Time away

If you couldn't tell, I've been on an unannounced hiatus. At this point, I'm not sure when I'll resume blogging.

Mistakes have been made

On to Tehran, part xxiv

While US officials "remain divided" over Iran, it looks like the big boy on the Mid East block is lining up the dominoes for an eventual strike, just in case it is deemed necessary.

Thus, according to Reuters, Israel is in the process of "buying" from the US "$319 million worth of air-launched bombs, including 500 'bunker busters' that could be effective against Iran's underground nuclear facilities."

And while it is briefly mentioned in the Reuters piece, it's worth highlighting that Israel really isn't buying anything; the money for the bombs is coming out of the US aid budget to its "special friend."

Outsourcing US policy, anyone?

The toll

Jefferson Morley looks at the different estimates of Iraqi civilian casualties in media around the world.

Teflon George

Antonia Zerbisias, echoing my thoughts almost precisely:

Way to go, CBS.

Thanks to your rush to kick off a new season of 60 Minutes II on Sept. 8 with big ratings, your bungling of what the pro-war blogosphere has dubbed "Memogate," your hesitation to admit the error of your ways and your blinkered eye on the bottom line, you carpet-bombed the U.S. presidential race with bluster and blather about proportional spacing, nuking what little remains of serious political discourse in the U.S. and making the Kerry-Edwards campaign collateral damage.

Meanwhile, the Bush-Cheney Jedi Mind Tricksters — what consortiumnews.com called them yesterday — laugh again, as the media underplay an ever-burgeoning budget deficit, a damaging internal intelligence report warning of an Iraqi civil war, Britain's impending withdrawal of troops from the "coalition," another lie by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on the state and size of Iraqi security forces and just about any story that might damage George W. Bush's run for re-election.

Does nothing stick to this guy, who has yet to come clean about his alkie, Vietnam-evading past? After all, the basics of the CBS story were true, reported five years ago by Greg Palast and other real don't-just-play-one-on-TV reporters.

Over the weekend

* Patrick Cockburn and Tom Engelhardt have exceedingly grim reviews of what's happened over the past week in the Iraq.

* Dexter Filkins of the NY Times reports that the US military is considering a "year end drive" to retake areas of Iraq that have fallen outside of its control.

* So it's final. No WMD in Iraq. Ho hum.

* In related essays, Mark Danner looks at the hidden story of Abu Ghraib and Marjorie Cohn explores the Bush administration's war crimes, along with their cover-up.

* Salon's Eric Boehlert offers a useful primer on questions about Bush's Guard Duty, particularly in the wake of the flap over the discredited CBS memos.

* Remember when Presidential campaigns used to be about the issues? asks Jason Leopold.

* "It's ironic that John Kerry's character is under assault for the most courageous political act of his life -- his opposition to the Vietnam War," observes Robert Jensen. But rather than embracing that part of his personal history, Kerry is running from it. As a result, Jensen laments, "a campaign controversy that could help the United States come to terms with bigger truths about its brutal history of empire building is being used by both parties in ways that obscure the truth."

* Here's a revised version of the afterword to Noam Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival. It's worth a read.

More reading

I remain pressed for time, so here's another link dump:

* "A classified National Intelligence Estimate prepared for President Bush in late July spells out a dark assessment of prospects for Iraq," the NY Times reports. "The estimate outlines three possibilities for Iraq through the end of 2005, with the worst case being developments that could lead to civil war [while the] most favorable outcome described is an Iraq whose stability would remain tenuous in political, economic and security terms."

* "After weeks of hurricanes and controversies over swift boats in Vietnam and Texas and Alabama National Guard records," Jim Lobe observes in a round-up of recent media reports, "Iraq is beginning to creep back onto the front pages, and the news is uniformly bad."

* The US military is still striking Fallujah with impunity, and of course killing scores of Iraqi civilians in the process. Meanwhile, Baghdad continues to be torn apart by daily violence.

