Cover-up, anyone?

You've probably heard that Henry's been put in charge of the 9/11 probe. No comment necessary, I think, although you can check out what David Corn says about it, as well as the luvable Hitch. For added background, see the two-part Hitchens article on Kissinger from last year's Harper's, here and here. This bipartite essay served as the basis for his book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger.

In my opinion, Grady Olivier put it best: "I think Kissinger's the right man for the job, what with all his first-hand knowledge of the events of September 11."

Get Dem Saudis

"The latest brouhaha over Saudi links to al Qaeda that has the media pundits in a tizz may be no more than a clever PR maneuver by the conservative hawks in the Bush administration," contends Alternet's War on Iraq News Log.

Getting into the holiday spirit a bit early...

On the twelfth day of fascism
John Ashcroft gave to me
Twelve digital implants
Eleven years protesting
Ten less amendments
Nine internment camps
Eight surveillance cameras
Seven TIPsters tipping
Six snoops a-sniffing
Five Carnivores
Four airport friskings
Three wiretappings
Two detained Muslims
And a Department of Homeland Security
- Author unknown

(via Progressive Review)

The OSI Lives?

A media advisory from FAIR notes,

The Federation of American Scientists has pointed to a startling revelation by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that mainstream media have missed: In remarks during a recent press briefing, Rumsfeld suggested that though the controversial Office of Strategic Influence (OSI) no longer exists in name, its programs are still being carried out...

...in remarks made at a November 18 media briefing, Rumsfeld has suggested that though the exposure of OSI's plans forced the Pentagon to close the office, they certainly haven't given up on its work. According to a transcript on the Department of Defense website, Rumsfeld told reporters:

"And then there was the Office of Strategic Influence. You may recall that. And 'oh my goodness gracious isn't that terrible, Henny Penny the sky is going to fall.' I went down that next day and said fine, if you want to savage this thing fine I'll give you the corpse. There's the name. You can have the name, but I'm gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done and I have."

Rumsfeld's comments seem all the more alarming in light of analysis presented by William Arkin in a recent Los Angeles Times opinion column (11/24/02), in which he argues that Rumsfeld is redesigning the U.S. military to make "information warfare" central to its functions.

This new policy, says Arkin, increasingly "blurs or even erases the boundaries between factual information and news, on the one hand, and public relations, propaganda and psychological warfare, on the other." Arkin adds that "while the policy ostensibly targets foreign enemies, its most likely victim will be the American electorate."

On a related note, Robert Dreyfuss reports in the American Prospect on the Pentagon's efforts to muzzle the CIA.

Thnxgivin'

I'm off to "celebrate genocide" with family, so won't be posting anything until next week. I owe a few people email responses. If you think you're one of them, I'll get back to you then. Sorry for the delay.

This Friday

Another Century of War?

"A foreign policy that is both immoral and unsuccessful is not simply stupid, it is increasingly dangerous to those who practice or favor it. That is the predicament that the United States now confronts," contends Gabriel Kolko on Counterpunch. He concludes with this cheery assessment of the current predicament:

...the way America's leaders are running the nation's foreign policy is not creating peace or security at home or stability abroad. The reverse is the case: its interventions have been counterproductive. Everyone--Americans and those people who are the objects of their efforts--would be far better off if the U.S. did nothing, closed its bases overseas and withdrew its fleets everywhere, and allowed the rest of world to find its own way without American weapons and troops. Communism is dead, and Europe and Japan are powerful and can take care of their own affairs as they think best. There is every reason for the U.S. to adapt to these facts, but to continue as it has over the past half-century is to admit it has the vainglorious but irrational ambition to run the world.

It cannot. It has failed in the past and it will fail in this century, and attempting to do so will inflict wars and turmoil on many nations as well as on its own people.

Leftists Aligning With Power

Ed Herman takes on the "Cruise Missile Left" -- Michael Walzer, Michael Berube, Todd Gitlin, Christopher Hitchens, Marc Cooper, et al. -- in this month's Z Magazine.

The general thrust of Herman's argument is quite similar to what Paul Street had to say back in April.

Don't Mind Us

Weapons of Mass Instruction

Ron Reed observes,

These days it's hard to find an article or discussion of Iraq, whether from a pro- or anti-invasion viewpoint, that doesn't mention so-called "weapons of mass destruction," or "WMDs." From the nuke-Baghdad crowd we might call Christian Jihad, inviting ex-LaRouchies to expound on why we also ought to take out Saudi Arabia and Egypt while we're at it, all the way over to the liberals who insist that the United Nations ought to be asked to rubber-stamp Washington's plans, and even to the principled opponents of the New World Empire, everyone seems to agree that either Saddam has, or may have, or is developing, or could develop WMDs, which is universally conceded to be a Bad Thing.

Even those best in a position to know of his capacities, such as former UN chief weapons inspector Scott Ritter (who categorically states that it is impossible for Iraq, following almost eight years of UN-supervised destruction along with more than a decade - continuing even now - of the most stringent and tightly-enforced sanctions regime in history, to have developed WMDs), insist that UN inspectors should be re-admitted, and sanctions should be "smartened," so that the number of civilian victims is reduced.

Left unexamined in this discourse is the assumption that either the United States itself or the United Nations as a proxy of the US State Department can be relied upon as a safe repository for such weapons. However, even a cursory examination of the history of such weapons and their use, if unencumbered by ideological baggage, would show the folly of such an assumption. (For that reason, such an examination is never undertaken.)

...I would put forth the proposition that it is far less dangerous to contemplate WMDs in the possession of a brutal but rational dictator like Saddam Hussein, who at most harbors only regional ambitions and certainly knows the consequences were he ever to try to attack his neighbors with such weapons, than to allow their continued possession by a collection of hubristic psychopaths of overweening pride, a vastly inflated sense of self-importance, no experience with being on the receiving end of total war, and a vaulting and unlimited vision of refashioning the globe and modern history in their own image.

This latter group, booted and spurred and lashing the horses of the apocalypse toward the abyss, consists of the terroristic thugs and war criminals who have long made up the government of the United States, now styling itself the "world's only superpower," and openly lusting for empire.

Yowzas. That last paragraph is particularly harsh.

Bring This to the Table on Thursday

"Like people everywhere, most people in the US think it’s wrong to kill civilians as a means of pressuring their government. But for many, the link between this conviction and opposition to the US plan to attack Iraq is severed by fear, misinformation and a desensitization to what war will really mean for ordinary people in Iraq. This guide is intended to help combat the euphemisms (“collateral damage”) and passive language (“bombs fell”) that obscure the suffering that the Bush Administration’s plans will cause. We hope it will be useful to you in navigating conversations about the war and encouraging family and friends to take a stand for peaceful alternatives.

"This 'Thanksgiving Table Guide' is part of MADRE’s Every Child Has a Name campaign to raise funds for an emergency shipment of children’s medicines and milk for Iraqi families threatened by a US attack."

The deep politics of regime removal in Iraq

Online Journal's Larry Chin has penned a 5-part article on "The deep politics of regime removal in Iraq: Overt conquest, covert operations," which provides some crucial background on the US' march to war in Iraq. Worth checking out: Parts 1 2 3 4 5

Also on Online Journal, see Jon Prestage's two-part series, "Mainstream journalism," which addresses the unwillingness of the corporate media to hold the Bush junta responsible on domestic and foreign policy issues: Part 1, "Shredding the First Amendment"; Part 2, "Iraq, a conspiracy of silence and compromise".

Justifying Peace?

Leah of xok must be reading my mind: "I'm ineffably tired of pro-war ideologues bitching about how the anti-war folk are just 'complaining' without 'offering solutions' to global dilemmas. Peace doesn't need a fucking moral, ethical, economical, or political qualification; war does. Peace doesn't ravage, plunder, rape, or kill; war does. Peace does not need justification. War does."

