pages is that The Wall Street Journal's opinion pages are so violently demented that almost any other editorial voice sounds sane by comparison.

But by and large our opinion-writing classes are even stupider than they were 20 years ago. Take The New York Times' initial reaction to the attempted coup against President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. If there was ever a coup urgently and publicly demanded by Washington, this was it. Chavez was up there on the Wanted List, just under Saddam. When the attempt on Chavez finally came in mid-April, the Times swiftly editorialized that Chavez's "resignation" meant that "Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator." Eschewing the word "coup," the Times explained that Chavez "stepped down after the military intervened and handed power to a respected business leader." The editorial called Chavez "a ruinous demagogue," and proclaimed that "Venezuela urgently needs a leader with a strong democratic mandate," subsequently undercutting the majesty of this statement by having conceded that Chavez himself actually had a democratic mandate, having been "elected president in 1998."

Three days later, Chavez was back in power and the Times ran a second editorial half-apologizing for its earlier triumphalism. "In his three years in office, Mr. Chavez has been such a divisive and demagogic leader that his forced departure last week drew applause at home and in Washington. That reaction, which we shared, overlooked the undemocratic manner in which he was removed. Forcibly unseating a democratically elected leader, no matter how badly he has performed, is never something to cheer." Which of course is exactly what the Times had initially done, without raising any unpleasant questions as to what role the CIA had in the attempted coup.

::Alexander Cockburn, NY Press: Wild Justice

2002-07-30T17:02:00.000-07:00

In the wake of a barrage of contradictory reports, Brendan O'Neill makes an admirable attempt at the impossible -- to decipher the Bush administration's intentions in Iraq:

What's going on? Is the USA planning a massive military conquest, or does it need to build more bombs first? Does the Bush administration have the backing of the 'civilised world' (as one US Senator calls it), or is it increasingly isolated in its plans to attack Iraq? According to one US journalist: 'The Bush administration knows it wants to bomb Iraq and it knows it wants to get rid of Saddam - it just doesn't know when, how or why to do it.'

::Brendan O'Neill, Spiked: Bush's Gulf War syndrome

2002-07-30T16:46:00.000-07:00

... the main moral failure of CEOs - and US presidents - does not consist in the conscious venality of thinking one thing while saying another. The disorder is deeper than that, for it is far more likely that such leaders are convinced of the false justifications they offer. That the justifications are profoundly self-serving, of course, is part of why the leaders are convinced. When George W. Bush recently broke America's promise on the ABM treaty, that did not make us a nation of liars, he told us, but of realists. And, incidentally, his sole-power agenda was advanced.

The pattern is wide. Executives who want only to put the numbers ''in a better light'' end by cooking the books. Politicians who harmlessly aim to tell voters what they want to hear wind up having no core grasp of what is true. Religious leaders who maintain the appearance of virtue as an absolute value lose the capacity to recognize their own fallibility. But in all of this, such figures are behaving only like members of the human species, for the tendency toward grievous self-deception is universal.

Thus, lifetime partners can go years without realizing they have no intimacy. The overweight can fool themselves about their health problem. Drinkers can deny what their lives have become. Compulsive workers can enslave themselves to a false dream of success. Life-wrecking depression can pass itself off as selfless worry. Greed can seem like ambition. The pursuit of happiness is killing us. The most damaging lies are the ones we tell ourselves.

::James Carroll, Boston Globe via Common Dreams: The Culture of Self-Deception

2002-07-29T10:40:00.000-07:00

George W.'s foreign policy touchstone?

What are nutbar bookworms reading at the beach this summer? According to the New York Times bestseller list the most popular novel in the country is the tenth installment of the "Left Behind" series. The books dramatise evangelical prophecy, depicting a post-Rapture world in which war in the Middle East sets in motion events that lead to the return of Christ.

It's disturbing enough that millions of Americans are devouring such paranoiac fantasies, but what is terrifying is how smoothly the worldview dovetails with the policies and rhetoric of the most powerful men on the planet. The American administration is either cynically playing footsie with twisted theology, or they actually believe in this stuff. If it's the latter, they have the option of speeding the process along. (When is a Washington press hack going to work up the courage to ask Bush, Ashcroft, et al if the Book of Revelations serves as an intelligence brief?)

Salon Books' Michelle Goldberg on the man behind Left Behind:

Tim LaHaye isn't merely a fringe figure like Hal Lindsey, the former king of the genre, whose 1970 Christian end-times book "The Late Great Planet Earth" was the bestseller of that decade. The former co-chairman of Jack Kemp's presidential campaign, LaHaye was a member of the original board of directors of the Moral Majority and an organizer of the Council for National Policy, which ABCNews.com has called "the most powerful conservative organization in America you've never heard of" and whose membership has included John Ashcroft, Tommy Thompson and Oliver North. George W. Bush is still refusing to release a tape of a speech he gave to the group in 1999.

The point isn't that all these leaders are part of some kind of right-wing Illuminati. It's simply that the seemingly wacky ideology promulgated in the Left Behind books is one that important people in America are quite comfortable with. The Left Behind series provides a narrative and a theological rationale for a whole host of perplexing conservative policies, from the White House's craven decision to cut off aid to the United Nations Family Planning Fund to America's surreally casual mobilization for an invasion of Baghdad -- a city that is, in the Left Behind books, Satan's headquarters.

Political attitudes and actions that make no practical or moral sense to secularists become comprehensible when viewed through Christian pop culture's eschatological looking glass. At a time when America is flagrantly flouting international law, spurning the U.N. and tacitly supporting the land grabs of Israeli maximalists, surely it's significant that the most popular fiction in the country creates a gripping narrative that pits American Christians against a conspiracy of Satan-worshipping, abortion-promoting, gun-controlling globalists -- all of it revolving around the sovereignty of Israel.

If the Rapture is to instantly take right-wing evangelical Christians from the planet and transport them to their reward, I wish it would hurry up a little. Some of us are interested in a decent life on this world.

