I won't have regular access to the internet until next week, but in the meantime consider making a donation to a relief organization to deal with the Tsunami disaster across the Asian rim (and parts of Africa), if you haven't yet done so.
Google has set up a useful resource page with links to a variety of relief groups, plus other news and information sites.
Here are the first person accounts of the Richmond Times-Dispatch reporter and photographer who were embedded with American troops at a military base in Mosul where mortar and rocket attacks earlier today killed 24, including 19 soldiers, and injured 57.
Update: Military investigators have concluded that the attack was actually a suicide bombing. The toll of casualties has been revised to 22 dead, including 14 soldiers, and 69 wounded.
The ACLU's FOIA mining operation is unearthing more details about the torture of detainees in Iraq and Gitmo at American hands with each passing day. Below are some of the latest revelations.
From an ACLU press release:
A document released for the first time today by the American Civil Liberties Union suggests that President Bush issued an Executive Order authorizing the use of inhumane interrogation methods against detainees in Iraq. Also released by the ACLU today are a slew of other records including a December 2003 FBI e-mail that characterizes methods used by the Defense Department as "torture" and a June 2004 "Urgent Report" to the Director of the FBI that raises concerns that abuse of detainees is being covered up.The NewStandard fleshes out this story in a bit more detail:
...The two-page e-mail that references an Executive Order states that the President directly authorized interrogation techniques including sleep deprivation, stress positions, the use of military dogs, and "sensory deprivation through the use of hoods, etc." The ACLU is urging the White House to confirm or deny the existence of such an order and immediately to release the order if it exists. The FBI e-mail, which was sent in May 2004 from "On Scene Commander--Baghdad" to a handful of senior FBI officials, notes that the FBI has prohibited its agents from employing the techniques that the President is said to have authorized.
The email, which was obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, represents the first hard evidence directly connecting the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal and the White House. The author of the email, whose name is blanked out but whose title is described as "On Scene Commander -- Baghdad," contains ten explicit mentions of an "Executive Order" that the author said mandated US military personnel to engage in extraordinary interrogation tactics.Turning away from the issue of Presidential complicity, a LA Times story summarizes the rest of the allegations, including claims that interrogators stuck "lighted cigarettes...in detainees' ears," Arab prisoners were "humiliated with Israeli flags wrapped around them," some unnamed "officials 'were engaged in a cover-up of these abuses,'" "a female prisoner 'indicated she was hit with a stick,'" and "Army criminal investigators were reviewing 'the alleged rape of a juvenile male detainee at Abu Ghraib prison.'"
An Executive Order is a presidential edict -- sometimes public, sometimes secretive -- instituting special laws or instructions that override or complement existing legislation. The White House has officially neither admitted nor denied that the president has issued an Executive Order pertaining to interrogation techniques.
In June, for instance, an [FBI] agent from the Washington field office reported that an Abu Ghraib detainee was "cuffed" and placed into a position the military called "The Scorpion" hold. Then, according to what the prisoner told the FBI, he was doused with cold water, dropped onto barbed wire, dragged by his feet and punched in the stomach.And lastly, to top things off, Newsweek has a story on Alberto Gonzales' bloodied hands in the torture mess. Such fine moral leadership we have at the head of the American government right now.
In Cuba, a detainee in May, 2002, was reportedly spat upon and then beaten when he attempted to roll onto his stomach to protect himself. At one point, soldiers apparently were "beating him and grabbed his head and beat it into the cell floor," knocking him unconscious.
Another agent reported this past August that while in Cuba he often saw detainees chained hand and foot in a fetal position on the floor "with no chair, food or water."
"Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left for 18-24 hours or more," the agent wrote.
Sometimes, he reported, the room was chilled to where a "barefooted detainee was shaking with cold." Other times, the air-conditioning was turned off and the temperature in the unventilated room rose to well over 100 degrees.
"The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him," the agent reported. "He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night."
The FBI documents also included a report about a prisoner in Cuba whose legs were injured and who said he lied about being a terrorist for fear that otherwise the U.S. military would amputate him.
"He indicated he was injured severely and in a lot of pain," the FBI wrote. Yet the prisoner constantly was being asked whether he had attended a terrorist camp in Afghanistan.