Malnutrition in Iraq - What the New UNICEF Study Shows

Malnutrition rates amongst Iraqi children are falling, according to a new UNICEF report. Ramzi Kysia of the Education for Peace in Iraq Center explains what the study shows. His conclusion:

Unfortunately, recent improvements are likely to be short-lived. There is currently a multi-billion dollar shortfall in the money available for the Oil-for-Food program. In order to stem the “crumbling” of sanctions, the U.S. has begun enforcing a policy on oil sales called “retroactive pricing.” Under this policy, purchasers of Iraqi oil are not allowed to know the price of the oil they have bought for up to a month after they’ve received it. Given the volatility of the oil market, this uncertainty has led to steep declines in sales. According to the UN Development Program’s June 2002 brief for Iraq, “the Oil-for-Food Programme is increasingly facing a financial crisis due to the substantial drop in revenues received from Iraqi oil exports and to uncertainties regarding the pricing mechanism.” If this crisis isn’t quickly reversed, the program will falter, and malnutrition rates will again begin to rise.

The other major problem on the horizon is the war George Bush keeps promising to deliver. If the U.S. bombs electrical plants, and water and sewage treatment centers in Iraq, as was done during “Desert Storm,” the result is going to be even greater epidemics than Iraq is currently suffering from. If civil war breaks out, or if the U.S. bombs roads, rail, and all the bridges, as was done during “Desert Storm,” the result will be country-wide famine.

...If we care about the children of Iraq, then we need to stop this war from happening. But, in the end, the only thing that will truly end Iraq’s humanitarian crisis, and put an end to malnutrition once and for all, is if we stop the war that is already going on. Economic sanctions are intended to damage economies and increase poverty. Increased poverty means increased malnutrition. And - no matter how hard UNICEF, or the Iraqi government, or anti-sanctions activists try - there's no way around that.

FYI: I referenced the UNICEF report last Friday, although not in an entirely serious context.

Racism's alive and well

The Detroit News ran a story about the continued resonance of racism in the United States last Friday.

Nearly 40 percent of whites interviewed in Detroit, Boston, and Atlanta said they would move if their neighborhoods became more racially integrated, according to a study released Thursday.

Fear of declining property values and a jump in crime were the main reasons whites gave for wanting to move out of increasingly integrated neighborhoods, according to the study, which is in the November issue of the journal Demography.

The full text of the study, "Whites Who Say They'd Flee: Who Are They, and Why Would They Leave?," is available via the Center for Public Information on Population Research. To access it, you'll have to login with this information: Username: cpipr; password: demography.

The secret war on Iraq

Raymond Whitaker writes in today's Independent, "British and American warplanes are attacking Iraq's air defences almost daily, and making practice runs on other targets. US special forces are reported to be on the ground in western and northern Iraq, and military engineers are preparing and upgrading airfields in the Kurdish zone. In many ways, the war on Iraq has already begun."

Orwell Owl & Poindexter Python Say...

Tom Tomorrow had a similar take on this months ago.

Colluding "with the forces that promise permanent world war"

Diane Perlman's article, "Misinterpreting Osama's Message: Erring on the Side of Danger," is well worth reading. Here's a snippet to whet your appetite:

We are on the verge of going to war [against Iraq] under the illusion of preventing a threat. What has been sold as a "preemptive strike," a misuse of the term, is actually a provocative strike. This war will unleash a cascade of unintended consequences. Terrorist attacks are likely planned for the onset of war.

Terrorism is a form of asymmetrical warfare. There is no amount of domination that cannot be turned against us, demonstrated by Sept. 11.

Counter-terrorism, attempting the physical elimination of terrorists, only creates more terrorism, inspiring new recruits and new strategies. There is no "end game." Attacking Afghanistan provokes al-Qaeda to decentralization and better hiding. We have the illusion that if we kill bin Laden we will be safer. Is it not likely that killing him will magnify his power and influence? If we kill bin Laden then the terrorists will have won. We are focused on the concrete and the physical, and so miss the powerful psychological dimensions.

The connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda is created by us; we are driving them into each other's arms. Osama has suggested that if we invade Iraq, he will respond in kind. There is every reason to believe him. The only way to reduce terrorism is to address the root causes and to transform our use of power in the world.

History is filled with military blunders. Going to war would be a megablunder. Misinterpreting Osama's message fuels the irrational drive toward war. With asymmetrical warfare and weapons of mass destruction, the consequences are unthinkable. By exaggerating the threat and censoring the message of the conditionality of violence, we collude with the forces that promise permanent world war.

War = Humanitarian Disaster

"The human consequences," writes Paul Rogers, "of large-scale war [on Iraq] could be massive, with three recent assessments being relevant."

First, a detailed analysis of conflict with Iraq has been written by three analysts at the Brookings Institute and is published in the current issue of Survival, the journal of the International Institute of Strategic Studies. In a war that does not involve use of CBW, it considers it likely that there would be perhaps 10,000 Iraqi military killed and a similar number of Iraqi civilians also killed. Any use of CBW could increase this substantially.

A second report, by the London-based MEDACT medical charity looks at the health-orientated consequences of a war. The MEDACT assessment covers a much wider range of up to 50,000 casualties but its real contribution is to point to the longer-term effects of a war on the provision of health services to the population as a whole, as well as for the more immediate and frequently forgotten issue of refugees.

The last point is crucial, in that there are indications that the deaths among refugees in Afghanistan have been very much higher than those due to the direct effects of the bombing.

The other point that comes from MEDACT is that the existing health status of ordinary Iraqis is so much lower than before the 1991 war, as a direct result of that war and of the subsequent sanctions regime.

This line of argument is supported by the third recent assessment, produced by one of the foreign charities that has operated in Iraq for many years, the European organisation Caritas with its UK affiliate, the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD). There are about 800,000 Christians in Iraq and Caritas has worked for years with many of them, sending a team there recently to assess the health and humanitarian consequences of a war.

The report, available on the CAFOD website, points out that there are currently 14 million Iraqis dependent on food aid, about two-thirds of the total population. Any breakdown of this distribution system, itself highly likely in the event of war, would lead to immediate major problems of malnutrition as well as many long-term effects. In a remarkably blunt conclusion, CAFOD states that: ‘from a humanitarian perspective, a war against Iraq would be a catastrophe that would bring shame on the world community.’

Proponents of the war argue that what is most likely to happen is that the regime itself will collapse at the onset of an invasion, and that none of these casualties or health impacts will happen. Perhaps the most reliable indicator that this is hardly certain comes from a number of reports that the United States may be planning to use less than 100,000 troops in the actual invasion, but plans to have at least another 100,000 in the immediate region as reinforcements for a longer war.

It is still possible that war might be avoided, but it is frankly unlikely. What is becoming apparent is that there is a very high risk of a humanitarian disaster as a consequence of military action, an aspect that does not seem to be factored into any of the current political discussions in Washington.

The Real Goals?

There's a good, illuminating disscussion of "Bush's long-term plans" on Stand Down. Check the comments and follow the links.

Air Industry's Worst Nightmare

Paul J. Caffera of Salon reports, "Just days ago, national security executives met secretly with airline CEOs to warn them that al-Qaida may be planning to fire shoulder-launched missiles at commercial jets in the U.S. There's virtually no defense."

Read the article here if you can't afford Salon Premium. Or if you just think it's not worth the price of admission.

Agency thought about making anonymous use of some parts of the Internet impossible

...an added footnote to the Orwellian nightmare that is TIA.

It's likely that this whole Poindexter Program is going to be "officially" rejected and dismantled in due time. Whether or not it will really be dismantled is another issue, altogether.

Feed them Bombs

I have a great idea for perpetuating this sort of progressive development. Feed them bombs. That'll drop malnutrition rates even more...

On a related note, Richard Perle has admitted the US would attack Iraq even if UN inspectors fail to find weapons. I'm shocked to hear that...

