Frankenfoods

A Guardian article from last week contained this snippet of information:

The idea of tightening regulations on GM products represents something of a revolution in thinking in the US, where about 70% of the processed food on supermarket shelves contains genetically engineered ingredients.

Mark Shapiro put it this way in an October Nation piece:

Americans...might be blindsided by such a revelation, even though most of us eat genetically engineered products practically every day. Walk through your local supermarket, and you'll find it in breakfast cereals, canned drinks, processed foods of every sort. Unless it's duly labeled, chances are anything with processed soy or corn has been genetically modified. The most popular sweetener today is not sugar, but corn syrup--and most corn syrup is made from genetically modified corn. GE corn and soybeans are fed to animals, so it's in our beef, our pork, our chicken and our milk. Over the past five years, the products of genetic engineering have slipped almost unnoticed into the American food system. Though there is no hard evidence that these products are harmful to human health, foreign and domestic scientists and activists are questioning their long-term impact on the environment, whether their much-heralded benefits are actually coming true and whether the introduction of what is, in essence, a new living organism into the ecosystem can be so easily controlled.

Ethnic Cleansing, Expulsion, and (Un)Worthy Victims

Ran HaCohen writes on "Ethnic Cleansing: Past, Present and Future," as the Israeli knesset moves to bar Arab members for their support of the intifada.

Related: Mike Golby pledges his support for the "victims of terror." I'm still waiting to see if CNN amends their own take on the victims.

The Afghan Payoff

Brooke Shelby Biggs follows up on the recent announcement of the Afghan pipeline deal. Also check the article she wrote last year for Mother Jones on the politics of oil in Afghanistan.

Imperial Overtures in Iraq

The editors at Monthly Review have dusted off some of the Marxist tracts on imperialism and applied them to America's stance towards Iraq.

"Compassionate Conservativism" is a sham

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post skewered Bush's "compassionate conservativism" last week. Picking up where Milbank left off, Nathan Newman locks on to the education part of this agenda, and observes that it's a complete fraud.

US Built Up Iraq's Arsenal

Better late than never, I suppose. That's my reaction to the story, "U.S. Had Key Role in Iraq Buildup," in today's Washington Post. This information should have been reported immediately once Iraq shifted to the top of the news agenda, as the general details have been known since at least '98. Instead, it comes out now, after a decision to invade has already been made (just wait) and the demonization campaign against Saddam has saturated the airwaves.

MLK's Turning Over in His Grave

Invoking the ideological measure of the great Myron Magnet, the Republicans move gallantly forward in their redefinition of Civil Rights.

An attack on us all

"Saddam is simply the latest focus for the west's racist abuse of Arabs," says Ghada Karmi in the Guardian.

The Count: Israel/Palestine

See also: "Moral Equivalence Redux"

(via gordon coale)

War on the Poor

"Each day, one turns to the latest news from the bowels of the Bush Regime with Dorothy Parker's immortal words sounding in the mind like a tocsin: 'What fresh hell is this?'"

That's how Chris Floyd kicked off his column yesterday. This time the fresh hell is the Bush administration's "cold, calculated, covert war against the world's poor."

Fallout from the Lott Remarks

"The most depressing and distressing thing about the Lott fiasco," writes Paul Street, "is the way it is provides white America yet another dangerous opportunity to pat itself on the back for advancing beyond the primitive state of level-one racism while digging the hole of systemic racism yet deeper."

CIA Using Torture

The Washington Post has reported that the CIA is using torture in order to elicit information for the war on terror.

Those who refuse to cooperate inside this secret CIA interrogation center [in Bagram, Afghanistan] are sometimes kept standing or kneeling for hours, in black hoods or spray-painted goggles, according to intelligence specialists familiar with CIA interrogation methods. At times they are held in awkward, painful positions and deprived of sleep with a 24-hour bombardment of lights -- subject to what are known as "stress and duress" techniques.

Those who cooperate are rewarded with creature comforts, interrogators whose methods include feigned friendship, respect, cultural sensitivity and, in some cases, money. Some who do not cooperate are turned over -- "rendered," in official parlance -- to foreign intelligence services whose practice of torture has been documented by the U.S. government and human rights organizations.

...The picture that emerges is of a brass-knuckled quest for information, often in concert with allies of dubious human rights reputation, in which the traditional lines between right and wrong, legal and inhumane, are evolving and blurred.

Predictably, Human Rights Watch is up in arms. The Guardian follows up on the story here.

I hope nobody is surprised about this. The CIA has used and outsourced torture for the past 50+ years. They've literally written the book on how to use torture effectively.