The agent wrote that the prisoner "stated he wanted to receive decent medical treatment, and felt the only way to get it was to tell the Americans what they wanted to hear."
"Can you say 'free-fire zone'?" That's the question Left I on the News asks after noting a kernel of info in this Agence France Presse article about the recent American assault on Fallujah:
The US-backed government put rebel losses at more than 2,000, although unit commanders later revealed their troops had orders to shoot all males of fighting age seen on the streets, armed or unarmed, and ruined homes across the city attest to a strategy of overwhelming force.Tune in 30 years from now for a new book by a consortium of Abrams Tank Veterans For Truth denying this ever happened.
The Washington Post reports:
More than 886,000 deaths could have been prevented from 1991 to 2000 if African Americans had received the same care as whites, according to an analysis in the December issue of the American Journal of Public Health. The study estimates that technological improvements in medicine -- including better drugs, devices and procedures -- averted only 176,633 deaths during the same period.Eh, but who cares about inequality. It ain't important, right?
That means "five times as many lives can be saved by correcting the disparities [in care between whites and blacks] than in developing new treatments," Steven H. Woolf, lead author and director of research at Virginia Commonwealth University's Department of Family Medicine, said in a telephone interview.
Ehsan Ahrari says that pushing for a Rummy resignation is a stupid move, since an ouster would conveniently deflect responsibility for the Iraq mess from President Bush.
"Rumsfeld should stay put," he writes, "and play a major role in paving conditions for America's eventual withdrawal from Iraq. Hounding him out of office is likely to create a bitter debate - if Iraq indeed ends up as a failure of America's foreign policy - that such a reality emerged largely because Rummy was not allowed to remain in office and finish his job."
Blogging will be sporadic for the near future as I don't have regular access to a computer.
* Following news that the White House was recently warned that the insurgency in Iraq poses a major threat to the elections scheduled for late January, two massive car bombs went off in Karbala and Najaf yesterday, while three election workers were executed in broad daylight in Baghdad.
* Michael Isikoff of Newsweek has discovered a late September 2001 memo from Justice Department lawyer John Yoo to White House counsel Alberto Gonzales' office that "seems to lay a legal groundwork for the president to invade Iraq -- without approval of Congress -- long before the White House had publicly expressed any intent to do so."
* Assessing the prospects for a revived challenge to the Bushist project in Iraq and beyond, Michael Albert argues that the "left should develop and pursue a radical organizational, moral, and intellectual alternative, not parrot liberal positions."
* "In the Vietnam War," Jules Witcover observes in the Baltimore Sun, "it took Americans at home years before the return of body bags reached a breaking point against a wrong war, with protest spilling noisily and sometimes violently into the streets. One wonders how much longer, and how many more body bags, it will take this time around."
* A sign of the apocalypse?: "The White House is pressing Pentagon officials to cut tens of billions of dollars from their proposed budgets over the next several years, signaling that the Bush administration's massive defense buildup in the years following the Sept. 11 attacks is coming to an end," reports the LA Times.
* Those seeking a resolution to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict should look back to the period prior to 1948 for inspiration, asserts George Bisharat in the SF Chronicle.
* In The Nation, Tony Judt examines the revived concerns about anti-Semitism in Europe, America, and the Middle East.
* Via War In Context comes a Spiked review of the new book by French sociologist Olivier Roy, Globalised Islam: The Search for a New Ummah, which charts changes in Islamic culture in accord with rapid modernization and globalization. See also this CFR discussion with Roy moderated by Fouad Ajami.
* Geov Parrish has the over/under on the media stories of 2004.
* Liza Featherstone explores how Wal-Mart feeds on and off the poor in The Nation.
Michael Schwartz, a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, outlines what the US military plans to do with Fallujah.
Here are some of the proposed new "rules" for the city:
Nearly half of all Americans believe the U.S. government should restrict the civil liberties of Muslim Americans, according to a nationwide poll.
The survey conducted by Cornell University also found that Republicans and people who described themselves as highly religious were more apt to support curtailing Muslims' civil liberties than Democrats or people who are less religious.
Researchers also found that respondents who paid more attention to television news were more likely to fear terrorist attacks and support limiting the rights of Muslim Americans.
...While researchers said they were not surprised by the overall level of support for curtailing civil liberties, they were startled by the correlation with religion and exposure to television news.