* Media reports of US casualties in Iraq have been lowballed by approximately 17,000, according to UPI.

* Shaheen Chughtai reports on the effects of depleted uranium in Iraq.

* The US military is running low on National Guard and reserve troops, according to a GAO survey.

* Ariel Sharon is threatening to expel or kill Arafat again. Sharon also recently admitted that he has no intention of following the much touted "road map" to peace.

* Kevin Drum breaks down the "whole Killian memo fiasco," arguing that "even if they're real they don't really add much to the story." Plus, Ian Williams agrees with Drum and FAIR urges the media to dig deeper.

* Ray McGovern introduces the new, Daniel Ellsberg-led Truth-Telling Project.

* Stephen Zunes asks: Is Kerry Really More Open than Bush to Alternative Foreign Policy Perspectives?

* Lewis Lapham provides a brief history of the Republican propaganda mill and Naomi Klein illustrates the pillaging of Iraq in this month's Harper's.

A brief rundown

Here's some material that's run across my computer screen in the last few days:

* Elizabeth Drew has been reading the 9/11 report and found some interesting stuff in there that isn't getting nearly the attention it deserves.

* Bush claimed "more than three quarters of Al Qaeda’s key members and associates have been detained or killed" since 9/11 in his RNC acceptance speech, but as Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball of Newsweek suggest, that number is completely meaningless. Nevertheless, even conceding the Bush administration this figure, Jim Lobe says it looks like the US is losing the "war on terror."

* A war on terrorism? Ed Herman says it's better characterized as a war OF terrorism.

* You can watch the new documentary Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear, and the Selling of American Empire online, here. You can also find out more about the film or purchase a copy of it, here.

* The greatest threat to the United States is not multinational terror organizations, argues Anatol Lieven. Rather, it is the United States itself; specifically, its potent strain of nationalism.

* America is already venturing down the winding road of fascism, writes Chris Floyd.

* You might not have noticed it since the press and the bulk of the intelligentsia are focused elsewhere, but Justin Raimondo observes that the United States recently lost Iraq to the rebels.

* Sunday was an absolutely horrific day around Iraq, with more than 80 civilians killed in a spattering of car bombs and mortar attacks from insurgents and an air strike from the US military. Plus: the situation in Iraq is worse than you think and the US military's "get tough" tactics are backfiring.

* Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post reports that the command to attack Fallujah following the lynching of four contractors mercenaries in April "originated in the White House," according to some "senior U.S. officials in Iraq." Oh, and the Iraqi force that was supposed to be patrolling the city has been disbanded; it turns out that it was really helping the insurgency.

* That socialist rag the Financial Times says it's "Time to consider Iraq withdrawal."

* Seymour Hersh's new book is out. Read a two part excerpt from the Guardian.

* John Cassidy decodes the radical agenda behind the Bush administration's taxation policies.

* While scores of bloggers are pouring over the Killian memos from CBS News regarding Bush's Guard Service, US News & World Report has unearthed new, unrelated evidence that Dubya was derelict in his duty.

* A US government study has found that nearly "400,000 New Yorkers breathed in the most toxic polluting cloud ever recorded after the twin towers were brought down three years ago, but no proper effort has been made to find out how their health has been affected," the Independent reports.

* God Bless Bob Novak.

Three long years...

9/11 for the record

NOW with Bill Moyers was excellent this week. If you get a chance to watch it, please do. The entire episode was devoted to the 9/11 report and, even though I learned nothing new, the show did an outstanding job outlining the important events leading up to the attacks of three years ago.

You can also read this piece by Moyers that summarizes much of what's covered this week. But, frankly, it doesn't do justice to what NOW put together.

Neocons for anti-Semitism

Eric Alterman, writing in his blog on the curious topic of neocons and anti-semitism, asks: "what could possibly have been a more generous gift to Jew-haters than this foolish [Iraq] war?"