Autocracy

High Water urges readers to check out Chris Floyd's recent column. I concur.

We've said it before, and we'll keep on saying it: A country whose leader has the power to imprison any citizen, on his order alone, and hold them indefinitely, in military custody, without access to the courts, without a lawyer, without any charges, their fate determined solely by the leader's arbitrary whim -- that country is a tyranny, not a democracy, not a republic, not a union of free citizens.

...What we are witnessing is the mutation of a democratic republic into a military autocracy: Bush bases his claim of arbitrary power on the president's constitutional role as commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed forces. Although there is nothing in the constitution that warrants the extension of military command to cover arbitrary rule over the entire citizenry, and certainly nothing that countenances the abrogation of basic rights and liberties on the unchallengeable say-so of an all-powerful leader, the "commander-in-chief" argument nevertheless serves a useful purpose for the autocrat, creating the illusion of a limited and temporary suspension of liberties -- a drastic but necessary "wartime" measure.

...Bush's dictatorial powers of arrest and imprisonment are only part of an unprecedented expansion of militarized state power into every aspect of American life, coupled with an unprecedented level of secrecy surrounding government activity. These changes are meant to be permanent -- and they are meant to remain under the control of the Bush Regime and like-minded successors. It is absurd to believe that Bush, Cheney and the rest of the junta are constructing this vast machinery of dominance only to risk turning it over to any political adversary who genuinely opposed empire, plutocracy and rule by a privileged elite.

It is equally absurd to believe that these new, unconstrained powers will not be abused. The very fact of their assertion is itself an abuse, a perversion of the freedoms that Bush has sworn -- falsely -- to uphold. They are a far greater threat to the foundations of American liberty than even the most horrendous attack by murderous criminals. No foreign terrorist can strip the entire American system of its basic freedoms -- the inviability of the citizen, the right to due process, the constitutional separation of powers, the people's right to know what their government is doing in their name.

Ugh


"A memorial for those lost during the events of 9/11/01. Retail selling at $19.99 per piece. Great gift ideas for mom, dad, family members, friends and co-workers. Every American should have one."

The Costly Case of the Purple Pill

"The story of one blockbuster heartburn drug tells you everything you need to know about the high cost of prescription medicine," claims an article in this week's Boston Globe Magazine.

Also check related stories in the Washington Post and Mother Jones from a while back. The NY Times has an interesting article on the pharmaceutical industry in today's edition, too.

NYC's Growing Homeless Population

This is in today's LA Times,

[New York] City officials, faced with a rapidly expanding number of homeless and a court order that requires New York to provide temporary shelter for any person who needs it, have come up with the novel plan to use old cruise ships as just one of several solutions to a chronic housing shortage.

...New York has more than 36,000 homeless people, the highest number in years, according to the Coalition for the Homeless. And although [Mayor Mike] Bloomberg has dismissed the notion that the problem is getting worse, New York has been hard-pressed to find suitable housing for this growing population.

More than 16,000 of them are under the age of 18, and an additional 12,000 are mothers, according to agency figures. The city will conduct a census of the homeless this winter in an effort to arrive at a more accurate number.

"I thought I'd heard it all when it comes to New York dealing with the homeless, but I guess I haven't," said Patrick Markee, senior policy analyst with the coalition. "I think most New Yorkers will hear this latest idea and say to themselves, 'There's got to be a better way than using cruise ships,' and of course there is."

New York is paying "a very stiff price" for the nearly 40% cutback in temporary housing assistance programs mandated by the previous administration of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, he said. Bloomberg has pledged to restore much of that funding, including renovation of city-funded apartments and federal Section 8 housing assistance programs, Markee added, "but right now we have an exploding homeless population and we need real programs to help them."

Let's play God!

The Washington Post reports today, "Scientists in Rockville [Maryland] are to announce this morning that they plan to create a new form of life in a laboratory dish, a project that raises ethical and safety issues but also promises to illuminate the fundamental mechanics of living organisms. J. Craig Venter, the gene scientist with a history of pulling off unlikely successes, and Hamilton O. Smith, a Nobel laureate, are behind the plan. Their intent is to create a single-celled, partially man-made organism with the minimum number of genes necessary to sustain life. If the experiment works, the microscopic man-made cell will begin feeding and dividing to create a population of cells unlike any previously known to exist."

Lies

I find it amusing that Bush musters the energy to lecture Saddam Hussein about lying when the entire Bush cabinet has been habitually lying on Iraq for the past few months. The irony...

Big Brother's Gonna Be Watching Your Spending Habits

If this doesn't scare the hell out of you, it's likely that nothing will.

A massive database that the government will use to monitor every purchase made by every American citizen is a necessary tool in the war on terror, the Pentagon said Wednesday...

[Undersecretary of Acquisitions and Technology Edward] Aldridge said the database, which he called another "tool" in the war on terror, would look for telltale signs of suspicious consumer behavior.

Examples he cited were: sudden and large cash withdrawals, one-way air or rail travel, rental car transactions and purchases of firearms, chemicals or agents that could be used to produce biological or chemical weapons.

It would also combine consumer information with visa records, passports, arrest records or reports of suspicious activity given to law enforcement or intelligence services.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is home to the Pentagon's brightest thinkers -- the ones who built the Internet. DARPA will be in charge of trying to make the system work technically.

Rear Adm. John Poindexter, former national security adviser to President Reagan, is developing the database under the Total Information Awareness Program. Poindexter was convicted on five counts of misleading Congress and making false statements during the Iran-Contra investigation. Those convictions were later overturned, but critics note that his is a dubious resume for someone entrusted with so sensitive a task.

This story has been a hot topic in a variety of places around the net. William Safire wrote a very good column on it last week. There's also some additional background in this post of mine from November 9th.

"If we all hate consumerism, how come we can’t stop shopping?"

Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter open up their two-part article on "The Rebel Sell" with this introduction to the ideology of "anti-consumerism."

Do you hate consumer culture? Angry about all that packaging and all those commercials? Worried about the quality of the “mental environment”?

Well, join the club. Anti-consumerism has become one of the most important cultural forces in millennial North American life, across every social class and demographic.

This might seem at odds with the economic facts of the 1990s—a decade that gave us the “extreme shopping” channel, the dot-com bubble, and an absurd orgy of indulgence in ever more luxurious consumer goods. But look at the non-fiction bestseller lists. For years they’ve been dominated by books that are deeply critical of consumerism: No Logo, Culture Jam, Luxury Fever and Fast Food Nation. You can now buy Adbusters at your neighbourhood music or clothing store. Two of the most popular and critically successful films in recent memory were Fight Club and American Beauty, which offer almost identical indictments of modern consumer society.

What can we conclude from all this? For one thing, the market obviously does an extremely good job at responding to consumer demand for anti-consumerist products and literature. But how can we all denounce consumerism, yet still find ourselves living in a consumer society?

The answer is simple. What we see in films like American Beauty and Fight Club is not actually a critique of consumerism; it’s merely a restatement of the “critique of mass society.” The two are not the same. In fact, the critique of mass society has been one of the most powerful forces driving consumerism for more than forty years.

That last sentence is worth reading again. The idea is so foreign, so completely the opposite of what we are used to being told, that many people simply can’t get their head around it. It’s a position that Thomas Frank, editor of The Baffler, has been trying to communicate for years. Strangely, all the authors of anti-consumerism books have read Frank — most even cite him approvingly — and yet not one of them seems to get the point.

Here is Frank’s claim, simply put: books like No Logo, magazines like Adbusters and movies like American Beauty do not undermine consumerism; they reinforce it. This isn’t because the authors, editors or directors are hypocrites. It’s because they’ve failed to understand the true nature of consumer society.

Read more by checking out part 1 and part 2 of "The Rebel Sell."

Why Attack Iraq?