"We need to explore why these two very important channels of discourse may nurture fear rather than understanding," Shanahan said.
I really hope this is some sick, cruel joke.
* The NY Times reports on concerns about the long-term mental health of soldiers fighting in Iraq.
* According to Scripps Howard News Service, nearly 900 U.S. children have had a parent killed in the Iraq war.
* The LA Times reports that "Marines in Iraq conducted mock executions of juvenile prisoners last year, burned and tortured other detainees with electrical shocks, and warned a Navy corpsman they would kill him if he treated any injured Iraqis, according to military documents made public Tuesday."
* Eric Leaver offers five steps to lessen the violence and insecurity in Iraq.
* David Edwards and David Cromwell, the editors of Medialens, argue in a Guardian piece that the "media's failure on Iraq was not really a failure at all, but rather a classic product of 'balanced' professional journalism." Amazingly, they seem to be on the same page as Howie Kurtz, of all people.
* Mike Whitney says a revival of the military draft is well in the works. All that's needed is a "trigger mechanism," like another "massive casualty-producing event" on US soil.
* Jim Lobe asks, Are They Serious About Syria?
* Guns vs. Butter.
* George Monbiot: "On Sunday the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), already responsible for 3.8 million deaths, started again. If you missed it, you’re in good company." The Washington Post has a report on what's happened since then.
* Tom Regan of the CS Monitor has a round up of where the FBI's Israeli spy/AIPAC probe stands.
* Josh Marshall has some good advice for any Democrats with enough of a spine to stand up to the GOP on Social Security privatization.
* Go over to Mousemusings for some...err...musings about Peak Oil.
This is an interesting development:
By the end of the decade, anyone around the world will have instant access to 7 million volumes of information at the University of Michigan's libraries without ever setting foot in Ann Arbor, foraging through a maze of dimly lit shelves or opening a single book.
Google, the popular Internet search engine co-founded by U-M alumnus Larry Page, today plans to announce a deal making virtually everything in the university's extensive collections searchable online.
It's a task that U-M had already begun on its own but, at the current rate, would have taken an inordinate amount of money and about 1,600 years to complete. Now, Google will send in a team of employees to scan books with "non-destructive" technology it developed and expects to be finished in fewer than six years.
Neither U-M nor Google will pay money to the other, and the school gets a digital copy of everything it owns.
"This is the day the world changes," said John Wilkin, a University of Michigan librarian working with Google. "It will be disruptive because some people will worry that this is the beginning of the end of libraries. But this is something we have to do to revitalize the profession and make it more meaningful."
The project, which also includes the New York Public Library and libraries at Harvard, Stanford and Oxford universities, will let Google users see the entire text of works in the public domain and those that the publisher has agreed to show online.
I'm busy. Some quick hits:
* "Even as the White House decries the ominous prospect of Iranian influence on the upcoming Iraqi national elections," reports Lisa Ashkenaz Croke of the NewStandard, "US-funded organizations with long records of manipulating foreign democracies in the direction of Washington’s interests are quietly but deeply involved in essentially every aspect of the upcoming Iraqi elections."
* Jim Lobe is worried about those "neo-conservatives and Christian Right hawks who still believe that Afghanistan and Iraq were just the 'hors d'oeuvres' to a repast of at least five or six courses."
* "Startling new revelations about Ohio's presidential vote have been uncovered" showing that "Republicans – in state and county government, and in the Ohio Republican Party – were determined to undermine and suppress Democratic turnout by a wide variety of methods," report Bob Fitrakis, Steve Rosenfeld and Harvey Wasserman of The Free Press.
* The dislike of President Bush abroad is starting to rub off on normal Americans.
* Mahmoud Abbas is calling for an end to the intifada, instead urging Palestinians to take up non-violent means of resistance. See also: "Why they love Mahmoud Abbas."
* "Former dictator Augusto Pinochet was indicted and put under house arrest Monday in connection with nine kidnappings and one homicide committed during his 1973-1990 de facto regime," reports IPS. "The fate of the 89-year-old retired general once more depends on the [Chilean] Supreme Court, which must determine whether or not the former dictator is mentally fit to stand trial in the current case, which involves Operation Condor, a covert military intelligence-sharing strategy followed by South American dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s." Hey, while they're at it, bring on Henry!