Think of it:

The American people were purposely misled and are paying for it dearly, in both blood and treasure;

The war was planned by neoconservatives, many of whom worked directly with their counterparts in the Israeli government, who helped perpetrate the deception;

The war did improve the security of Israel, but not that of the United States.

No other country’s population thought it was a good idea, including Britain, save that of Israel.

Some of the very people who helped perpetrate the deception, most notably Richard Perle and R. James Woolsey, have used the opportunity to make millions for themselves in the process.

Pentagon neocons were spying for Israel and using the Israel lobby as a conduit. (How perfectly paradigmatic is that?)

It seems to me all of the above constitutes a gift of enormous generosity to those who seek to blame Jews for divided loyalty, dishonesty, and duplicity in the service of their own financial interests. Of course, those of us who point this out, just as the people who recognize the fact that Israel’s brutal treatment of the Palestinians endangers Jews all over the world -- will somehow be tarred as anti-Semites or “self-hating Jews” rather than those who, like the Neocons, have themselves poured gasoline on the fires of anti-Semitism and Jew-hatred the world over.

Indeed.

The "G" word, finally

Danna Harman of the CS Monitor and Jim Lobe of IPS report on Colin Powell's testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he called the situation in Darfur "genocide" and pledged to put pressure on the UN to stop the activities of the Sudanese government.

The road to Abu Ghraib

With Abu Ghraib fresh on the mind, Alfred McCoy urges us to recall the CIA's long history of using torture:

Looked at historically, the Abu Ghraib scandal is the product of a deeply contradictory U.S. policy toward torture since the start of the Cold War. At the UN and other international forums, Washington has long officially opposed torture and advocated a universal standard for human rights. Simultaneously, the CIA has propagated ingenious new torture techniques in contravention of these same international conventions, a number of which the U.S has ratified. In battling communism, the United States adopted some of its most objectionable practices -- subversion abroad, repression at home, and most significantly torture itself.

From 1950 to 1962, the CIA conducted massive, secret research into coercion and the malleability of human consciousness which, by the late fifties, was costing a billion dollars a year. Many Americans have heard about the most outlandish and least successful aspect of this research -- the testing of LSD on unsuspecting subjects. While these CIA drug experiments led nowhere and the testing of electric shock as a technique led only to lawsuits, research into sensory deprivation proved fruitful indeed. In fact, this research produced a new psychological rather than physical method of torture, perhaps best described as "no-touch" torture.

The Agency's discovery was a counterintuitive breakthrough, the first real revolution in this cruel science since the seventeenth century -- and thanks to recent revelations from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, we are now all too familiar with these methods, even if many Americans still have no idea of their history. Upon careful examination, those photographs of nude bodies expose the CIA's most basic torture techniques -- stress positions, sensory deprivation, and sexual humiliation.

For vivid illustration, it's always fun to peruse two of the CIA's manuals on torture. That should hold you over until Hersh's book comes out next week, when hopefully these disgraceful policies will again be thrust into the face of a complacent public that seems perfectly fine with blaming those "few bad apples" even while there's a mountain of evidence that suggests responsibility for Abu Ghraib reaches all the way to the White House.

Forgotten victims

Patrick Cockburn reports from Iraq:

Iraqi officials demanded to know yesterday why so little international attention was being given to their numerous dead as the US mourned the death of 1,000 soldiers since the invasion of Iraq.

"When I heard on television that the Americans had lost 1,000 military killed in Iraq, I asked myself, what about our side? What is the number of Iraqis who have died?" said Dr Amer al-Khuzaie, an Iraqi deputy health minister.

Nobody really knows and, worse, the media don't seem to care too much, but the AP estimates between 10,000 and 30,000 Iraqis killed since the glorious liberation of March 2003.

Censored 2005

Project Censored has recently published its list of the top 25 censored media stories of 2003-2004. Check 'em out.

Body Count 1001

Stan Goff puts the infamous milestone of "1000" into its proper, depressing, enraging context:

One thousand times now, people have arrived home or looked out the front door only to see a military sedan, with two troops in their dress uniforms.