::Michelle Goldberg, Salon: Fundamentally unsound

2002-07-28T14:40:00.000-07:00

"Hi! I think civilian deaths are neat!"

Oh yes, cute and cuddly conservative columnist Ben Shapiro easily wins this week's Ann Coulter Award for sheer hateful idiocy:

I am getting really sick of people who whine about "civilian casualties." Maybe I'm a hard-hearted guy, but when I see in the newspapers that civilians in Afghanistan or the West Bank were killed by American or Israeli troops, I don't really care. In fact, I would rather that the good guys use the Air Force to kill the bad guys, even if that means some civilians get killed along the way. One American soldier is worth far more than an Afghan civilian.

It's a monstrous thing to say, of course, but it's likely a sentiment shared by a lot of Americans, if more discretely so among faux-liberal weenies. How different is Shapiro's statement than this shrugging off of a one ton bomb that killed 14, from progressive corporate-blogger Eric Alterman?:

I don’t know if killing the military chief of Hamas, together with his family, is an effective military measure -- as surely someone will rise to replace him and it will make a lot more people angry, perhaps even angry enough to become suicide bombers. It may not bring Israel and the Palestinians any closer to peace or mutual security. But I don’t have a moral problem with it.

Hamas is clearly at war with Israel. Hamas feels empowered to strike Israeli civilians inside Israel proper and not just on the war zone of West Bank. Sheik Salah Shehada could have protected his family by keeping away from them. He didn’t and owing to his clear legitimacy as a military target, they are dead too.

So tough luck, fella.

War is hell.

This consensus of conscience across the political spectrum illustrates why Bush's approval ratings stay so high despite an administrative philosophy that blends theocracy and kleptocracy -- impervious to scandal, evident ineptitude and innumerable policy meltdowns. So long as the President keeps bombing dark-skinned Muslims to redeem the WTC martyrs, he's unbeatable in 2004.

2002-07-28T13:12:00.000-07:00

Is this story more defeatist Euro-alarmism, or storm clouds that are being pointedly ignored on this side of the Atlantic?

Saudi Arabia is teetering on the brink of collapse, fuelling Foreign Office fears of an extremist takeover of one of the West's key allies in the war on terror.

Anti-government demonstrations have swept the desert kingdom in the past months in protest at the pro-American stance of the de facto ruler, Prince Abdullah.

At the same time, Whitehall officials are concerned that Abdullah could face a palace coup from elements within the royal family sympathetic to al-Qaeda.

Saudi sources said the Pentagon had recently sponsored a secret conference to look at options if the royal family fell.

Nationwide protests, Prince Abdullah humiliated by the failure of his Middle East peace plan (one more demonstration why it's best to avoid Thomas Friedman), secret factional war within the Saudi royal family, and this intriguing nugget:

Anti-Abdullah elements within the Saudi government are also thought to have colluded in a wave of bomb attacks on Western targets by Islamic terrorists.

These bombings have made expat living in Saudi Arabia rather perilous:

The Western community is living in fear. It has become the target of a series of bomb attacks, carried out by al-Qaeda-linked terrorists who want to drive all non-Muslims out of the Arabian peninsula. But the terrified Westerners have received little help from the Saudi authorities. The secret police instead blame the Westerners for the attacks, locking up the innocent and forcing them to confess. Three have died. Seven are in jail. Others have been arrested, interrogated, tortured and released.

The Observer quite boldly reports events that seem almost impossible to imagine, and warns of an impending backlash that may further inflame the region:

If Saudi Arabia is hit by revolution, then history will say that it started in a girls' school. On 11 March at Girls' Intermediate School No 31 in Mecca at just after 8am an accidental fire took hold. It quickly spread and the teenagers fled outside. But within minutes the religious police, or mutawwa'in, had also arrived. Incredibly, as some girls fled out of one gate the police forced them back in through another. Fourteen girls died in the blaze. Dozens more suffered horrific burns. Their mistake had been to flee the fire without first putting on their black robes and headscarves. Some were still in nightdresses. That was enough for the police effectively to condemn them to death. Some even beat rescue workers trying to save the children. 'Instead of extending a helping hand, they were using their hands to beat us,' one rescue worker said.

The deaths prompted an unprecedented wave of anti-government protest across the country that was hailed by some dissident elements as 'Saudi Arabia's Prague Spring'. Until now details of those protests have been kept secret. But The Observer has interviewed some of the marchers and seen photographs of the demonstrations. Thousands of people, the majority of them women, gathered in streets across the kingdom. Some women even cast off their veils.

The women were joined by a variety of groups, including reformists, pro-Palestinian demonstrators and those belonging to the minority Shia community. Protests swept across the Shia strongholds of the Eastern Province, including the towns of Safwa, Al Qarif, Sayhat and Al Awjam. From the coastal port of Jeddah in the west to the Gulf City of Dhahran in the east, people took to the streets.

The crackdown was brutal. Four days after the demonstrations, police made mass arrests. They picked up the ringleaders and beat female protesters. 'They attacked us with sticks and fired rubber bullets,' said a civil servant. 'They even beat women and the six-year-old child of my neighbour. They concentrated their attack on women.' In Jeddah police locked female students in their compounds and sealed off an area around the US Consulate in Dharan to prevent demonstrators gathering there.

Saudi Arabia is now being pulled violently in two directions. As King Fahd lies dying in a Swiss hospital, the government of the de facto ruler, Crown Prince Abdullah, is being split apart as it seeks to hold a middle ground. In the wake of the fire, Abdullah removed the running of girls' schools from the hands of religious scholars and gave it to the Ministry of Education. It was a bold move and it prompted outrage from Islamists, including those of his main rivals, the conservatives Prince Naif and Prince Sultan. Abdullah's status with the powerful Islamic clerics is already at a record low following the demise of his peace proposals between Israel and Palestinians. He is seen as a sell-out. 'His credibility is completely destroyed,' said Saad al-Fagih, a leading London-based Saudi opposition figure.