W's Military Footprints

Check out Dubya's military records. Still trying to figure out what happened back in '72...

Trans-Afghan Pipeline Deal Inked

From the AP:

Leaders from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Turkmenistan gathered on Thursday to strike an ambitious deal to build a gas pipeline through war-ravaged Afghanistan.

The long-delayed $3.2-billion natural gas pipeline, known as the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline, would carry gas from energy-rich Turkmenistan to Pakistan. It would be one of the first major investment projects in Afghanistan in decades.

Al Jazeera's Coming to Town

"The Arabic-language news network, notorious for broadcasting the statements of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda colleagues, plans to open an English-language website in early 2003 and begin distributing English-language news programming by satellite and cable late next year," reports the CS Monitor.

Getting a Jump Start on the Campaign

What's Going On

I've requisitioned my parents' computer for a few hours, and figured I'd post some of the stuff I'm just starting to go through online. So, following up on last week's volley of catch-up, here's a similar list of stuff that's striking me as relevant and useful:

*“The United States edited out more than 8000 crucial pages of Iraq's 11,800-page dossier on weapons, before passing on a sanitised version to the 10 non-permanent members of the United Nations security council,” reports the Sunday Herald.

*Take a peek at the corporations that supplied Iraq's weapons program.

*In an appearance on PBS’ NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Senator Bob Graham remarked that there is some “very compelling evidence” that a “sovereign foreign government” was “involved in facilitating the activities of at least some of the terrorists in the United States” on 9/11. Justin Raimondo and the folks over at antiwar.com were the first to pick up on this bombshell of a story last week. Not surprisingly, Raimondo thinks the “sovereign foreign government” in question is Israel. See the archive of media coverage of the Israeli–9/11 connection for some background.

*“Confidential UN planning papers paint a grim picture of the effects of an attack against Iraq,” reports the Times of London. Reporter James Bone writes that the UN is “making secret contingency plans for a war that would halt all Iraqi oil production, 'seriously degrade' the country’s electricity system, provoke civil unrest and create 900,000 refugees."

*The White House continues its class warfare with a proposal to cut “taxes on corporate dividends for shareholders by about half.” The NY Times reports that the “cut would cost the Treasury more than $100 billion over 10 years, and the tax benefits would overwhelmingly flow to the nation's very wealthiest taxpayers.”

*LibertyThink asks, “Why are we supposed to forget about the Anthrax attacks?"

*“To strive toward creating the no-sleep soldier,” ABC News reports, the US military has funded a “multi-tiered program from tinkering with a soldier's brain using magnetic resonance to analyzing the neural circuits of birds that stay awake for days during migration. The hope is to stump the body's need for sleep — at least temporarily.”

*Geov Parrish & Maria Tomchick have published their list of Media Follies for the year 2002.

*German TV airs documentary charging American war crimes in Afghanistan – and the US State Department is furious.

*Nearly half of the entering Congressional fresh(wo)men are millionaires, and many have financial interests in the banking, oil and pharmaceutical industries. God bless plutocracy!

*“The Bush administration is planning to propose requiring Internet service providers to help build a centralized system to enable broad monitoring of the Internet and, potentially, surveillance of its users,” reports the NY Times. “The proposal is part of a final version of a report, 'The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace,' set for release early next year, according to several people who have been briefed on the report. It is a component of the effort to increase national security after the Sept. 11 attacks.”

*Scott Peterson of the CS Monitor reminds us, “If US fights Iraq, it would use a weapon that left a radioactive trail in Gulf War.”

More Time Off

I'm going back on hiatus for a bit, as I'm visiting family for ~2 weeks and won't have access to a 'puter. So, don't expect anything here until after the new year. Toodles.

Tax Burden to Shift to Poor

I always thought that the rich paid too much in taxes...

The economy is tanking. Millions of people in this country live in poverty, lack healthcare, and don't have jobs. And this is what the Bush administration is spending their time crafting. Says a lot, doesn't it?

Policing the Margins of the Right

Were you wondering why Republicans were so quick to denounce Trent Lott? (even David Horowitz has condemned him, for chrissakes!)

Ed Kilgore, the Policy Director of the Democratic Leadership Council, has an answer. Josh Marshall relays his comments in a TPM blog entry:

The angle some people may be missing about conservatives and Lott is that they are eager to pursue a number of things--a scaleback of affirmative action policies, private school vouchers, appointment of conservative judges with backgrounds more questionable than Lott's--that will create some concerns that the GOP is not exactly the reborn Party of Lincoln that appeared on TV screens at the 2000 convention. Given this agenda, conservatives don't want the task complicated by a Senate Leader (whom they don't like anyway) whose very name will conjure up racial dissension for the foreseeable future. For one thing, they're afraid the Bush White House will put the kibosh on controversial conservative initiatives if Lott has [to] carry the water. So don't be fooled into thinking that GOP conservatives will drop an anvil on Lott strictly because they are horrified by his words.