Sarah Graham-Brown and Chris Toensing of the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) have published "Why Another War? A Backgrounder on the Iraq Crisis." The report is available only as a PDF file.

The Fifth Afghan War

Vijay Prashad wrote in a ZNet Sustainer Commentary on October 30,

On the 3rd of October, 2001, I wrote a ZNET commentary called "Forward into the Past: US War Aims." This was four days before the bombardment began. Already the war aims of the administration seemed to escalate as each day went by. First we heard about retaliation for 9/11, perhaps the capture or murder of bin Laden and the top al-Qa'ida leadership.

But, since the Bush doctrine spoke about "those who harbor" terrorists, it had become clear that the Taliban would face the barrage as well. But the jargon of political science departments flew from Bush's mouth: he did not want to conduct "nation-building," we heard, although "regime change" was on the cards.

As I wrote then, "US war aims, then, are simultaneously as brutal and unfocused in Afghanistan as they are in Iraq - to overthrow one corrupt regime and put in place another, but this time friendly with the US." When I wrote of Iraq then, I meant the Gulf War of 1990-91, not the impending chaos.

So it is fitting, one year later, to assess the war aims, to see what the US has done both with the war and with the region, to tally up the accounts of the Fifth Afghan War...

Read on.

"The Art of Modern War"

"As we prepare to go to war again, it's a good idea to review the atrocities and apparent cover-up that happened in Gulf War Part I," writes Thomas Spencer. Check his post on Stand Down, as well as what he has to say on his own blog. The links Spencer offers are worth checking out, too.

Dare call it an empire

Alex Cockburn observes that, "Suddenly, the word 'empire' is everywhere, scattered through the opinion columns like rose petals before a conquering hero." But, he contends, this is nothing new: "The basic aims of American international strategy have changed barely at all since the end of the Second World War. The difference is in the degree of frankness with which the brute realities of world domination are discussed."

US Muslims Suffer Backlash

"Hate crimes against Arabs and Muslims in the United States increased by 1,700% in 2001," reports the BBC. This revelation comes on the heels of the release of a new HRW report, "We Are Not the Enemy." The press release for the report is available here.

Dems: Winning in the Long or Short Run?

Does anyone else find it pathetic that the idea with the most resonance right now in some liberal-left circles seems to be getting moderate Republicans to "pull a Jeffords" and switch out of the Republican party? The current "edition" of TomPaine.com is devoted to this issue. Working for Change has jumped on the bandwagon, too.

Now, sure, this might have the potential for a tactical impact, but I still find it to be...umm...a wee bit desperate. Especially with the recent woeful performance of the Democratic party in the elections, shouldn't energy be focused elsewhere? Like, say, building up the means to produce a counter-narrative to all the Bush spin. So says Sam Parry,

In winning on Nov. 5 – thus holding the House of Representatives for a fifth consecutive election and regaining the Senate – the Republicans proved they can mobilize electoral majorities, even against what appear to be their personal economic interests. The Republicans can flood the political system with both positive and negative messages to rally their conservative constituencies while dividing independents and depressing the Democratic base.

The Republicans have this power because they have invested billions of dollars in a sophisticated media apparatus that includes Fox News, talk radio, the Wall Street Journal's editorial pages, the Washington Times, dozens of magazines and Internet publications, and a large stable of conservative op-ed writers who dominate the opinion pages of major newspapers, including supposedly liberal ones like the Washington Post.

By comparison, liberals and Democrats have spent almost nothing on a media infrastructure, leaving them struggling to get out their political messages.

This media imbalance puts the Democrats in a nearly impossible bind when trying to fashion a winning national message that must mix progressive policies with a populist style. For Democrats to win nationally, their message must offer tangible solutions to social, economic, environmental and national security problems in language that inspires and unites divergent subgroups throughout the country.

Beyond building up a "sophisticated media apparatus," the additional emphasis should be on developing ideas that resonate with people not merely in opposition to or in the context of what the right is saying or doing.

In other words, the Democrats need to stop getting into rhetorical catfights with Republicans and spending time luring potential "Republicrats" to their side. Instead, they should work on developing a platform that has some degree of originality and, dare I say, independence. First and foremost, they need to clarify their ideas and purpose.

The preoccupation with "winning this round," by whatever means necessary, will only result in larger, more significant losses down the road. Unfortunately, as David Vest says on Counterpunch today, "That appears to be the emerging new Democratic strategy: not find someone who stands for something, but find someone who 'can win.'"

Bush Aides Consider Domestic Spy Agency

Another hint that COINTELPRO is being resurrected. Recall this recent post.

Bringing Back The Bomb

Dan Stober and Jonathan S. Landay of the San Jose Mercury News reported last week that the "Bush administration is laying the groundwork for the resumption of nuclear testing and the development of new nuclear weapons." On Sunday, James Dao of the NY Times reported that the Bush administration was "gradually moving toward creating new kinds of nuclear weapons."

The Dao article quoted Edward J. Markey, a Representative from Massachusetts, as saying, "At a time when we are trying to discourage other countries — such as North Korea — from developing nuclear weapons, it looks hypocritical for us to be preparing to introduce a whole new generation of nuclear weapons into the arsenal."

Ya think?

Justifying a Land Grab in Hebron

Following up on their recent media critique, Nigel Parry and Ali Abunimah claim that the Israeli spin on the "Sabbath Massacre" story was intended to create "a rationale for ethnic cleansing."

Also on the Electronic Intifada, Hasan Abu-Nimah comments on the perpetuation of a tragic status quo in Palestine. He writes, "The disturbing reality is, therefore, that while political leaders (mainly in Israel) are totally engaged in unprincipled opportunistic fights for their personal ambitions and short-sighted selfish interests, while world powers lack the needed political will, and indeed the moral courage, to enforce the rule of international law, and while regional powers remain largely incapacitated by their accumulated failures, innocent blood continues to be senselessly spilled and the cycle of violence continues to spiral wildly out of control."

Guerilla Tactics, Redux

I mentioned the site blackpeopleloveus.com a little more than one week ago. The NY Times follows up with an article on it, here.

Perhaps most interesting, Jonah Peretti, the dude who became the "poster boy of guerilla media" for his Nike iD email stunt, is behind the site.

Not in our backyard!

According to the Guardian, prior to the sinking of the tanker Prestige off the coast of Spain, European countries were trying to get it towed to Africa.

Yeah, let those poor, darker countries in the Economic South deal with ecological catastrophe. I guess you could call this an extension of the Lawrence Summers Memo logic...

Terrorism, Society's Self-Condemnation

I found this essay by Jean Baudrillard via Mark Woods. Here's an interesting excerpt:

The worst thing that can happen to global power is not for it to be attacked or destroyed but for it to be humiliated. Global power was humiliated on 11 September because the terrorists inflicted an injury that could not be inflicted on them in return. Reprisals are only physical retaliations, whereas global power had suffered a symbolic defeat. War can only respond to the terrorists' physical aggression, not to the challenge they represent. Their defiance can only be addressed by vengefully humiliating the "others" (but surely not by crushing them with bombs or by locking them up like dogs in detention cells in Guantanamo Bay).

...Terrorism depends not only on the obvious despair of the humiliated, but on the invisible despair of globalisation's beneficiaries. It depends on our subjugation to the technology integral to our lives, and to the crushing effects of virtual reality. We are in thrall to networks and programmes, and this dependence defines our species, homo sapiens gone global. This feeling of invisible despair -- our own despair -- is irreversible because it is the result of the total fulfilment of our desires.

If terrorism is really the result of a state of profusion without any hope of payback or obligation to sacrifice, of the forced resolution of conflicts, then eradicating it as if it were an affliction imposed from the outside could only be illusory. Terrorism, in its absurdity and meaninglessness, is society's verdict on -- and condemnation of -- itself.