Observers believe the Islamists are preparing to strike.

::Martin Bright, Nick Pelham and Paul Harris, London Observer: Britons left in jail amid fears that Saudi Arabia could fall to al-Qaeda
::Paul Harris, Nick Pelham and Martin Bright, London Observer: Expat Brits live in fear as Saudis turn on the West
::Guardian Special Reports: Saudi Arabia

2002-07-26T09:59:00.000-07:00

The U.S. has staked its hopes on one man figure-heading a theoretical government in Kabul. The propaganda value of this good news story is waning...

The Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, has dismissed his bodyguards and is being protected by 46 American soldiers, in an extraordinary - and politically explosive - demonstration of how little he trusts his own government.

The Americans, who are believed to include members of the special forces, took up their new duties at the weekend.

The decision is likely to cause anger among Mr Karzai's nominal Afghan allies, many of whom already regard him as a tool of the US and other "infidel" nations.

Evidence that yet another Great Power Afghan debacle is being cooked up continues to mount (and is being reliably catalogued by Dack, Brendan O'Neill, and others). Americans are widely perceived as a murderous occupying entity by many locals, an "American soldier was shot in the southern city of Kandahar while on patrol only days after the air attack and now the few troops who venture into the streets are insulted by passers-by." Yet conventional wisdom clings to the notion that the regime change represents a 'success' in the Eternal War on All Bad Things Everywhere. If anyone out there can point to substantive reasons for confidence in this shimmering illusion of a government, please forward them to me. (But please don't peddle feminist crusader Laura Bush's suggestion that this is about the protection of women's rights

And if this shell does indeed collapse under the weight of its own absurdity, and Afghanistan descends deeper into chaos, and American belligerence continues to alienate the international community, and Al-Qaeda is merely dispersed and barely diminished, and if Bin Laden is still lurking in the shadows somewhere... a question comes to mind: "what exactly has been accomplished?"

::David Rennie, Sydney Morning Herald: Afghan leader risks revolt as US troops replace local guards - smh.com.au
::Shyam Bhatta, London Times: Rivalry Revived in Afghanistan: Karzai Takes On Secret Service Led by Defense Minister
::Robyn Dixon, LA Times: For Afghan Women, Taliban-Era Law Survives in a Nebulous Legal System
::Jonathan Steele, Guardian: Arms and the warlords
::Times of India: Laden's terrorist network may be regrouping: Rumsfeld
::Reuters: We don't know if Laden is alive: Rumsfeld
::New York Times: A Legacy of Misery
::Image from Ministry of Homeland Security

All links from Dack, of course.

2002-07-26T09:37:00.000-07:00

The New York Times is talking a pretty good game these days on the irrational and unsound nature of the economy at the end of the 20th century. But as Douglas Rushkoff reminds us, the elite media was active in perpetuating the collective delusion...

When AOL bought Time Warner, the New York Times asked me to write a comment piece. "What does it all mean?" my assigning editor asked.

What I wrote was that AOL's purchase of Time Warner heralded the end of the dotcom bubble. AOL was cashing in its casino chips. And just like the gambler who trades in his coloured plastic disks for real cash, AOL's Steve Case understood that his run was over and that it was time to trade in his stock certificates for those of a company that had genuine assets.

The New York Times refused to run the piece. They told me I was misreading the landscape to such an extent that for them to publish such a view would be irresponsible.

::Douglas Rushkoff, Guardian: Signs of the times via Cursor

2002-07-26T09:12:00.000-07:00

The inquiry into the U.S. bombing of Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan has predictably laid sole responsibility on the F-16 pilot who dropped the bomb on a training exercise. Portions of the report concerning inadequate pre-flight briefings and the overall breakdown of coordinated command-and-control (*FYI, 60 Minutes notwithstanding, Canada is a U.S. ally*) have apparently been excised.

At first, military headquarters in Ottawa gave three reasons for blanking out key passages, including the entire section of conclusions about "the nature and quality of the co-ordination between ground and air forces": privacy, operational security, and "so as not to prejudice any possible future activity the U.S. government might choose to take." On questioning, a military spokesman acknowledged that possible U.S. military justice issues were "only incidental."

Neither operational security (the Canadian battalion group has left Afghanistan) nor privacy (the Canadian inquiry, after all, fingered the pilots without naming them) make much more sense.

It was clear that the Pentagon wanted the pilots to bear most, if not, all of the blame. That finding was deliberately leaked to major U.S. newspapers just before President George W. Bush headed off to Kananaskis. In doing so, the whole issue of command and control and the supposedly seamless integration of Canadian and U.S. forces disappeared in the glare of publicity about errant pilots.

Any hint that the U.S. was putting less of a premium on safeguarding soldiers from other nations than its own would be hugely damaging as Washington struggles to hold together a military coalition in Afghanistan. Almost as bad would be an embarrassing revelation that senior commanders had dropped the ball on what is supposed to be their first priority -- safeguarding their own soldiers -- by failing to ensure that pilots knew where their own ground troops were located.

::Paul Koring, Globe and Mail: We deserve better
::A Couple of Nutbars, Some Nutty Right-Wing Outfit: Our Canadian Friends

2002-07-23T17:50:00.000-07:00

Just on the off-chance you're wondering why I'm not posting so much lately...

I'm profoundly grateful to report baby and Mom are both healthy and happy.

Papa's wish: that by the time his son grows up, 'war' is just a history lesson that his old man goes on about.

Harry's First Day

2002-07-20T23:33:00.000-07:00

Another angle in Smilin' Dick's grand corporate adventure...

[Halliburton] under Cheney benefited from $3.8bn in government contracts or insured loans. Although Bill Clinton was in the White House, Capitol Hill - where the Appropriations Committee handles government contracts - was controlled by Cheney's Republican Party, to which Halliburton doubled its contributions to $1,212,000 after his arrival.