Far fetched? Hardly. It's all about holding on to political capital so that the Republicans can go for the gold a lil bit later on...

Contemplating or Using Torture?

"In a sense, we already use torture anyway," one CIA officer told me. "When we arrest a foreign national who we think has important information, we hand him over to a foreign government such as the Egyptians. Its police will arrest the suspect's wife and children, put them at the other end of the same cell, and then produce a couple of pit bulls and say: 'Talk, or we let these dogs go at your wife and child.' That usually works."

This kernel of information is from an opinion piece in the UK's Telegraph.

(via Unknown News)

Modern Conservativism Laid Bare

You gotta love Cal Thomas.

Asked if the ability to reduce complex social issues to glib slogans and the function of government to the entertainment quotient of a football game reflects all that well on the depth of conservative ideology, Thomas replied: "It may not be true that there are always simple answers to complex problems, but the liberals are in the situation they're in because they've ignored simple answers and created complex problems."

'Back

...Finally. Now I have to figure out where to begin and how to catch up. Here's just some of the stuff I've found interesting from the past blog-free week:

*Dubya’s getting sued for “race based harassment and individual sex crimes" committed against a Texas woman and her husband. Court documents, here.

*SF-IMC got embroiled in a murder controversy over this post on its open newswire.

*John Pilger does an excellent job drawing together the delightful acronyms PNAC and P2OG in his most recent column.

*US is gonna use land mines in Iraq. Screw the UN...

*If at first you don't succeed, try, try again…that’s the US' approach to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

*British troops moving into the Gulf in February. Hmm. Wonder what that could mean…

*Apparently, it's ok to be a racist and hold a powerful post in the American government. Just don't be stupid enough to say what everyone knows you think, publicly. Yeah, Trent, that's you.

*Some liberals are in a quandary over Iraq, while others sign up for war…

*Surveillance drones to patrol US cities. No joke...

*Dust off those nukes!

*Propaganda, ahoy! (this is nothing new, btw)

*An Iraq war will not only provide an "opportunity" for Israel, it will "yield momentum" for peace. Peace? Read: transfer.

*Bob Novak concedes that an "Iraq War is for Israel's Benefit"!

*Even those radicals writing in Foreign Policy see the Iraq war as “unnecessary.”

*Decode the top buzz words of 2002.

*The government has put out a new set of want ads. Are you qualified?

*More greed and insensitivity from the Bush administration. Shocking!

*Mother Theresa sometimes wondered if God really exists. Hmm. Maybe I still have a chance to get into heaven.

*Kitchen + car = American consumer bliss

*In case ya didn't know, Google rocks.

Hiatus

Due to the crush of work this week, I'm not going to be posting anything for a while. I'm purposefully censoring myself.

I'll probably be back sometime next week (after December 16th). Hopefully, the world will still be around then, with the Bushies getting ready to pull the trigger and all (January, though, seems to be the more likely strike time). I will be checking email, so if you see something I should really keep my eye on, feel free to contact me.

The Mirror Tells All...

White House preparing to accuse Iraq

Maggie Farley and Robin Wright of the LA Times report, "Even before Iraq hands over the long-awaited declaration of its weapons and missile programs in Baghdad today, the Bush administration is preparing to declare Iraq in material breach of a tough U.N. resolution for expected omissions in the report, U.S. officials said Friday.

"The White House claims to have evidence -- which it hasn't released to inspectors or other countries -- that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, despite Baghdad's repeated denials."

No surprise here...the UN inspections, once declared by the Bush administration to be of utmost importance, are entirely irrelevant. Don't you worry; they'll get their war another way.

Iraq war may cost US $2 trillion

From the AP:

War with Iraq could cost the United States anywhere from $99 billion to more than $1.9 trillion over a decade, researchers concluded in a study.

In the worst case, a war could consume the equivalent of an entire Federal budget for one year or close to that, according to the projections. The government spent $2 trillion in the last budget year, which ended Sept. 30.

Monbiot vs. MediaLens

The British journalist George Monbiot and David Edwards of the Brtitish media-watch group MediaLens have gotten into an interesting debate over Saddam Hussein, Iraq, and the concept of a "just war". MediaLens initiated the exchange in response to a recent Guardian article written by Monbiot. The entire debate (as it exists up to this point; Edwards will likely respond once more) is available here.