Three Cheers for Academic Freedom

Peter Kirstein, a professor of history at St. Xavier University, got embroiled in a controversy a few weeks ago when he lashed out against a student at the Air Force Academy for sending an unsolicited email requesting help for an academic forum on international relations. This was Kirstein's response to the initial email:

You are a disgrace to this country and I am furious you would even think I would support you and your aggressive baby killing tactics of collateral damage. Help you recruit. Who, top guns to reign death and destruction upon nonwhite peoples throughout the world? Are you serious sir? Resign your commission and serve your country with honour [sic].

No war, no air force cowards who bomb countries with AAA, without possibility of retaliation. You are worse than the snipers. You are imperialists who are turning the whole damn world against us. September 11 can be blamed in part for what you and your cohorts have done to Palestinians, the VC, the Serbs, a retreating army at Basra.

Although Kirstein later apologized, it was too late. He pissed quite a few people off and the doors of criticism flung wide open.

On Friday, St. Xavier President Richard A. Yanikoski released this statement regarding the incident. As disciplinary measures, he announced that "Professor Kirstein was relieved of his teaching responsibilities for the current semester and reassigned to other duties." Kirstein will also receive an official reprimand, and his academic work will be subject to close scrutiny while he is on leave.

I find Kirstein's actions to be absolutely deplorable, but I don't understand this disciplinary move by St. Xavier. The email outburst has absolutely nothing to do with his academic credentials. Kirstein has every right to make an ass out of himself; that doesn't warrant an official reprimand from the university.

That's my take, at least. This episode raises serious questions about academic freedom. You can get more background on this story over at History News Network.

Ha'aretz

It pays to keep your eye on what's published in Ha'aretz (even though you miss a lot in the English version, purposefully). Here are two interesting stories from today's edition which I haven't seen elsewhere, yet:

Growing doubt that suspect intended to hijack El Al airliner
-->"There were growing indications Monday that an apparent hijacking attempt on an El Al airliner Sunday may have been a case of security guards reacting to an argument between a passenger and a stewardess."

IDF worried by steep rise in desertion
-->"The Israel Defense Forces has expressed concern recently about the sharp rise in incidents of desertion in its ranks...an increase of 67.2 percent [in comparison to last year]."

Update: The first link above has changed. It now leads with, "An Israeli Arab accused of trying to hijack an El Al Airlines flight wanted to copy the September 11 suicide attacks on the United States and fly the aircraft into a public building in Tel Aviv, Turkish police officials were quoted as saying on Monday."

Blowback

This is the second to last paragraph of this story in today's NY Times:

A war with Iraq could require more than the 265,000 National Guard and Reserve troops summoned to active duty in the war in 1991, largely to protect valuable sites in the United States like airports, power plants and pipelines.

Guess our beloved leaders are expecting significant domestic "blowback" once we engage Iraq in a war.

Circular Argument

Afghan War Crimes

Remember this story? The possible execution and intimidation of witnesses suggests that somebody's trying to hide something...

Update: The Guardian reports on this, as well.

False claims of "massacre" of "worshippers" in Hebron

Ali Abunimah and Nigel Parry comment on the media coverage of the recent "Sabbath Massacre" in the West Bank over the weekend:

News media and public officials did not wait for the full story to emerge before jumping to the conclusion that Jewish "worshippers" had been killed in a Palestinian ambush in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron on Friday. In fact, those killed were all Israeli soldiers and armed paramilitary settlers.

Many media accounts reported the initial Israeli government version of the events with little question and no cautions that the information was coming from one source and that it had not been confirmed. Almost every report said that Palestinian militants had first attacked "Jewish worshippers" and then ambushed soldiers who attempted to come to their rescue.

...Yet by the morning, the Israeli media were reporting that an intial army investigation had found that the Palestinian attackers had instead targeted the Israeli army, not the settlers, and those killed in Hebron were nine armed occupation soldiers, and three armed paramilitary settlers. No civilian worshippers were killed.

...Earlier this year, Israeli officials and many media commentators were sharply critical of Palestinian officials for describing Israel's actions in Jenin as a "massacre." No such qualms restrain those who adopt this term to describe attacks in which Israelis are victims. Hence an ambush which killed only armed combatants became the "Sabbath Massacre."

Reuters reports on this, as well.

Behind the Scenes in the 'War on Terror'

According to Evan Thomas of Newsweek, this is how we're fighting our wars now:

In the war in Afghanistan last fall, the United States bought off more enemy fighters than it killed. In one case, the CIA offered $50,000 to a Taliban warlord to defect. When the commander asked for time to think about it, a Special Forces A Team laser-guided a JDAM precision bomb to explode next door to his headquarters. The next day the CIA man called the commander back with a new offer. How about $40,000? This time the commander said yes.

FYI: The Newsweek report mentioned above and the story I posted yesterday are derived from Bob Woodward's new book Bush at War, which is being excerpted in the Washington Post this week.

How much will war cost?

William Nordhaus, a Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale, elaborates on "The Economic Consequences of War" in this week's New York Review of Books. The article is an abbreviated version of a larger research project, which you can check out here.

An "Insepections Quagmire"

Drawing heavily on Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan's essay from last week's Weekly Standard, Dana Milbank of the Washington Post concludes that the neocons really want to go to war. They just can't wait to get this inspections mumbo-jumbo out of the way...

CIA's Cash Toppled Taliban

Who says you can't "buy victory"? From today's Washington Post:

A new book says President Bush's advisers had grave doubts about the early course of the war in Afghanistan and suggests that the ultimate defeat of the Taliban was due largely to millions of dollars in hundred-dollar bills the CIA handed out to Afghan warlords to win their support.

...the CIA spent $70 million in direct cash outlays on the ground in Afghanistan, a figure that also included money for setting up field hospitals. "That's one bargain," the president said in an interview with Woodward last August. The money was handed out by about a half-dozen CIA teams spread through the country, starting with a 10-man paramilitary team code-named "Jawbreaker" that landed in Afghanistan on Sept. 27, 2001. The team leader carried $3 million in a single attache case.

The report by Mike Allen also includes this kernel of information:

Roger E. Ailes, a media coach for Bush's father and now chairman of the Fox News Channel, sent a confidential communication to the White House in the weeks after the terrorist attacks. Rove took the Ailes communication to the president. "His back-channel message: The American public would tolerate waiting and would be patient, but only as long as they were convinced that Bush was using the harshest measures possible," Woodward wrote. He added that Ailes, who has angrily challenged reports that his news channel has a conservative bias, added a warning: "Support would dissipate if the public did not see Bush acting harshly."

This lends even further support to the notion that Fox is a direct propaganda arm of the Republican White House. I mean, Ailes is helping craft policy for chrissakes!

Update: Roger Ailes denies that he ever gave Rove advice. The NY Times has two articles on the Ailes memo: one is here; the other, here.

A Powder Keg

Geov Parrish warns of the consequences of lighting "the Iraqi fuse" in his most recent column:

This is a war with the most clearly imperial aims of any major global conflict in a generation; the Bush Administration proposes to redraw Asia's maps to America's lasting economic, political, and military advantage. But once you start proposing to erase international boundaries, a funny thing happens: other people also start thinking about where to redraw them. And as developments suggest this week from Jordan to Kabul to whichever phone booth bin Laden is dropping rupees from, a number of people are already doing more than just thinking.

With bin Laden popping up again, the FBI issuing all sorts of scare-the-hell-out-of-you warnings of possible terrorist attacks, and the military "losing control" in Afghanistan, I think it's clear that somebody needs to put the brakes on things, and reevaluate the trajectory this nation has taken over the past year or so. I feel like we're this close to things getting entirely out of hand...

Only American Lives Matter

This was in yesterday's NY Times:

In the question-and-answer session [following a political forum on the American presidency at the University of Utah], a woman politely asked [Karl] Rove if the administration was concerned over the possibility that 200,000 innocent Iraqis might die in an American-led invasion.