This was my nightmare while my own son was there. An army sedan.

When people see it, they know in that terrible instant that someone they pushed out of their own body, someone they saw take a first step and speak a first word, or with whom they made love, or the anchor in the stormy world that is a parent, someone called brother or sister or grandchild, that sedan with the survival officer and the chaplain signifies that this someone has been erased and is no longer in the world with us, that something shocking has happened to the living body we once held close and will never hold again.

One thousand times now, as George W. Bush and his entourage smirked and plotted and slapped each other on the back, those left to live have been flayed with grief then set adrift in the void of their own loss to seek some trifling scrap of consolation. Why?

It's so the oxygen thieves who run the US Empire can chase after their grandiose delusions in drawing rooms, surrounded by an army of servants attending to their every whim, and so the class they represent can continue to accumulate money. That's why a thousand ripped up bodies have been shipped home--boxed and draped in bright new flags to sanitize the obscenity.

These pampered fucking sociopaths have no conception of the anguish of ordinary people, of how inconsolable is this loss.

When we reflect on the personal enormity and breathless depth of the sorrow of ordinary people that we know, then maybe we can begin to understand how that pain is mirrored in the ordinary Iraqi people who have been occupied--where their children have been bombed, homes destroyed, husbands and fathers and wives and mothers and best-friends and sons and daughters and grandchildren and neighbors and schoolmates killed and maimed, whole communities reduced to rubble, dignity daily kicked face first into the mud, humiliation their daily bread and fear their meat, the very soil transformed into a radioactive toxin that leaves women giving birth to pitiable monsters and people rotting in their own bodies from inexplicable malignancies.

This is what we can appreciate about others when we begin with the loss of those we think of as our own. This is what we can comprehend about who is the real enemy here; when we begin to really see the kind of personal devastation that is the price of this war. And a price paid for what?

MIA?

Questions about Dubya's National Guard records seem to be coming back to the fore.

Odd coincidence, that

American Leftist: "Did anyone notice that the Saudis are keeping their promise?"

Double talk

In the Independent, Graydon Carter takes a look at the numbers that belie Bush's double standards.

A referendum on reality

Robert Parry, speaking the blunt truth about what lies ahead some two months from now:

Election 2004 suddenly is not just about whether John Kerry or George W. Bush will lead the United States the next four years. It’s not even about which of the candidates has better policies or is more competent.

This election has become a test of whether reality still means anything to the American people, whether this country has moved to essentially a new form of government in which one side is free to lie about everything while a paid “amen corner” of ideological media drowns out any serious public debate.

The unwinnable war

"Citizens of the United States are a decent, fair-minded people," writes James Carroll in his return to the opinion pages of the Boston Globe following a six-month hiatus. "The only reason we tolerate what is being done in our name in Iraq is that, for us, this war exists only in the realm of metaphor. The words 'war on terrorism' fall on our ears much in the way that 'war on poverty' or 'war on drugs' did.

"War is an abstraction in the American imagination. It lives there, cloaked in glory, as an emblem of patriotism. We show our love for our country by sending our troops abroad and then 'supporting' them, no matter what. When images appear that contradict the high-flown rhetoric of war -- whether of young GIs disgracefully humiliating Iraqi prisoners or of a devastated holy city where vast fields of American-created rubble surround a shrine -- we simply do not take them in as real. Thinking of ourselves as only motivated by good intentions, we cannot fathom the possibility that we have demonized an innocent people, that what we are doing is murder on a vast scale."

3 years later

Neoliberalism and class power

Continuing along the lines of an essay by Henry Giroux I recently posted, here's a piece by David Harvey that again raises the contradiction between democratic values and neoliberal ideology.