Update: David Edwards and David Cromwell of MediaLens respond to Monbiot's last rejoinder here.

Iraq Deadline Ticking; Contact your Reps

"With this weekend as Iraq's confession due-date, and the likely exploitation of whatever results by the war machine, TODAY and TOMORROW (Dec. 5-6), as well as next week, are the best times to let the Congress and President know you demand skepticism and wisdom and not a rush to war," writes Matthew Hogan on Stand Down.

Click here for "a comprehensive list of contact information including as-yet-unseated representatives."

HSA: The Rise of the American Police State

Jennifer Van Bergen, a contributing editor of Criminal Defense Weekly, critiques the recently passed Homeland Security Act (HSA) in a three-part series on Truthout.

Part 1 reviews the origins of the Act in the Hart-Rudman Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations. Part 2 discusses Cheney's plan for global dominance and how that relates to homeland security. Part 3 details some of the HSA provisions themselves and briefly discusses what worries civil libertarians.

What the World Thinks in 2002

"Despite an initial outpouring of public sympathy for America following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, discontent with the United States has grown around the world over the past two years. Images of the U.S. have been tarnished in all types of nations: among longtime NATO allies, in developing countries, in Eastern Europe and, most dramatically, in Muslim societies," reports a Pew Global Attitudes survey of more than 38,000 people in 44 nations.

See also:

*"Survey shows Iraq war threat fuels Muslim ire worldwide"
*"Anti-US anger grows among Arab moderates"
*"U.S. Losing Popularity in World"

Al-Qaida’s long-term strategy

In his recent column, Paul Rogers writes that al-Qaida's strategy "still seems largely unrecognised": "al-Qaida is specifically interested in inciting greater US and western military action anywhere in the Islamic world. It is not expecting to ‘defeat’ the United States in the short term. Quite the contrary – it positively seeks an increased confrontation as a means of greatly increasing support for both its medium-term and longer-term aims." Tragically, he writes, "it may take more atrocities and much more loss of life before a deeper understanding [of this strategy] begins to dawn" in Washington.

Media Spin Separates War From Death

After providing a brief overview of what happened the last time we attacked Iraq, Norman Solomon asks, "What are the likely human consequences of the impending war on Iraq? News media should be asking that question. But the American public remains in the dark." He continues,

"The avowed U.S. aim of regime change means any new conflict will be much more intense and destructive than the Gulf War, and will involve more deadly weapons developed in the interim," said a report issued last month by health professionals with the London-based Medact organization and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. They warned: "Furthermore, the mental and physical health of ordinary Iraqis is far worse than it was in 1991, making them much more vulnerable this time round."

The report found that "credible estimates of the total possible deaths on all sides during the conflict and the following three months range from 48,000 to over 260,000. Civil war within Iraq could add another 20,000 deaths. Additional later deaths from post-war adverse health effects could reach 200,000."

And here's another conclusion from the report that major U.S. news outlets keep ignoring: "In all scenarios, the majority of casualties will be civilians."

Related: Solomon popped up on CNN in a discussion with Jonah Goldberg and Wolf Blitzer on US policy towards Iraq. See the transcript.

An "Opportunity" for Israel

Ha'aretz reports:

Speaking on Monday at the Herzliya Conference on Israel's National Strength and Security, Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that the impending U.S. military operation in Iraq could provide "an opportunity for us." Israel, Netanyahu explained, might be able to work toward its goals of replacing the Palestinian Authority's leadership, and, subsequently, democratizing Palestinian society.

Some commentators, most notably Justin Raimondo, have suggested that the preoccupation with attacking Iraq is driven mostly - or primarily - by Israeli security demands. This admission by Netanyahu lends some credence to that argument.

Aim is off in our quest for security

"It's like buying a cannon to defend yourself against killer bees. When it inevitably fails, when you get stung and hurt bad, you don't go out and buy more cannons.

"But if cannons is all you know, maybe you do."

That's the analogy used by Jay Bookman to describe the bizarre justification for increased military expenditures following 9/11.