Mr. Rove responded, "I'm more concerned about the 3,000 who died on 9/11."

I suppose this is what Czar Bennett is referring to when he lauds the current administration's "moral clarity."

Despicable.

The US "free" press and the Pentagon war machine

Citing this article from the 10 November Washington Post as evidence, Bill Vann claims that the "buildup to war in Iraq has once again exposed the media as a propaganda arm of the Bush administration and the Pentagon. The television networks, daily newspapers and other means of mass communication have all obediently lent themselves to what White House aides themselves have described as a campaign to 'sell' the war to the American people."

Resolution 1441

Some analysts affiliated with the Institute for Public Accuracy critique the recently passed UN Security Council Resolution 1441 on Iraq.

Strategic blowback

Paul Rogers' latest column brilliantly exposes the madness behind the recently articulated National Security Strategy of the United States.

First, he breaks down the strategy by identifying its four key claims:

1. The US should actively try to shape the 21st century in its own "political and economic image."
2. Whoever resists this mission should be viewed as a "threat both to the United States and its allies and to the world as a whole."
3. It will sometimes be necessary to "pre-empt the rise to power" of other states or movements which serve to challenge – directly or indirectly – premise #1.
4. This requires that the US maintain, by far, the world's strongest, most technologically advanced military, ready to strike wherever and whenever it is deemed necessary.

Rogers then suggests that these four points are bound together by "transparency" – that is, other nations know this policy, internalize it, and are made fully aware that any resistance will be met with untrammeled force.

After this brief sketch, he goes on to define the one major "catch in all of this: namely, that the policy itself is likely to prove deeply and persistently counter-productive."

For a state such as Iran, and for at least half a dozen others, a US state policy of this kind, with its parallel military power, makes it far more necessary to acquire deterrent forces, whether these be missiles or biological, chemical or nuclear weapons. True, they will have to be produced in conditions of great secrecy, but in the face of US military power they will be seen as essential – they will become the weapons of the underdog.

We therefore end up in the extraordinary position that US attempts to control opposition by military means will simply encourage opponents to redouble their efforts to protect themselves and deter such attacks. They will be aided by many states that may not be implicitly opposed to the US but are more than happy to aid those who see themselves as threatened. Serbia may aid Iraq with upgraded radar systems, China may help Iraq with military communications and Pakistan with its nuclear programme. Pakistan, in turn, may help North Korea with nuclear facilities, and North Korea is meanwhile in the business of selling missiles to Syria and Iran.

...Furthermore, states facing the United States and its allies will do everything they can in order not to have to face the direct use of military power. Every asymmetric warfare method available, whether it be sabotage, paramilitary attacks, support for radical movements or any other tactic – all will be seen as essential for their own security.

On 11 September 2001, al-Qaida found one weak point, exploited it with remarkable ability and executed it with terrible consequences. Since then, al-Qaida has dispersed, it has resisted every attempt to destroy it, it is emerging with most, if not all, of its capabilities intact, and it seems to have as much support as ever.

The end result of the Bush security posture is to establish a broadly-based ‘us versus them’ polarisation, in the belief that this is the only way to ensure the New American Century. In practice it encourages exactly the opposite – a widespread and growing opposition in which every means will be found to counter US power. In such a situation, the United States itself will actually end up less secure, although it may take years for this to be recognised.

This is an exceptional insight. It articulates exactly why the NSS is self-defeating, and how it will make the world a much more dangerous place. A few other commentators, like Paul Kennedy, have offered similar analyses, but none as clearly as Rogers here.

Bomb the British!

Surely, we cannot tolerate such blatantly anti-American rhetoric as this!

President George Bush is seen by a third of Britons as a bigger threat to world safety than Saddam Hussein, according to a new poll conducted by a senior US Republican and due to be broadcast today.

...The Channel 4 poll found that a third of the British public have no trust at all in Mr Bush, and many actually fear him. In a straight choice between Mr Bush and President Saddam as to who poses the greater threat to world peace, 32% said Mr Bush and 49% said President Saddam. Almost half see Mr Blair as Mr Bush's lapdog, with the figure even higher among the under-30s.

Almost two-thirds of people said the only reason the US has targeted President Saddam is because he threatens US control of the Middle East - only a quarter feel it is because the Iraqi leader is a threat to world peace.

What would Jesus say?

An Optimist's View

A New Age of Empire

Sasha Lilley offers an excellent summary of the ideas being floated in policy circles regarding the invasion of Iraq and the desired reshuffling of the Middle East. It's worth reading the whole article.

Back from the Grave

Who is this Osama dude that I keep hearing about now? He seems mean and evil...must be related to Saddam.

Iraq invasion will trigger 'human catastrophe'

George Edmonson of the Cox News Service reports,

A report to be released today predicts that an invasion of Iraq could lead to a "human catastrophe" with casualties as high as 250,000 within the first three months.

"Collateral Damage: The Health and Environmental Costs of War on Iraq" was prepared largely by Medact, the British affiliate of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. The U.S. affiliate, Physicians for Social Responsibility, also was involved. Most of the estimated casualties would be Iraqi civilians caught in the bombing, said Bob Schaeffer, a spokesman in Massachusetts for the International Physicians organization. It was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 for what the committee called its "considerable service to mankind by spreading authoritative information and by creating an awareness of the catastrophic consequences of atomic warfare.''

The study also looks at the impact of an invasion on the public health system and necessities such as agriculture, water and energy, he said.

"We're saying that there'll be a very large short-term impact and an even more profound longer-term impact," Schaeffer said. "The report uses the word `human catastrophe' even if it does not escalate to the level of poison gas, civil war or nuclear weapons.''

The estimates of casualties, he said, range from a low of 50,000 up to 250,000.

James Snyder, spokesman in Washington for Physicians for Social Responsibility, said the report utilizes information about likely Iraq invasion scenarios as well as knowledge gleaned from study of the 1991 Persian Gulf War and U.S. actions in Somalia and Panama.

Schaeffer said physicians associated with the international organization also had made some inspection tours, and their findings were factored in.

"The estimates and ranges are based on sound science and previous experience," Snyder said.

Staged photos?

First this. Now this:

Something weird's going on. And I don't like it.

African Famine

An Oxfam press release reads, "International development organization Oxfam warned today that the food crisis in southern Africa has worsened. Recent assessments of the region indicate that 14.4 million people are now at risk of starvation unless sufficient food aid is provided immediately. In response to the worsening situation, Oxfam has launched a fundraising appeal to expand its capacity to address the crisis. Donations to the crisis relief fund can be made at http://www.oxfamamerica.org/relief."

The BBC breaks down those regions worst hit by the famine.

Shared Narratives

"Avi Ohayon (C) is supported by friends as he weeps following the deaths of his wife and two children in the Kibbutz Metzer in Israel, November 11, 2002. Ohayon's wife Revital and his sons Matan, 5, and Noam, 4, were killed when an alleged Palestinian gunman infiltrated the kibbutz and shot them in their home. The gunman also killed two other Israeli citizens before fleeing."



"Khalil Mashal mourns over his two-year-old son Nafeth at Najar hospital in Rafah southern Gaza Strip, Monday Nov. 11, 2002. Israeli troops in the southern Gaza town of Rafah on Tuesday shot dead a two-year-old Palestinian boy and wounded two other children, hospital officials and witnesses said."

Support Us, Or Else

Thalif Deen of Inter Press News Service implies that the unanimous backing of the UN Resolution condemning Iraq last week came about because of intense diplomatic and economic pressure from the United States. In other words, the US bribed countries into acquiescence. Deen writes,

Friday's unanimous vote in the U.N. Security Council supporting the U.S. resolution on weapons inspections in Iraq was a demonstration of Washington's ability to wield its vast political and economic power, say observers...