* Those Damn Cubans.
* The ownership society? More like the "risk-based society," as Kevin Drum says. Plus: "Rolling Over, Again?"
After a brief review of some of the war crimes recently committed in Fallujah, where battles continue to rage, Joseph Nevins announces that since "Congress is unwilling to hold accountable high-level officials for war-related crimes, it is the American public's political and moral responsibility to rein in Washington. By acting upon this responsibility, a mobilized citizenry can help end the Iraq debacle and lessen the likelihood that U.S. soldiers are even in a position to commit future atrocities."
This is an excellent analysis by Stan Hister of the issues lurking behind "right wing populism" and the November 2 election results, which like countless post-election pieces uses Thomas Frank's What's the Matter With Kansas? as a launching point for a larger discussion about the future of class-based politics.
"If Nov. 2 proved anything," Hister concludes, "it is that the old political model of 'consensus-building' is now ancient history. We live in radical times. But FDR isn't coming back from the grave and the unions aren't going to shut down Wal-Mart with sit-down strikes. If there is any alternative to right-wing populism, if there is any way of framing class anger so that it is directed at the real enemies on Wall Street instead of at liberal bogeymen, then this can only come from the radical left. But the left has to become as radical as the times, it has to find its revolutionary soul again. And nothing is more important in this respect than putting socialism back on the agenda: so long as the left has no alternative to capitalism, so long as it stands for nothing except 'inclusion', it will only merit contempt. What the rise of right-wing populism shows is that the road to popular consciousness isn't through pragmatic compromise or lesser evilism, but through a radical idealism that speaks to working people's anger. Either the working class will haunt capitalism or it will haunt the left."
Here is a good, contextual article from the LA Times on the emerging battle over Social Security.
Killing family members. Busting down doors. Yet more evidence as to why the Americans are so hated in Iraq.
Gary Webb, the journalist behind the infamous 1996 San Jose Mercury News investigation of the CIA's role in the crack cocaine explosion, has committed suicide.
For a succinct summary of the scandal surrounding the "Dark Alliance" series, including how quickly the press turned on Webb, check out articles by Norman Solomon from FAIR's publication Extra! and Peter Kornbluh from the Columbia Journalism Review.
In the Independent, Scott Ritter has some wise things to say about the UN's oil-for-food scandal:
The corruption evident in the oil-for-food programme was real, but did not originate from within the United Nations, as Norm Coleman and others are charging. Its origins are in a morally corrupt policy of economic strangulation of Iraq implemented by the United States as part of an overall strategy of regime change. Since 1991, the United States had made it clear - through successive statements by James Baker, George W Bush and Madeleine Albright - that economic sanctions, linked to Iraq's disarmament obligation, would never be lifted even if Iraq fully complied and disarmed, until Saddam Hussein was removed from power. This policy remained unchanged for over a decade, during which time hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died as a result of these sanctions.See also Joy Gordon's recent Nation piece, which seems to be adapted from her longer essay in this month's Harper's Magazine.
"Twenty-one months after U.S. forces entered Iraq," the Washington Post reports, "the Defense Department is only now coming to terms with the equipment shortages caused by the prolonged fighting there. The Pentagon has prepared an unprecedented emergency spending plan totaling nearly $100 billion -- as much as $30 billion more than expected as recently as October -- say senior defense officials and congressional budget aides. About $14 billion of that would go to repairing, replacing and upgrading an increasingly frayed arsenal."
"Anti-Semitism is alive and well today worldwide and its major victims are Arabs and Muslims and no longer Jews," writes Joseph Massad in an intriguing article for Al-Ahram. "The fight should indeed be against all anti-Semitism no matter who the object of its oppression is, Arab or Jew."
Despite receiving widespread applause, the British media watchdog group Medialens has some interesting criticisms of the recent 3-part BBC documentary, "The Power of Nightmares."
Check out the Medialens critique (part I & part II), along with the rejoinder from Adam Curtis, the writer and director of the BBC series.
(via dialogic)
Jude Wanniski thinks the UN's oil-for-food "scandal" is "another trick of the neo-conservatives to blow away anyone who gets in the way of their plans for a global empire" and a related AP report suggests that the whole imbroglio isn't quite the clean lil' morality tale conservatives make it out to be (read: UN baaaaaaad).