It's The Economy, Stupid: What Bush Has Done For America

While Bush has been President:

- Unemployment has risen from 3.9% to 6.0%;
- 42 States will or expect to make Medicaid Cuts;
- 41.2 Million People in America Have NO Health Insurance;
- Number of Americans living in Poverty rises for first time in eight years;
- Overall economic growth at 1 percent, the lowest for any administration in 50 years;
- The value of Americans' stock holdings down $4.5 trillion and a 30 percent drop in the value of IRAs and 401(k) plans;
- A projected budget surplus of $5.6 trillion converted into a deficit of $400 billion;
- Bush Budget Will Spend the Entire Social Security Trust Fund Over Next Two Years;
- "Consumer Comfort" has dropped from +20 to -20 in one year;
- 49% of Americans Are "Dissatisfied With The Way Things Are Going in the United States at this time," up from 29%;
- Bush Budget Posted First Deficit Since 1997, Predicted Deficits Until 2005;
- 98% of Pension Funds expected to be Under-Funded;
- "Consumer Confidence" continues to drop;
- U.S. debt will have "Major International Consequences."

Sources for these numbers are available at BuzzFlash.com.

We really care about those Iraqis...

Salvaging the Wreck

Laurie King-Irani offers these hopeful words.

We are now living in a wreck--all of us, from Washington, DC, to the refugee camps of Beirut and Gaza, to the bombed out villages of Afghanistan, to the windswept coasts of California, to the suburbs of Tel Aviv. In the last few years, the world has come to represent a submerged disaster, floating aimlessly beneath the waves of history, economy, and politics, devoid of leadership, vision, justice, or compassion. Our world, this wreck, is a huge, complex, and injured, yet precious thing, its parts deteriorating, but still interconnected in ways we do not know unless we investigate, diving deeper, directing our flashlights into the hull...

What one salvages from long visits to the wreck, from looking at it with courage and honesty, as my wise women friends in Beirut have done, is a deep awareness that there is no "us" and "them." Underwater, there are no borders or fences. All flows together: hope, horror, memory, dreams, fear and wonder. We are in the wreck together; we are in danger of drowning in the same sea, in need of the same oxygen of justice, sense, decency, compassion, and dignity, and threatened by the same dangers: fundamentalist ideologies of all sorts--nationalist and religious alike; the insidious belief that some lives are cheap, others are worthy; and the delusion that military might and coercive force will deliver us from the disaster that is--sadly--already in progress.

Does Sharon dictate US policy?

When one sees these two stories so close together:

Sharon nixes envoy’s ‘2 states’ remark
3 December 2002

President backs off Palestinian statehood
3 December 2002

...one wonders just how much input Sharon has in forging American policy towards Israel/Palestine.

US: Agent of Change

"Maybe the United States will just march into Iraq, take over and give Saddam Hussein the boot," wonders Michael S. James. "Maybe it will get Iraqis or other allies to do the dirty work. Maybe economic strangulation will smoke Saddam out. Perhaps he'll even end up dead. Such things have befallen America's enemies before."

See: "America Has a Long History of Prompting ‘Regime Change’" (this is on ABCNews.com, btw, not some commie-pinko site).

Blatant Disregard for the Law

John Pilger charts the rampant hypocrisy on Iraq in his latest column. To cite one example, he writes,

On September 12, George W Bush appeared before the UN General Assembly and asked dramatically: "Are Security Council resolutions to be honoured or cast aside?"

The answer came a few weeks later when the Security Council passed Resolution 1435, which demanded that "Israel immediately cease measures in and around Ramallah including the destruction of Palestinian civilian and security infrastructure" and withdraw its "occupying forces from Palestinian cities towards the positions held prior to September 2000".

The resolution was passed 14-0 with one abstention, the United States. Israel dismissed it; and nothing happened. This was no surprise. The Israelis have defied at least 40 Security Council resolutions and scores of General Assembly resolutions: a record of dishonouring and "casting aside" the law (to quote Bush) unequalled by any nation since the UN was founded...

According to the Bush logic, we should be getting ready to bomb Tel Aviv, no?

Constitution to be written and amended by private foundations and think tanks

Underreported.com warns that "a private organization funded by the power elite will be coming up with a suite of Constitutional Amendments." Read more on this here.

Turning the tables on TIA and Poindexter

John Gilmore has this proposition for ya:

The SF Weekly's column by Matt Smith in the Dec 3 issue points out that there may be some information that John M. and Linda Poindexter of 10 Barrington Fare, Rockville, MD, 20850, may be missing in their pursuit of total information awareness. He suggests that people with information to offer should phone +1 301 424 6613 to speak with that corrupt official and his wife. Neighbors Thomas E. Maxwell, 67, at 8 Barringon Fare (+1 301 251 1326), James F. Galvin, 56, at 12 (+1 301 424 0089), and Sherrill V. Stant (nee Knight) at 6, may also lack some information that would be valuable to them in making decisions -- decisions that could affect the basic civil rights of every American.