France, China and Russia, in almost a single voice, said they decided to back the resolution because of assurances by the United States that it would return to the Security Council before launching a military attack on Iraq...

But the 10 non-permanent members - Cameroon, Guinea, Mauritius, Bulgaria, Colombia, Mexico, Singapore, Norway, Ireland and Syria - voted under heavy diplomatic and economic pressure from the United States...

All these countries were seemingly aware of the fact that in 1990 the United States almost overnight cut about 70 million dollars in aid to Yemen immediately following its negative vote against a U.S. sponsored Security Council resolution to militarily oust Iraq from Kuwait...

''The Yemen precedent remains a vivid institutional memory at the United Nations,'' Phyllis Bennis, a fellow at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies, told IPS.

Bennis said that just after that 1990 vote, the U.S. envoy turned to the Yemeni ambassador and told him that his vote would be ''the most expensive 'no' vote you would ever cast''. The United States then promptly cut the entire 70 million dollar U.S. aid budget to Yemen...

Could any of these countries easily stand up to the United States or refuse to fall in line with their benefactor or military ally?

James Abourezk, a former U.S. Senator, said he seriously doubts that any country receiving U.S. government aid could withstand the economic pressure to vote for a U.S. resolution at the Security Council.

''It would be a tragedy,'' he told IPS, ''if a war were to be declared based on such pressure''.

The negotiations for the payoffs, by the way, have been going on in earnest for at least two months. Recall this story from September's LA Times.

How Energy Figures into the Iraq War Debate

MSNBC is featuring a special report on "Oil: The Other Iraq War." Worth a look if only because this type of analysis is such a rarity in the American media.

Iran: Bush's real target?

"Iraq is not the main objective for the small but powerful coterie of Pentagon hardliners driving the Bush administration's national security policy," contends Eric Margolis of the Toronto Sun. "Nor is it for their intellectual and emotional peers in Israel's right-wing Likud party. The real target of the coming war is Iran, which Israel views as its principal and most dangerous enemy. Iraq merely serves as a pretext to whip America into a war frenzy and to justify insertion of large numbers of U.S. troops into Mesopotamia."

Just Biding Their Time

In an article in yesterday's LA Times, William Arkin discussed the American military's frantic buildup and expansion of supply capacity for the past, and undoubtedly future, American wars on terrorism whoever we deem to be a threat. Buried in the article, Arkin also laid bare why the Bush administration has been bothering to work with the UN on Iraq:

Some analysts have suggested that U.N. weapons inspections may reduce the likelihood of war. That is not how senior White House and Pentagon officials see it. None believes Saddam Hussein will permit effective inspections, but they see the U.N. effort as a win-win situation: The inspections process will improve the political climate for eventual action and buy time for the Pentagon to get ready. The war that Bush and his team think is necessary and inevitable will thus come with the approval of both Congress and the U.N. Meanwhile, one of the main practical obstacles to war with Iraq will have been dealt with: The enormous infrastructure needed to supply and sustain today's armed forces against Iraq is being constructed on the foundations of the system created for the war in Afghanistan.

Convenient, eh?

The US war lobby and the disciples of NSC-68

The roots of the George W. Bush administration's policy for Iraq "regime change" can be traced to strategies formulated since the early 1990s by a small network of inveterate Cold Warriors linked by philosophical lineage and war-intelligence policy collaborations.

This tightly-knit cabal stretches across the current and previous White Houses, the State Department, the CIA, the National Security Council, the boards of neo-conservative think tanks and the boards of transnational corporations (including Washington-linked energy and war-technology companies). Virtually all of the players are members of elite planning bodies, such as the Council on Foreign Relations. Many of them are indicted criminals—five individuals were direct participants in the Iran-Contra operation.

All have, over the course of their intertwined careers, advocated imperialist policies involving 1) pre-emptive wars, 2) the conquest of Iraq and Iran, and the breakup of Saudi Arabia, 3) hard-line support of Israel, Ariel Sharon and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and 5) the encirclement and containment of Russia and China.

See Larry Chin's breakdown of the "Iraq Regime Change Network."

U.S. warns Egypt about anti-semitic TV series

World Tribune.com is reporting that the "United States has quietly threatened to turn an Egyptian television series into a new dispute between the two allies."

Bush administration officials and congressional leaders said a television series based on the anti-Semitic "Protocols of Zion" has become a leading issue between Cairo and Washington. At least 26 members of Congress have appealed to Egypt to halt the series.

"We have expressed our concerns to the Egyptian government directly about what we've heard about this program," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said. "At this point I'm sure we'll be watching very, very closely and raising these issues, as appropriate, depending on what actually airs.

Boucher said the Egyptian government must be responsible for the contents of its state-owned television. The series is meant to have 41 episodes.

FYI: The NY Times ran an article on the television series last month.

Update: Linda Heard has a good article on the series over at Counterpunch.

Bush Approves Iraq War Plan

Charles Aldinger of Reuters reports that the Iraqi war plans have already been given the go-ahead by the White House.

President Bush has approved a war plan for Iraq to initially capture parts of the country for footholds to thrust in 200,000 or more troops, U.S. officials said on Saturday.

The officials, who asked not to be identified, stressed the plan was flexible but that Bush had in recent weeks accepted Army Gen. Tommy Franks' advice that smaller numbers of troops could not capture and hold Iraq if invasion became necessary.

They confirmed a New York Times report in its Sunday edition that any attack ordered by Bush and led by Franks, head of the U.S. Central Command, would begin with "a rolling start" of smaller numbers of troops while B-1 and B-2 bombers led an air campaign against Saddam's palaces, air defenses and bases.

"Those are the right words -- a rolling start," said one of the officials. "I doubt you would see this all come at once."...

So much for waiting to see how Iraq reacts to the recently passed UN resolution. Forget about giving Iraq a "final chance"; we're already revvin' up our bombers.

Update: CNN reports that the Bush adminstration doesn't think it needs the UN's permission or approval to attack Iraq, while James Hall of the Scotsman elaborates further on the plan to strike Iraq.

Pentagon Plans Massive Computer System to Spy on Terrorists (and Americans, too)

In a disturbing article in today's edition of the NY Times, John Markoff reports on the emergence of Big Brother in the digital age.

The Pentagon is constructing a computer system that could create a vast electronic dragnet, searching for personal information as part of the hunt for terrorists around the globe — including the United States.

As the director of the effort, Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, has described the system in Pentagon documents and in speeches, it will provide intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials with instant access to information from Internet mail and calling records to credit card and banking transactions and travel documents, without a search warrant.

Historically, military and intelligence agencies have not been permitted to spy on Americans without extraordinary legal authorization. But Admiral Poindexter, the former national security adviser in the Reagan administration, has argued that the government needs broad new powers to process, store and mine billions of minute details of electronic life in the United States.

Admiral Poindexter, who has described the plan in public documents and speeches but declined to be interviewed, has said that the government needs to "break down the stovepipes" that separate commercial and government databases, allowing teams of intelligence agency analysts to hunt for hidden patterns of activity with powerful computers.

...In order to deploy such a system, known as Total Information Awareness, new legislation would be needed, some of which has been proposed by the Bush administration in the Homeland Security Act that is now before Congress. That legislation would amend the Privacy Act of 1974, which was intended to limit what government agencies could do with private information.

The possibility that the system might be deployed domestically to let intelligence officials look into commercial transactions worries civil liberties proponents.

"This could be the perfect storm for civil liberties in America," said Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington "The vehicle is the Homeland Security Act, the technology is Darpa and the agency is the F.B.I. The outcome is a system of national surveillance of the American public."

Last week we learned that the FBI has bugged our libraries. As Kurt Nimmo suggests, these recent developments should have us all gravely concerned; it's likely that a new version of COINTELPRO is being constructed before our very eyes.

"Take your war and go to hell"

more photos from Italy-IMC

Europeans put Americans to shame again as half a million march against Bush's war in Florence.