The most eye-catching contract was for the refurbishment of a Siberian oilfield, Samotlor, for the Tyumen oil company of Russia. The company was loaned $489m in credits by the US Export-Import Bank after lobbying by Halliburton; it was in return to receive $292m for the refurbishments.

The White House and State Department tried to veto the Russian deal. But after intense lobbying by Halliburton the objections were overruled on Capitol Hill. One of Halliburton's top lobbyists was David Gribben, who had been Cheney's chief of staff at the Pentagon.

The State Department's concerns were based on the fact that Tyumen was controlled by a holding conglomerate, the Alfa Group, that had been investigated in Russia for mafia connections.

::Ed Vulliamy and Nick Paton Walsh, London Observer: Cheney firm won $3.8bn contracts from government

2002-07-20T11:31:00.000-07:00

Now that operations are winding down, the New York Times seems to think that news of Afghan civilian casualties is finally fit to print. Too bad they couldn't be bothered to report on it back when air raids were being carried out across the country on a daily basis.

The raid on July 1 was the sixth since January that the United States had carried out to hunt Taliban leaders in Southern Afghanistan. So far, they have not detained even a single important Taliban leader but have killed more than 80 people.

In Kakrak, five men were arrested. Among the homes hit there was that of Abdul Malik, who fought with Hamid Karzai, now Afghanistan's president, last fall when he launched a local campaign to oust the Taliban. Mr. Malik lost 25 family members.

"Every time they say that they will coordinate more," Mr. Muhammad said. "They killed my people in Oruzgan and they said they would not make a mistake again and that they would contact us first. Then they did it again."

What angered Afghans like Mr. Muhammad, and Westerners working in the area, is what they described as a trigger-happy American approach. No Americans entered the village before the planes opened fire. Once called in, the American AC-130 gunship, which employs heavy-caliber machine guns, and cannons, strafed four villages.

"Two questions remain," said a Western aid official working in southern Afghanistan. "Why they attacked with such force, and what precautionary moves do they take to differentiate between civilians and Al Qaeda and Taliban. They attacked quite a big area, four villages, and you cannot just assume that everyone there is the enemy."

The pattern of striking with maximum force on questionable targets began months before, when American planes attacked an ammunition dump in the village of Niazi Qala, 50 miles south of Kabul, and wiped out the entire village. A United Nations spokeswoman said 52 people died there.

::Dexter Filkins, NY Times, Flaws in U.S. Air War Left Hundreds of Civilians Dead

2002-07-18T23:50:00.000-07:00

Diego Rivera's Night of the Rich

Across Latin America, millions of others are also letting their voices be heard. A popular and political ground swell is building from the Andes to Argentina against the decade-old experiment with free-market capitalism. The reforms that have shrunk the state and opened markets to foreign competition, many believe, have enriched corrupt officials and faceless multinationals, and failed to better their lives.

What we really need are some macroeconomists and pundits to go down there to explain it only seems as if standards of living have tanked since their nations embraced neo-liberalism. These people need to be taught that enriching a tiny elite at the expense of everyone else, while giving the appearance of social injustice, does some wonderful things for key economic indicators. Most important, they need to understand that when they gripe about hunger, land theft, environmental degradation, police repression and kleptocracy they undermine the interests of international investors here in el Norte.

::Juan Forero, NY Times: Still Poor, Latin Americans Protest Push for Open Markets

2002-07-18T23:23:00.000-07:00

I recognise that a disturbing proportion of my postings lately have been columns by Nicholas Kristof. But I'm going to keep posting his stuff until others start reporting on the FBI's non-investigation into last fall's anthrax attacks.

This time Kristof focuses not on the culprit himself, but on the conditions in which he was able to function. He describes one inventory of a U.S. biodefense lab in which 62 samples had gone missing, including Ebola, hantavirus, anthrax, S.I.V. (the monkey version of the virus that causes AIDS), and others described only as "unknown."

Usamriid says that it rechecked this year and was able to account for virtually all of the missing specimens except one set that would have been irradiated to render it harmless. But a decade's delay in bothering to look for missing Ebola seems a bit much, and conversations with scientists who have worked at Usamriid do not inspire confidence (although, in fairness, many who talk publicly have lawsuits pending against the lab).

"When I was laid off, I walked out for three days in a row with boxes, and no one looked inside them," recalled Richard Crosland, who worked at Usamriid from 1986 to 1997. "I was there for 11 years, and never once did anyone ask, `Where is the substance you ordered?'

::Nicholas Kristof, NY Times: Case of the Missing Anthrax

2002-07-16T09:31:00.000-07:00

Drip, drip, drip...

Air Force Brig. Gen. John W. Rosa Jr., the deputy director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters it was not clear to him that the AC-130 gunship that attacked the Afghan village had been fired upon first.

"I can't say unequivocally that the AC-130 was fired on. That will come out, hopefully, in the investigation," Rosa said.

. . . Asked about Rosa's comments, Air Force Col. Ray Shepherd, a spokesman at Central Command headquarters that is overseeing the war in Afghanistan, said there is no change in the U.S. version of events.

::Robert Burns, AP: Pentagon Stands Behind Attack Story via Dack

2002-07-12T16:04:00.000-07:00

I'm receiving a few pokes in the comments field over at Warblogger Watch. I predicted in a recent posting that the Warmongerers would be sniggering over a column noting that racist anti-Islamic sentiment was being perpetuated in the United States. The complaint is that I ought to have subjected myself to the arguments of the desktop warriors before I dismissed them out of hand...

Fair enough. Against my better judgement I descended into the Purgatorio anew, with neither Virgil nor Menlo to guide me. Having learned my lesson, this time I took the precaution of stripping naked before I began.

Casting about in this nebulous, hateful netherworld, I learned that the piece did indeed raise some hackles. The most common complaint, such as with The Corner, is that Kristof "suggests that America is just as bad." Some version of this refrain popped up in almost every objection.