Some people are suspicious that the degenerate Poindexter's Total Information Awareness system will be used to harass and track the activities of people who some significant fraction of society disagree with. They fear a replacement of today's general tolerance (and official blindness to one's Bill-of-Rights-protected activities such as speech and association), with specific harassment of those whose names pop up in the database. Such harassment of people who are not reasonably suspected of criminal activity would destroy much of value in our society, such as the presumption of innocence and the "live and let live" philosophy that encourages diversity. Offering dissidents "a death of a thousand cuts" by constantly harassing them and denying them the privileges of ordinary life would be far worse than charging them with a (bogus) crime, which they could clear up merely by demonstrating their innocence in court.

It would be good to have an early public demonstration of just how bad life could become for such targeted citizens. While ratfink's system is probably not working yet, and a large part of it is classified, much of it can be manually simulated for demonstration purposes. Public records can be manually searched and then posted to the net by people who happen to be looking there for something else. Many Internet public records search sites also exist; try searching for "People finder". (Matt Smith at matt.smith@sfweekly.com has offered to "publish anything that readers can convincingly claim to have obtained legally".) Photographs and videos of the target, their house, car, family, and associates, can be made and circulated to demonstrate facial recognition techniques.

Time to get to work...

War, Just in Case

From the AP:

U.S. officials say they hold little hope Saddam Hussein will provide any useful information in Iraq's promised declaration regarding its weapons of mass destruction programs, but they will compare the report to U.S. intelligence's own findings just in case.

Just in case, eh? That's a convenient little scenario for the Bush administration: if, gosh darn it, the UN inspectors don't find anything, just drape out some "US intelligence" to prove the need for an invasion...

It's becoming clear (err...if it already wasn't clear) that, in the words of Robert Fisk, "America plans to go to war whatever the UN inspectors find."

The tiger of terrorism: Islamic anti-semitism

Richard Webster has written an article for the New Statesman which directly addresses an issue many leftists (including myself) fail to adequately confront, partly because of the fear that doing so will serve as a further rationalization to crush Arabs and Muslims: Islamic anti-semitism. He observes,

The charge that militant Islam is inherently anti-semitic is, or should be, a deeply disturbing one. The first question we need to ask is ‘is it true?’. My impression is that this question tends to be avoided (or at least not adequately addressed) by commentators such as John Pilger, Robert Fisk and Noam Chomsky who have written most critically about the war on terrorism. If so, the omission is a dangerous one, for it leaves extraordinarily powerful ammunition in the sole possession of those who are the advocates of war. Those advocates sometimes seem, on this issue, to be seeing reality more clearly than their opponents do. If we are to redress the balance we need to reconsider the entire question of Islamic anti-semitism.

…One reason we hear so little about Arab and Muslim anti-semitism, except from pro-Israeli commentators, is that to draw attention to it might seem unhelpful to the Palestinian cause. It may also seem unjust to accuse of vilifying their enemies those who fight in the cause of the very group of people who are among the most vilified in the world: leading Israeli politicians have described Palestinians as ‘cockroaches in a jar’, ‘two-legged beasts,’ ‘lice’ and ‘a cancer’. As Edward Said (among many others) has pointed out, few national groups have been robbed of their humanity in the eyes of the world more comprehensively than ordinary Palestinian men and women.

Just as importantly, some pro-Israeli commentators and pressure groups have used the charge of anti-semitism to conduct a relentless and bullying campaign against any journalist who dares to make entirely legitimate criticisms of the Israeli government or the Israeli military. The tactic has been frighteningly effective, particularly in America. As Robert Fisk has written: ‘Our gutlessness, our refusal to tell the truth, our fear of being slandered as “anti-Semites”, the most loathsome of libels against any journalist, means that we are aiding and abetting terrible deeds in the Middle East.’

Webster goes on to conclude,

The great danger of the left’s omissions, and in particular its failure to engage with the problem of Arab anti-semitism, is that Hitchens, Sullivan and all those commentators who have characterised their opponents as ‘Islamofascist’, are currently succeeding in persuading many people of what is false by urging upon them what is true.

Contrary to what they suggest the greatest threat to world peace we now face is not that posed by Islamist dreams of world-domination; it is that which is posed by our failure to understand that these cruel and destructive dreams are themselves intimately related - by a complex process of reciprocal influence - to western fantasies of world-domination.

Largely because of the masssive increase of military and economic power which has taken place in America over the last half-century, it is these western fantasies which are much nearer to being realised than their Islamic counterparts. Yet precisely because the imperialism of the United States is the habitual environment in which we live, these fantasies have been rendered, like the ocean to the fish, all but invisible to us. So too has the extent to which we have dislocated the rest of the world in order to turn them into reality.