This is the conclusion to Harvey's essay, although the whole thing is worth reading:

The profoundly anti-democratic nature of neo-liberalism is becoming a potent political issue. The democratic deficit in nominally democratic countries is now enormous. Institutional arrangements, like the Federal Reserve, are biased, outside of democratic control. They lack transparency. Internationally, there is no accountability let alone democratic control over institutions such as the IMF, the WTO and the World Bank. To bring back the demands for democratic governance and for economic, political and cultural equality and justice is not to suggest some return to a golden past. The meaning of democracy in ancient Athens has little to do with the meanings we must invest it with today. But right across the globe, from China, Brazil, Argentina, Taiwan, Korea as well as South Africa, Iran, India, Egypt, the struggling nations of Eastern Europe as well as in the heartlands of contemporary capitalism, there are groups and social movements in motion that are rallying to the cause of democratic values.

The Bush Presidency has projected upon the world the idea that American values are supreme and that values matter since they are the heart of what civilization is about. The world is in a position to reject that imperialist gesture and refract back into the heartland of neo-liberal capitalism and neo-conservatism a completely different set of values: those of an open democracy dedicated to the achievement of social equality coupled with economic, political and cultural justice.

On the crutches of "liberty" and "freedom"

George Lakoff outlines the narrative framing of Bush's presidency that dominated last week's RNC convention.

(via American Samizdat)

Challenge Bush, don't follow him

Stephen Zunes argues that if John Kerry wishes to have a chance in the November election, he needs to outline foreign policy stances that fundamentally question the Republican narrative about how the world works, rather than trying to "out-Bush" Bush or throw in a nod to multilateralism and burden sharing in stump speeches.

Because of who we are? Or what we do?

"Why do they hate us?" Sasan Fayazmanesh has an interesting response to this clichéd question.

August toll in Iraq high

"About 1,100 U.S. soldiers and Marines were wounded in Iraq during August," reports the Washington Post, "by far the highest combat injury toll for any month since the war began and an indication of the intensity of battles flaring in urban areas."

Proportionately, however, the death toll for August did not rise in accordance with the number of injuries, a pattern that had been relatively consistent until this past month.

Despite this, the Post reports rather ominously that there were

indications that troops might have suffered more severe wounds in August than in previous months.

At the Baghdad hospital, staff members are accustomed to seeing the most severely injured soldiers and Marines. The hospital, the only one in Iraq where the military's brain and eye surgeons work, handles the worst head wounds. Normally, perhaps half the patients who come to the emergency room qualify as "acute" cases, a term that indicates severity and urgency.

"A soldier who comes in and is almost bleeding to death will require more care than someone who is just shot with a bullet," Beitz explained.

In August, however, the rate of acute cases jumped to three of four ER patients.

That's a high ratio. And as we know, such wounds tend to have far reaching consequences that don't get much coverage in the media.

Bush's BS

Rahul Mahajan critiques the foreign policy parts of Bush's RNC acceptance speech from Thursday.

Recent 'quiet'?

The "relative calm" meme reared its ugly head once again in reports of the suicide bombings in the Israeli city of Beer Sheva this past week.

As Arjan El Fassed explained,

Anyone following the mainstream media couldn't miss the news today. CNN reported that two suicide bombers set off almost simultaneous blasts on buses in Beer Sheva, killing 16 people in addition to themselves. At least 93 people were wounded. Usually, such attacks are followed with a wide range of condemnations.

Ariel Sharon said: "Israel will continue fighting terror with all its might." The U.S. State Department, as well as the European Union, through its foreign policy chief Javier Solana, and the United Nations, through Secretary-General Kofi Annan, in addition to Andrey Denisov, the current president of the Security Council condemned the bombings.

Most news reports stated that Palestinian groups had not carried out a major attack inside Israel since March 14, when 11 Israelis were killed in the port of Ashdod. Only a few referred to the Israeli assassinations of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin and his successor Abdel Aziz Rantisi afterwards. None, however, referred to the number of Palestinians, mostly civilians, killed in the months between. None referred to Israel's military assault on Rafah in May 2004, when Israeli forces killed 44 Palestinians, including 18 children, and destroyed 400 homes, and Beit Hanoun from June to August.