My own reading is that Kristof argues Islam has no monopoly on racism, that we should examine our own prejudices before condemning those of others, and that we do ourselves no favours by radically oversimplifying a complex and historically rich religion. But this is a pissing contest to the Killbloggers, isn't it? Right vs. Wrong. Good vs. Evil. Freedom vs. Oppression. And if these defenders of the faith pronounce another major global faith to be inherently evil, well, so be it.

Interestingly, while making claims for the essential bigotry of dark-skinned others, these accomplished religious scholars make a few intemperate remarks of their own:

Andrew Sullivan:

"there is simply no equivalence between anti-Muslim bigotry in the U.S. and anti-Western and anti-Semitic terrorism in the Arab world. One bigotry mouths off (often appallingly). The other murders thousands of civilians because of their religion and culture and glories in it. "

Midwest Conservative Journal:

"So it would be better to "understand" why Islam treats women as poorly as it does? It would be more civilized to "understand" why Islamic societies have never ever treated members of other religions as civic equals? It would be more enlightened to "understand" why so many Muslims are so violent these days?"

In a mirror, dimly...:

"Islam will wear virtually any face as long as it takes to draw you into its insidious embrace. After that you'll be trapped in much the same way small animals are in carniverous plants, drawn in by the sweet smells, then digested at leisure."

Hoystory:

"Christianity sees value in every person -- no matter what their station in life is.

There are those who claim to be Christians that are racist, violent hatemongers. They are a minority.

There are those who claim to be Muslims that are racist, violent hatemongers. They are a majority."

Quite a way to see "value in every person" -- stating that a billion or so people around the world must be "racist violent hatemongers", without bothering to justify the assertion. Very generous.

I enjoyed reading Hoystory's entry for the sheer self-contradictory fun of it. Another gem is his declaration that "the Bible is a story of God's love and redemption of humanity. The Koran is about God's venegence", though he himself later points to the "...wealth of verses available in the Old Testament where God commanded the Israelites to wipe out the inhabitants of the Promised Land."

Does this analysis deserve to be blown off as mere "sniggering"? Do such nuanced arguments merit close and attentive reading? You decide.

FYI, this time reading the Killbloggers didn't send me into a fit of psychotic dementia. But I do have an inexplicable urge to go beat up a hippie.

2002-07-12T10:04:00.000-07:00

In a previous column, Nicholas Kristof all but named former U.S. bio-warfare scientist Steven Hatfill as the likely culprit in last fall's anthrax attacks. (Remember them? They were big news when we thought Arabs were responsible.) With his most recent NY Times op-ed, he ups the ante:

When someone expert in bio-warfare mailed anthrax last fall, it may not have been the first time he had struck.

So while the F.B.I. has been unbelievably lethargic in its investigation so far, any year now it will re-examine the package that arrived on April 24, 1997, at the B'nai B'rith headquarters in Washington D.C. The package contained a petri dish mislabeled "anthracks."

The dish did not contain anthrax. But a Navy lab determined that it was bacillus cereus, a very close, non-toxic cousin of anthrax used by the U.S. Defense Department.

Anybody able to obtain bacillus cereus knew how to spell "anthrax." An echo of that deliberate misspelling came last fall when the anthrax letters suggested taking "penacilin."

The choice of B'nai B'rith probably was meant to suggest Arab terrorists, because the building had once been the target of an assault by Muslim gunmen. In the same way, F.B.I. profilers are convinced that the real anthrax attacks last year were conducted by an American scientist trying to pin the blame on Arabs.

::Nicholas Kristof, NY Times: Anthrax? The FBI Yawns
::Laura Rozen, The American Prospect: Who is Steven Hatfill?
::Nicholas Kristof, NY Times: The Anthrax Files

2002-07-12T09:26:00.000-07:00

Notes from a northern haven for terrorists...

Three men once touted as Canadian operatives for Osama bin Laden appear to be far less sinister than officials initially thought.

In the weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, the men -- Kuwaiti-born Nabil al-Marabh, Syrian-born Hassan Almrei and Somali-born Liban Hussein -- were accused separately of crimes that made front-page news.

Each was portrayed as a Canada-based component of the al-Qaeda network.

But today, law enforcers aren't as eager to accuse the men. Although remaining enveloped in secrecy, the cases against them appear to be less than ironclad, and critics noted that there is no evidence of the men's complicity that was made public.

::Colin Freeze, Globe and Mail: Accusations of terrorism against 3 Arabs less convincing

2002-07-11T15:24:00.000-07:00

Time to indulge in some ethically shady behaviour. Why let the bad apples have all the fun? This posting lifted in its entirety from the British weblog Airstrip One:

Mass resignations in the Turkish government. Why should this worry us? Hyperinflation? No. The fact that this is the IMF's biggest creditor? Not particularly.
The fact is that Turkey is "leading" the peacekeepers in Northern Afghanistan (not to be confused with those "hunting down Al Qaeda" in Southern Afghanistan). Bankrupt and divided, and our biggest allies.
With government ministers being assasinated how long before we are called back in?

2002-07-09T21:12:00.000-07:00

Looks like the new persona as a corporate reformer who gets results is off to a roaring start...

***He said the Securities and Exchange Commission "should be able to punish corporate leaders who are convicted of abusing their powers by banning them from ever serving again as officers or directors of a public company." ...By limiting the suggestion to those convicted of crimes, he stopped well short of what the S.E.C. has sought.

***In some cases, as with his calling on the stock exchanges to require companies listed on them to have more independent directors and to give those outside directors more power, he endorsed proposals that are already sure to be adopted.

***The most important part of the Bush program could be the appointment of what he called a ``financial crimes swat team'' to oversee investigations and prosecutions of corporate officials. ...But administration officials said the creation of the task force did not necessarily mean that more F.B.I. agents or prosecutors would be assigned to such cases, and did not assure a bigger budget for such cases. So it remains to be seen if prosecutions will increase.

***Mr. Bush did not discuss a legislative proposal by Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, to create a new felony that would prohibit any ``scheme or artifice'' to defraud shareholders. Advocates say that would make it easier to win convictions, but aides to the president declined to say if he would sign a bill containing that provision.