…But the idea that there is some kind of autonomous ‘Islamofascism’ which can be crushed, or that the West may defend itself against the terrorists who threaten it by cultivating that eagerness to kill militant Muslims which Hitchens urges upon us, is a dangerous delusion.

The symptoms that have led some to apply the label of ‘Islamo-fascism’ are not reasons to forget root causes. They are reasons for us to examine even more carefully than we have done up to now what those root causes actually are.

When we do so, we find that the key to the problem remains in the history of Western colonialism in the middle east, and above all in Palestine. It is there, and not in Iraq, or Iran or Syria that our main political energies and our strategic intelligence should now be deployed.

Frankly, excerpts cannot do the article justice. It is a long piece, yes, but I urge you to read the whole thing. Also be sure to check out the web bibliography Webster has compiled at the end of the article.

Regime Change, Now

Robin Miller offers "A Proposal for Regime Change in the United States."

One Nation Under Fox

Michael Wolff has some interesting things to say about Fox News in this article from New York Magazine. He writes, "Fox really isn’t in the service of the Republicans. [Chairman Roger] Ailes can say this baldly and confidently. (The Republicans, more and more, follow the Fox line.) Fox isn’t in any conventional sense ideological media. It’s just that being anti-Democrat, anti-Clinton, anti-yuppie, anti-wonk turns out to be great television. Great ratings make for convenient ideology." And continues,

Part of the explanation of the conservative-media success is that in a liberal nation, they have had to develop a more compelling and subversive story line. They’ve fully capitalized on the outsider, tough-talking, Cassandra thing. Accordingly, while the country remains unenthusiastic about Republican policies, as the Times reported last week, Republicans get positive ratings (go figure).

And a part of this is the dancing-dog advantage. Conservatives have been hired by the heretofore liberal media to be, precisely, conservatives—hyperconservatives, even; eager exaggerations (wink). Whereas, when liberalish people are hired by liberalish media organizations, the issue is to be neutral, unliberal. The main challenge for George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s This Week is never to let on that he once worked for the Democrats.

Osama's 'Letter to America'

Harley Sorensen asks in an opinion piece for the SF Chronicle, do “you think that anyone in America is curious as to why Muslim fundamentalists hate us so much? If we were given the answer, straight from the horse's mouth, would anyone pay attention? If Osama bin Laden wrote, 'This is why we hate you,' and then laid it all out, chapter and verse, do you think we'd be curious enough to read what he had to say?”

He continues,

The answers to these questions seem to be no, no and no.

Lives are at stake in our "war on terrorism," perhaps thousands of lives, maybe hundreds of thousands -- and not just overseas. Untold numbers of Americans might die -- right here, in the United States of America -- before our "war" is resolved, and yet we seem not one whit interested in the motivations of our enemies.

That's the conclusion one must reach if one looks at our studious avoidance of the "letter to America" purportedly written by Osama bin Laden.

Have you seen that letter? Have you read about it in your newspapers? Have you heard it mentioned on television or on the radio?

Not likely. As near as I can tell, after searches on both Nexis and Google, bin Laden's "letter to America" has been thoroughly ignored by the American press.

I have doubts about the authenticity of the letter, but it's remarkable that hardly anyone in the US press has picked up on it.

IDF Blows up Food Earmarked for Palestinians

Just about two weeks ago, it was reported that "more than a fifth of Palestinian children in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are suffering from acute malnutrition." UNRWA elaborated in a press release that, "four out of five Palestinian children have inadequate iron and zinc intake, deficiencies that cause anemia and weaken the immune system. Over half the children in Gaza and the West Bank have inadequate caloric and vitamin A intake. Half of Palestinian children have inadequate folate intake."

So, what to make of the news that "Israeli soldiers blew up a warehouse full of food for needy Palestinians" over the weekend? The World Food Programme contends that the IDF (purposefully?) destroyed over US$271,000 worth of food, "which was housed on the ground floor of a three-storey building and clearly marked as WFP property, mainly comprised donations from the European Commission and Sweden and was to be distributed by the Ministry of Social Affairs to some 41,300 destitute people affected by the ongoing humanitarian crises in the Gaza Strip."

A tragic mistake, the IDF claims. Or, perhaps, part of Sharon's renewed effort to enact "vengeance" and further collective punishment for the recent spate of terrorist attacks?