While mainstream media tend to portray suicide bombings as a return to violence after a relatively peaceful period, there have been numerous killings in the weeks leading up to suicide bombings that underscore the lack of evenhanded attention given to loss of life in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

According to statistics from the Red Crescent at least 436 Palestinians have been killed since March 14 to August 31. This month alone, Israeli forces killed 43 Palestinians and injured 285. In May Israeli forces killed 128 Palestinians and wounded 545. In March Israeli forces killed 92 Palestinians, of which 44 Palestinians were killed in the first part of that month.

300+ dead in Russia

The BBC has extensive coverage of the hostage tragedy in Russia and the Guardian has two good essays on the larger implications of this event, one by Simon Tisdall and another by Isabel Hilton.

Chalabi and OSP being investigated, too

The Washington Post reports that Ahmed Chalabi's shenanigans are part of the Larry Franklin-Israeli spy investigation.

In related news, it turns out the OSP is under a separate investigation by the FBI.

Iraq at center of regional turmoil

The Royal Institute of International Affairs, a British think tank, concludes in a recent study that "Iraq will be lucky if it manages to avoid a breakup and civil war, and the country risks becoming the spark for a vortex of regional upheaval," the LA Times reports.

Missions Accomplished?

Craig Aaron rehashes, in painful detail, the lowlights of the Bush administration. Unfortunately, there sure are a lot of them.

More slaves than ever

Susan Llewelyn Leach examines the depressing virulence of modern day slavery in the CS Monitor:

Slaves are cheap these days. Their price is the lowest it's been in about 4,000 years. And right now the world has a glut of human slaves - 27 million by conservative estimates and more than at any time in human history.

Although now banned in every country, slavery has boomed in the past 50 years as the global population has exploded. A billion people scrape by on $1 a day. That extreme poverty combined with local government corruption and a global economy that leaps national boundaries has produced a surge in the number of slaves - even though in the developed world, that word conjures up the 19th century rather than the evening news.

Check out Kevin Bales' organization, "Free the Slaves," for further background.

Hijacking US foreign policy

Writing in the NYRB, the famed liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. reviews three of the recently-published books that attempt to explain how the Bush adminstration got us into the Iraq mess, or, in other words, how the neocons "stole the show."

On a rampage

Nepal shocked; rest of world indifferent

Did you know that the killing of 12 Nepalese hostages in Iraq has set off violent protests throughout Kathmandu?

Probably not. This story has been buried in the media.

(via war in context)

A sham war

"The 'war on terror' is an absolute fraud," announces an angry M. Junaid Alam. "It is a war designed specifically to mask the injustices and inequalities which afflict millions of Americans by aggravating and amplifying the injustices and inequalities inflicted upon millions of non-Americans. Its very existence represents continuous and ever-expanding victory for only the most vicious, opportunistic, and hateful elements among humanity, who will impose upon us tragedy upon tragedy, and terror upon terror, until we break cleanly and completely from the rotted chains of mindless fealty to false national leaders and forge links with those abroad whose friendships we have forgone for far too long."

Banned in America

John Tirman outlines the ordeal of Tariq Ramadan, a Muslim scholar who was set to begin teaching at Notre Dame this fall before he ran afoul of the Patriot Act.

Israeli spy investigations broader than previously reported

"The burgeoning scandal over claims that a Pentagon official passed highly classified secrets to a Zionist lobby group appears to be part of a much broader set of FBI and Pentagon investigations of close collaboration between prominent U.S. neo-conservatives and Israel dating back some 30 years," reports Jim Lobe of IPS.

And, in a separate story, the Boston Globe reports that more of Doug Feith's underlings at the Pentagon are under investigation to determine whether they "went outside normal channels to gather intelligence on Iraq or overstepped their legal mandate by meeting with dissidents to plot against Iran and Syria."

So, as expected, the Franklin imbroglio seems to be merely the tip of the iceberg.