***Mr. Bush promised more financing for the S.E.C., ...but it is smaller than the increases proposed in both House and Senate.

***The president was silent on the important issue of financing for [the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants] and for the Financial Accounting Standards Board, which sets accounting rules. When the Public Accounting Board, a weak regulator of accountants, tried to get tough a couple of years ago, the industry responded by threatening to cut off its funds. It has since disbanded.

***Mr. Bush's soaring oratory yesterday was intended to keep him from being blamed, but he runs the risk of being held to the standard he set. Chief executives, he said, ``set a moral tone by showing their disapproval of other executives who bring discredit to the business world.'' ...Yet Mr. Bush has so far stood by Thomas E. White, the Army secretary, who as an Enron executive ran an operation whose accounting has been repudiated by the company and who held on to his Enron stock for many months after taking office, selling only after talking to former Enron colleagues.

...and that ought to demonstrate once and for all the personal integrity of the president. In the face of public uproar, when lesser men would pathetically try to appease the outrage, Bush is determined to stand by the interests that made him the man he is today. A leader of less character would cut and run, abandoning his closest and most valued friends. Not George W. Bush. Tried, tested and true...

::Floyd Norris, New York Times: Bush, on Wall Street, Offers Tough Talk and Softer Plans

2002-07-09T12:21:00.000-07:00

I'm sure the warbloggers are already sniggering about this column by Nicholas Kristof. I'd go check some of their pages to see for myself, but I'd rather not risk infection. Last time I descended into the self-referential concentric circles of the Killblogger Purgatorio I was siezed with symptoms of vertigo, eventually blacking out during a violent fit of uncontrollable quaking. I was naked and covered in what I later realised was ketchup when I came to, wailing "Faster, President! KILL! KILL!" like a banshee. Call me a feckless coward -- hell, you can call me a liberal -- but I am loathe to repeat the experience.

Thankfully, the hardy souls at Warblogger Watch continue to wade about in the jingo muck...

But I digress from the article at hand...

Since 9/11, appalling hate speech about Islam has circulated in the U.S. on talk radio, on the Internet and in particular among conservative Christian pastors -- the modern echoes of Charles Coughlin, the "radio priest" who had a peak listening audience in the 1930's of one-third of America for his anti-Semitic diatribes.

...One problem with this prejudice (as with Osama bin Laden's) is that it blinds the bigots to any understanding of what they deride. If Islam were really just the caricature that it is often reduced to, then how would it be so appealing as to become the world's fastest-growing religion?

Islam already has 1.3 billion adherents and is spreading rapidly, particularly in Africa, partly because it also has admirable qualities that anyone who has lived in the Muslim world observes: a profound egalitarianism and a lack of hierarchy that confer dignity and self-respect among believers; greater hospitality than in other societies; an institutionalized system of charity, zakat, to provide for the poor. Many West Africans, for example, see Christianity as corrupt and hierarchical and flock to Islam, which they view as democratic and inclusive.

One can dispute that, and it's reasonable to worry about the implications of the spread of Islam for the status of women and for the genital mutilation of girls. But simply thundering that Islam is intrinsically violent does not help to understand it and picks up on racist and xenophobic threads that are some of the sorriest chapters in our history.

::Nicholas Kristof, New York Times: Bigotry in Islam — And Here

2002-07-09T12:07:00.000-07:00

It's a shame our countries aren't into nation building.

Last month, many of the delegates to Afghanistan's loya jirga (grand council), complained that Mr. Karzai was granting too much power to the warlords by appointing them or their close allies to positions of power.

However, the President gambled that the warlords were as sick of the violence, bloodshed and disorder as most of their fellow countrymen and were ready to play a peaceful political role.

"We have to put resentment behind us and look to the future of this country and build this country," he said last month.

However, there are few signs of that transformation.

Regional warlords still maintain small private armies and large caches of weapons, paid for chiefly through smuggling, extortion and drug dealing.

...Despite promises from time to time, none of the major warlords has been willing to hand over substantial stocks of weapons and ammunition to the Afghan national army.

Even Defence Minister Mohammed Fahim is believed by foreign diplomats and intelligence officers to be hoarding stockpiles of heavy weapons in the Panjshir Valley. Mr. Fahim is in charge of the national army.

Although Mr. Fahim and the others say they are not trying to undermine the national army, which the United States considers the cornerstone of a strategy for restoring internal security, there are indications that the warlords' main priority is to ensure that their own private forces remain well-stocked.

::Kathy Gannon, Globe and Mail: Karzai's political gamble takes a hit

2002-07-09T12:03:00.000-07:00

Gore Vidal, in conversation...

The Afghans had nothing to do with what happened to our country on September 11. But Saudi Arabia did. It seems like Osama is involved, but we don't really know. I mean, when we went into Afghanistan to take over the place and blow it up, our commanding general was asked how long it was going to take to find Osama bin Laden. And the commanding general looked rather surprised and said, well, that's not why we are here.

Oh no? So what was all this about? It was about the Taliban being very, very bad people and that they treated women very badly, you see. They're not really into women's rights, and we here are very strong on women's rights; and we should be with Bush on that one because he's taking those burlap sacks off of women's heads. Well, that's not what it was about.

What it was really about -- and you won't get this anywhere at the moment -- is that this is an imperial grab for energy resources. Until now, the Persian Gulf has been our main source for imported oil. We went there, to Afghanistan, not to get Osama and wreak our vengeance. We went to Afghanistan partly because the Taliban -- whom we had installed at the time of the Russian occupation -- were getting too flaky and because Unocal, the California corporation, had made a deal with the Taliban for a pipeline to get the Caspian-area oil, which is the richest oil reserve on Earth. They wanted to get that oil by pipeline through Afghanistan to Pakistan to Karachi and from there to ship it off to China, which would be enormously profitable. Whichever big company could cash in would make a fortune. And you'll see that all these companies go back to Bush or Cheney or to Rumsfeld or someone else on the Gas and Oil Junta, which, along with the Pentagon, governs the United States.