Iraq: Beyond Regime Change

Sandy Tolan connects the dots behind the proposed war on Iraq in a LA Times opinion piece. The preoccupation with removing Hussein, he argues, "has less to do with weapons of mass destruction than with implementing an ambitious U.S. vision to redraw the map of the Middle East. The new map would be drawn with an eye to two main objectives: controlling the flow of oil and ensuring Israel's continued regional military superiority."

The "Parallel" Legal Universe

Charles Lane of the Washington Post reports,

The Bush administration is developing a parallel legal system in which terrorism suspects -- U.S. citizens and noncitizens alike -- may be investigated, jailed, interrogated, tried and punished without legal protections guaranteed by the ordinary system, lawyers inside and outside the government say.

The elements of this new system are already familiar from President Bush's orders and his aides' policy statements and legal briefs: indefinite military detention for those designated "enemy combatants," liberal use of "material witness" warrants, counterintelligence-style wiretaps and searches led by law enforcement officials and, for noncitizens, trial by military commissions or deportation after strictly closed hearings.

Only now, however, is it becoming clear how these elements could ultimately interact.

For example, under authority it already has or is asserting in court cases, the administration, with approval of the special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, could order a clandestine search of a U.S. citizen's home and, based on the information gathered, secretly declare the citizen an enemy combatant, to be held indefinitely at a U.S. military base. Courts would have very limited authority to second-guess the detention, to the extent that they were aware of it.

...At least one American has been shifted from the ordinary legal system into the parallel one: alleged al Qaeda "dirty bomb" plotter Jose Padilla, who is being held at a Navy brig, without the right to communicate with a lawyer or anyone else. U.S. officials have told the courts that they can detain and interrogate him until the executive branch declares an end to the war against terrorism.

More evidence that we're slouching towards fascism....

And since Jose Padilla's popped up in the news again, recall this post from August. It's quite apropos.

World AIDS Day

"The scale of the AIDS pandemic is unprecedented," contend Salih Booker and William Minter. "But AIDS is like other widespread diseases in that it is fueled not only by unequal access to medical care but also by social and economic conditions. Poverty and gender inequality fuel the pandemic in Africa. Malnutrition reduces resistance to disease. Migrant labor patterns (well entrenched in Africa from colonialism and apartheid) raise the risk of infection. The proximate cause of the spread of AIDS is HIV, but vulnerability to infection is linked not only to behavior but especially to unequal power relations between women and men, and to poverty and living conditions [see Eileen Stillwaggon, "AIDS and Poverty in Africa"]. Poverty, in turn, is linked to race and to the structural position of communities within countries and of countries within the world economy.

"Thus debating what is to be done about AIDS keeps leading back to broader issues..."

Material Breach: US Crimes in Iraq

"D-Day of December 8th quietly approaches," writes Heather Wokusch, "the day Iraq must provide the UN Security Council with a complete accounting of its weapons programs, plus its civilian chemical/biological/nuclear production and research activities. Even though UN weapons inspectors have criticized the December 8th deadline as unrealizable, the consequences for missing it will be catastrophic: Iraq will be in 'material breach' of UN resolution 1441, and therefore subject to swift and decisive military action."

But at this point, UN 1441 seems little more than a whitewash pretext for a US-led attack on Iraq. With US warplanes patrolling Iraq's no-fly zone, bombing raids against Iraq ongoing, multiple aircraft carriers on alert and 60,000 US troops currently in or around the Persian Gulf, it's clear the war has already begun, "material breach" or not. When it's convenient for the Bush administration, Iraq will be found to have violated some aspect of the UN resolution, and the current buildup and covert military activity will explode into an all-out attack.

The justification (that Iraq's Hussein violates international law with his weapons of mass destruction and is thus a menace to world peace) seems a bit ironic in light of US actions in Iraq these past eleven years...

Read on.

More on HK

Eric Alterman referenced this quote from Todd Gitlin in an entry on his blog about the Kissinger-9/11 probe announcement:

If you're a college professor who tells students that you saw combat in Vietnam when you were actually teaching history at West Point, your lie will land on the front page of the New York Times and provide debate fodder in the letters columns, on National Public Radio and wherever else serious people reason together. On the other hand, if you're a serial liar who claims to have brought peace to Vietnam while presiding over pointless deaths in the hundreds of thousands (more than 22,000 Americans, the rest Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians), you'll never dine alone or lack for honors; you'll be lionized by Ted Koppel and your book of International Studies 101 pieties will be treated as "an intellectual event...that is also a tour de force" (Walter Russell Mead in the Washington Post).

That sums up the Kissinger complex well. The quote is from a Salon book review from last year.