What the Democrats Should Do

Scoobie Davis has some good, tactical advice for the Democrats.

War on Terror Faltering or Failing?

The Washington Post reports that the "U.S. military is losing momentum in the war on terrorism in Afghanistan because the remnants of al Qaeda and the Taliban have proven more successful in adapting to U.S. tactics than the U.S. military has to theirs." In all reality, that's just a nice way of saying the war is failing, miserably. As Paul Rogers concludes in his most recent column,

As far as the future of the ‘war on terror’ is concerned, an overall picture is emerging of a loose alliance of anti-American and anti-western groups, many of them connected to al-Qaida, but collectively active in a number of countries. The frequency of the attacks indicates a level of activity that may actually be on the increase, and it certainly does appear to be the case that support for such groups is at least as strong as 14 months ago, and very probably stronger. On that basis, any talk of the ‘war on terror’ being a success is a very long way from reality.

Friendly Dictator Trading Cards

"Meet the Friendly Dictators -- three dozen of America's most embarrassing "friends", a cunning crew of tyrants and corrupt puppet-presidents who have been rewarded handsomely for their loyalty to U.S. interests.

"...Friendly Dictators usually grow rich, while their countries' economies go down the drain. U.S. tax dollars and U.S. backed loans have made billionaires of some; others are international drug dealers who also collect CIA paychecks. Rarely are they called to account for their crimes."

Black People Love Us!

If you haven't already, check out this site. It's interesting to look at, primarily because it's so conflicted and can be read at a number of different levels. Is it making fun of some group? If so, of whom? Presumably, it's satire, but of what precisely? Be sure to check out the letters section, where you can find many of the differing interpretations articulated.

Who leaked the damn photos?!

From the AP:

The Pentagon was investigating Friday to find out who took and released photographs of terror suspects as they were being transported in heavy restraints aboard a U.S. military plane.

Four photographs of prisoners handcuffed, heads covered with black hoods and bound with straps on the floor of a plane appeared overnight on the Web site of radio talk show host Art Bell.

...The photos are the first giving a glimpse into security measures aboard any of the airplanes used over the past year as prisoners were transferred to prisons in and around Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world, including to the high-security prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba...

Blueprint for Bush Doctrine

Tom Barry of Foreign Policy In Focus writes,

The White House's National Security Strategy of the United States, released September 2002, briefly outlines the new Bush foreign policy doctrine of global military domination and interventionism. But the full scope and ambition of the Bush foreign and military policy is more comprehensively laid out in a book called Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy produced by the Project for the New American Century in 2000. In this edited volume by PNAC founders Robert Kagan and William Kristol, one can find what amounts to a blueprint for the current objectives of U.S. global engagement. Nonstate terrorism is given short shrift in the book, which includes chapters written by such current top foreign policy team players as Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz, and Peter Rodman.

It's a call for a doctrine of frontier justice in which the top gun--the U.S.--saddles up and hustles together a posse to pursue bandits and rogues. According to the conservative internationalists, like Paul Wolfowitz, we "must descend from the realm of general principles to the making of specific decisions." While laws, judges, and trials are what we "want for our domestic political process … foreign policy decisions cannot be subject to that kind of rule of law."

PNAC's Present Dangers apparently functions as a playbook for the Bush administration. In his chapter on the Middle East, Elliott Abrams lays out the "peace through strength" credo that has become the operating principle of this administration. "Our military strength and willingness to use it will remain a key factor in our ability to promote peace," wrote Abrams, who is the administration's National Security Council Senior Director for Democracy, Human Rights, and International Operations. Like the other PNAC principals, Abrams calls for a preemptive "toppling of Saddam Hussein." Strengthening our major ally in the region, Israel, should be the base of U.S. Middle East policy, and we should not permit the establishment of a Palestinian state that does not explicitly uphold U.S. policy in the region, according to Abrams.

...The Bush administration contends...that U.S. war-making is a strike for peace. Writing during the last presidential campaign, Kagan and Kristol called for a new foreign policy based on the principles of superior military power and conservative internationalism. "Conservative internationalists," they said, "…are the true heirs to a tradition in American foreign policy that runs from Theodore Roosevelt through Ronald Reagan." Fortunately, most of the international community and growing numbers of Americans reject the revival of 19th century gunboat diplomacy as an appropriate manifestation of 21st century internationalism.

Boom Time!

If only the merchants of death were included in everyone's 401(k) plan...

US braces for retaliation after Yemen assassination

Blowback on the horizon...

This made me smile...

...and then it made me angry. Such is life nowadays.

The Day After

Alex Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair summarize the Democrats' predicament:

The Democrats are a party of ghosts and revenants, not the most convincing battalion to put against the party of property and oil, of fundamentalist Christians now in coalition with warmongering neocons ranging from Wolfowitz to Hitchens. The most articulate voice against the war fever has been an octogenarian, Bobby Byrd.

Final verdict? We agree entirely with this assessment by Mark Donham, an Illinois environmentalist who sent it along to us the morning after.

"If the democrats do not see this as a serious repudiation of their strategy of trying to 'out republican' the Republicans, then I think we will continue to see the Democrats become more and more irrelevant. Only if the Democrats embrace a new vision based upon real change, change that will mean taking on the status quo in real ways, not just pandering to the status quo, will they return to power.

"An interesting article ran in yesterday's USA Today regarding the lack of voting by people in the age group of 18-24. In non-presidential elections, the percentage of this age group that are voting is only about 25%. That is because no one is providing them with a vision that makes sense, and the smaller parties that might be providing that vision, like the Green Party, don't have the resources to reach them in adequate numbers.

"Therein lies the untapped political resource to revitalize the Democratic Party, but they will not be fooled or interested by milktoast ideas. It's time for Daschle and Gephardt to step down, admit that their strategy failed, and let some new, progressive leadership re-excite the party. If the party leadership looks at this and concludes that the they weren't conservative enough and tries to push their positions even more to the right, then I see the Democrats disintegrating into near irrelevancy."

Meanwhile, the Republicans are salivating at the prospects...

Tyranny and Democracy Went Head to Head. Who won?

Mike Golby, an observer on the other side of the Atlantic, a bit to the south, put well the task placed before the American people yesterday:

Today, Americans need to re-evaluate their organizing principle. They must choose between their Constitution and the tyranny of a Military Industrial Complex run riot. Today, Americans choose whether to give King George the Despot free rein or boot him out in favor of reintroducing President George W. Bush the right-wing democrat to the cold, hard but clear light of day.

We will live with the results, whether we like them or not.

Well, the results are in, and they are not good. As it has become glaringly obvious over the past few months, this outcome will likely have massive global consequences.

Republican Poll Watchers

The election situation is still a bit topsy turvy, so I don't think it's prudent to start commenting yet. In the meantime, Joe Conason offers this:

If the early exit numbers leaking out hold, there will be no enormous change in the congressional stalemate when this election is over. The big Election Day story may well be the efforts of the Republican Party to discourage citizens from exercising their democratic rights. Bulletins from around the country suggest a national strategy, coordinated from Washington, to intimidate Democratic voters in the name of preventing "fraud."

While there have been reports of such tactics from places as far afield as Tennessee, Texas and Maryland, the smoking document turned up in Pennsylvania -- where the Republicans were desperately trying to preserve Rep. George Gekas from defeat. Today the Lebanon Daily News ran an editorial...denouncing the Gekas campaign for preparing a systematic effort to "challenge" voters in counties favorable to his Democratic opponent, Rep. Tim Holden.

...In other words, Republican "poll watchers" around the country evidently have been instructed to attempt to stop people from voting, without regard to the specific provisions of state law. This is a disgrace without parallel since the civil rights era (or at least since Florida 2000). Should the Democrats hold onto the Senate, an appropriate subcommittee should investigate these schemes -- because the Republicans never will.