We had planned to occupy Afghanistan in October, and Osama, or whoever it was who hit us in September, launched a pre-emptory strike. They knew we were coming. And this was a warning to throw us off guard.

::LA Weekly: The Last Defender of the American Republic? via Cursor

2002-07-09T11:53:00.000-07:00

It's just a few bad apples. Or maybe a few thousand of them with a vice-grip on money and power...

It is no accident that the current wave of costly corporate scandals followed the rise of modern conservatism to political power two decades ago. Ronald Reagan governed while denigrating government as "the problem, not the solution." He starved agencies of resources and placed committed ideological opponents in charge of them. Reagan's Commerce Department drew up a hit list of regulations resented by business ("the Terrible 20"). And of course Reagan signed the law that deregulated the savings and loans associations, while his appointee revoked requirements that any S&L have 400 shareholders. The resulting infamies cost taxpayers many billions.

The conservative assault on government reached fever pitch when Newt Gingrich led the "perfectionist" caucus of the Republican right to take over Congress. For Gingrich conservatives, government regulation was creeping Stalinism. House Majority leader Dick Armey said that in the New Deal and the Great Society, "you will find, with a difference only in power and nerve the same sort of person who gave the world its Five Year Plans and Great Leaps Forward -- the Soviet and Chinese counterparts."

And it wasn't just rhetoric. "Regulatory agencies have run amok and need to be reformed," said Rep. Tom DeLay of Texas, the House majority whip, as he invited business lobbyists to detail the regulations they wanted gutted.

A centerpiece of Gingrich's Contract With America was "securities reform." Passed in 1995 over President Clinton's veto, the bill shielded outside accountants and law firms from liability for false corporate reporting, and made it more difficult for shareholders to bring suit against fraudulent reporting. A flood of corporate misstatements has followed, with nearly 1,000 companies restating misleading reports in the past five years.

::Robert Borosage, Washington Post: The Conservative Bubble Boys

2002-07-07T13:07:00.000-07:00

Each year, Americans spend as much on lawn maintenance as the government of India collects in federal tax revenue.

::Wade Davis, Globe and Mail: The ticking bomb: The Western ideal of comfort and wealth holds a hollow promise for the rest of the world and provides fodder for extremists
::Wade Davis @ wood s lot

The use of lawn chemicals is dramatically increasing despite alarming reports of increasing rates of cancer and the perennial threat posed to children, pets, and wildlife. According to a recent study (U.S. News 4/3/1999) the number of Americans treating their lawns has risen from 55 percent to 67 percent just in the last decade . Although many factors affect people's vulnerability to cancer, increasing pesticide use may be partially responsible for the staggering one percent per year increase in cancer rates among children. The rise lawn chemical use is also problematic for the growing number of people who work with these chemicals; pesticide sprayers have been shown to have significantly higher incidence of lymphoma and possibly other immuno-response deficiencies. Even pets are at risk; the rates of lymphoma among pets of lawn chemical users is double that of non-chemical users.

::Safelawn Alliance

Diazinon has been banned from use on golf courses and sod farms because it is responsible for deaths of large numbers of birds on turf and in agriculture. YET... it is still allowed to be used in our common lawn and garden products.

. . . Bird kills associated with diazinon use have been reported in every area of the country and at all times of the year. Diazinon is highly toxic to fish and bees.

Residues of diazinon have been found in the air of garden stores where it was being displayed and sold.

::Where have all the songbirds gone?

Lawn fertilizer . . . contains nitrogen compounds called nitrates. When fertilizer gets applied excessively or just prior to a rainstorm, it washes off the lawn and into the gutter, where it makes its way through the storm sewer system and into a river or lake. Once in the water, these nitrates have the same effect on algae as they do on lawns - they make it grow! Overgrown algae can have devastating effects on a lake or stream, consuming all the oxygen and suffocating fish and other aquatic wildlife. This is called eutrophication.

::Non-point source pollution

2002-07-04T17:24:00.000-07:00

Mokhiber and Weissman point out that recent reports of corporate crime have focused on financial wrongdoing. That revelations have come in this area is likely because regulatory oversight in finance is actually relatively strong, at least when compared with consumer, labour and environmental protections.

Given what is now the apparent blatant corporate disregard for the law, even in areas where executives are most closely watched, what should we expect is occurring elsewhere? What's happening with consumer rip-offs, sales of unsafe products, endangerment of workers, pollution of the environment?

Even with inadequate law enforcement, reporting requirements or organized countervailing institutions, we know enough to know that the epidemic of corporate crime, fraud and abuse is at least as severe outside of the financial arena as within.

..."Cracking down on corporate crime" -- the mantra of the moment -- cannot be limited just to financial crime, already the most policed form of corporate wrongdoing.

My personal nominee for best progressive writer around, Barbara Ehrenreich, has made this point dozens of times. Last Sunday, the author of Nickled and Dimed reflected on corporate crime and her experiences living among the servant-for-hire class in a NY Times Op-Ed:

What has been revealed in corporate America over the past six months is a two-tier system of morality: Low-paid employees are required to be hard-working, law-abiding, rule-respecting straight arrows. More than that, they are often expected to exhibit a selfless generosity toward the company, readily "donating" chunks of their time free of charge. Meanwhile, as we have learned from the cases of Enron, Adelphia, ImClone, WorldCom and others, many top executives have apparently felt free to do whatever they want — conceal debts, lie about profits, engage in insider trading — to the dismay and sometimes ruin of their shareholders.

But investors are not the only victims of the corporate crime wave. Workers also suffer from management greed and dishonesty. In Wal-Mart's case, the moral gravity of its infractions is compounded by the poverty of its "associates," many of whom are paid less than $10 an hour. As workers discover that their problem is not just a rogue store manager or "bad apple" but management as a whole, we can expect at the very least widespread cynicism, and perhaps an epidemic of rule-breaking from below.

::Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman: Cracking Down on Corporate Crime, Really!
::Barbara Ehrenreich, Harper's, January 1999: Nickled and Dimed: On (not) getting by in America
::Barbara Ehrenreich, New York Times: Two-Tiered Morality
::Image from Mark Dowie, Mother Jones, 1979: The Corporate Crime of the Century

2002-07-04T16:46:00.000-07:00

The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) provides a bare minimum of reproductive health care for women in developing countries -- or in cases like Afghanistan, completely destroyed countries. UNFPA runs maternity hospitals, provides family planning advice and dispenses sterile emergency birth kits for refugees. It is not involved in any way with abortion.

But this fact -- verified by several independent investigations, including one by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell just last year -- cuts no ice with the bug-eyed fanatics that Bush and Cheney have empowered. They insist that UNFPA is in cahoots with China's forced abortion and sterilization programs, and thus not a cent of sacred American money -- doesn't it say "In God We Trust" on every precious greenback? -- should be spent on the devil's handiwork.

Although forced abortion and sterilization were once lauded by good Christian Rightists as a means of ridding the world of "inferior breeds" (indeed, the Bush family has a long history of involvement with the "eugenics" movement and its modern offspring), the "pro-life" battle now provides convenient cover for the Right's larger anti-woman (no, anti-human) agenda.

Bush has plucked extremists from several pseudo-religious culture-war factions to represent the United States in high-level UN negotiations on such controversial issues as protecting children, combating AIDS and the truly heinous Convention on Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. The Bushvolk have aligned the U.S. with enlightened states like Sudan, Iran and Iraq to thwart even these extremely modest attempts to provide a few scraps of human dignity to the "insulted and injured," the weakest, most brutalized and vulnerable of our common species.

Bush's Bug-Eyes say such efforts are "unscriptural," and threaten the God-given order of slaveowning, childbeating, womanhating and ethnic cleansing enshrined in that rattle bag of Bronze Age texts called the Bible. And the polyp-less president agrees -- for hath not the Lord made His healing light to shine upon His exalted servant's pure and gleaming colon?

::Chris Floyd, Moscow Times: Seat of Power

2002-07-03T13:52:00.000-07:00

"There seems to be a fantasy enemy..."

Listening to US leaders over the past six months, it seems that the unnameable, unknowable enemy in the war on terror is everywhere - and nowhere. The evil forces that would attack and undermine America are present in 'up to 60 nations' and everywhere from 'Brussels to Bagram' - but on the ground in Afghanistan, where an actual war is taking place, there is no sign of bin Laden, Muhammad Omar, or any of the other al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders that allied forces have spent nine months searching for. Indeed, many now question how coherent or big an organisation al-Qaeda actually is.

There seems to be a fantasy enemy, against whom Bush and co can make grand pronouncements and big bad threats - and a real enemy, which has continuously eluded American and British forces in Afghanistan. A fantasy war on terror, where America and its allies look strong and determined - and a real war in Afghanistan, where the war aims change on a weekly basis and where operation after operation ends in failure.

::Brendan O'Neill, Spiked-Online: War against what?

2002-07-03T13:39:00.000-07:00

A nice indication of how well things are going with that war they said was all but over a few months back...

The United Nations has suspended its programme of returning refugees to northern Afghanistan because of the "extremely volatile" security situation.

Yussuf Hassan, the spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Kabul, said on Tuesday that conditions were now too "precarious".

::BBC News: UN halts Afghan repatriation via Dack

2002-07-02T14:18:00.000-07:00

The Pentagon has some cool chemicals for you

The war on terrorism is gonna get a lot more trippy...

The Advantages and Limitations of Calmatives for Use as a Non-Lethal Technique, a 49 page report obtained last week by the Sunshine Project under US information freedom law, has revealed a shocking Pentagon program that is researching psychopharmacological weapons. Based on "extensive review conducted on the medical literature and new developments in the pharmaceutical industry", the report concludes that "the development and use of [psychopharmacological weapons] is achievable and desirable." These mind-altering weapons violate international agreements on chemical and biological warfare as well as human rights. Some of the techniques discussed in the report have already been used by the US in the "War on Terrorism".

The team, which is based at the Applied Research Laboratory of Pennsylvania State University, is assessing weaponization of a number of psychiatric and anesthetic pharmaceuticals as well as "club drugs" (such as the "date rape drug" GHB). According to the report, "the choice administration route, whether application to drinking water, topical administration to the skin, an aerosol spray inhalation route, or a drug filled rubber bullet, among others, will depend on the environment." The environments identified are specific military and civil situations, including "hungry refugees that are excited over the distribution of food", "a prison setting", an "agitated population" and "hostage situations". At times, the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate (JNLWD) team's report veers very close to defining dissent as a psychological disorder.

...Most of the JNLWD team's weapon candidates are controlled substances in most countries. Some are widely used legitimate pharmaceuticals that are also drugs of abuse, such as Valium and opiates. The Pentagon team advocates more research into the weapons potential of convulsants (which provoke seizures) and “club drugs”, the generally illegal substances used by some at "rave" and dance clubs. Among those in the military spotlight are ketamine ("Special K"), GHB (Gamma-hydroxybutrate, "liquid ecstasy"), and rohypnol ("Roofies"). The latter two in particular are called "date rape drugs" because of incidences of their use on victims of sexual and other crimes. Most are DEA Schedule I or II narcotics that provoke hallucinations and can carry a sentence of life imprisonment.

Taking drugs to fight terrorism to take drugs to...

::Project Sunshine: Pentagon Program Promotes Psychopharmacological Warfare

2002-07-02T13:52:00.000-07:00

This story would be funny if it wasn't so damned pathetic... How else to think about business and police who "find the idea of a trailer full of books parked downtown to be far too challenging to the normal order of things"?

::Paul Riismandel, Urbana-Champaign IMC: Bookmobile Visit Marred by Harrassment from City Police and Downtown Business via Mediageek