Outlining the "horrible toll" of the Iraq war on American troops and reservists, Sharon Smith writes that those "who equate 'supporting our troops' with supporting the war should think again."
Perhaps inadvertantly, this story from the AP notes the excellent job most of the American media and politicians are doing ignoring the evidence of electoral fraud and irregularities.
For a good laugh, juxtapose David Brooks' recent NY Times column with Paul Krugman's.
Both are about social security privatization, but it's up to you to figure out which author makes an ass out of himself with his column. Oh, what the hell, here's a hint.
Sam Parry provides an exegesis of Bush's 2004 electoral victory, declaring that there are two possible explanations for it: "the first is that somehow the vote tallies were manipulated; the second is that negative campaigning is far more effective than almost anyone wants to admit."
In an analytic piece for the Washington Post, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen describe how the Bush administration is gearing up for its second term assault on domestic programs "by essentially replicating the formula...used to reshape foreign policy in the first."
A recent feature by CBS' 60 Minutes noted that 5,500 soldiers have deserted from the Iraq war. A related story in the London Times evaluates this news in the context of other "signs of strain" for the US military.
From the NY Times:
More than a billion children - over half the children in the world - suffer extreme deprivation because of war, H.I.V./AIDS or poverty, according to a report released yesterday by the United Nations Children's Fund.
While there have been gains in reducing the death rates of young children and in increasing the number of children in school, the report said that some of the progress made over the past decade and a half had been offset by the toll taken by AIDS and H.I.V., the virus that causes it, and wars, particularly the 55 civil wars since 1990.
...Of the world's estimated 2.2 billion children, over 640 million lived in homes with mud floors or in extreme overcrowded conditions. More than 120 million did not attend primary school, most of them girls. More than 29,000 children died every day of mostly preventable causes. More than 2 million children were employed in the sex industry, while 1.2 million were trafficked.
The report also noted that child poverty had worsened in a number of developed countries, roughly over the past decade, among them Finland, Sweden, Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Austria and Italy. And while the United States still had a child poverty rate substantially higher than any of those European countries - at 21.9 percent - its rate had fallen from 24.3 percent.
The report said that global military spending was $956 billion, while the cost of effectively combating poverty would be $40 to $70 billion.
Who let the devil in the American door? wonders Chris Floyd.
A bunch of ghastly stories have popped up in the media over the last few weeks, providing even more evidence of a US government "gone insane, embracing terror, atrocity and tyranny. Yet," Floyd writes, "there was no public outcry against these desecrations. Few even noticed; fewer still cared."
"U.S. veterans from the war in Iraq are beginning to show up at homeless shelters around the country," reports Mark Benjamin of UPI, "and advocates fear they are the leading edge of a new generation of homeless vets not seen since the Vietnam era."
The LA Times reports that a new article in the New England Journal of Medicine claims that the US military is severely short of medical surgeons in Iraq. The Journal article is accompanied by a very graphic photo essay, too.
Additionally, according to the Boston Globe, troops injured in the war "have required limb amputations at twice the rate of past wars, and as many as 20 percent have suffered head and neck injuries that may require a lifetime of care."
The AP reports that the recently passed intelligence reform bill "includes a mysterious and expensive spy program," speculating that the allotment is for a new satellite system. This might be a signal that the training wheels are being taken off the US military's foray into space.
Update: The NY Times and Washington Post follow up on this story.
After punching up some numbers on his calculator, Paul Craig Roberts asks, "Did the Americans who reelected Bush know that the president who will admit to no mistake is locked on a course that will squander a half trillion dollars for no purpose other than to kill and wound between 36,290 and 73,205 US troops, with 'collateral damage' to Iraqi civilians ranging from 443,941 to 2,825,710 dead and wounded?"
How fitting that Rumsfeld was publicly chastised by soldiers a few days after this depressing column appeared in the Grand Forks Herald.
"Muted by the evidence of the Anglo-American catastrophe in Iraq," John Pilger writes, "the international 'humanitarian' war party ought to be called to account for its largely forgotten crusade in Kosovo, the model for Tony Blair's 'onward march of liberation.' Just as Iraq is being torn apart by the forces of empire, so was Yugoslavia, the multi-ethnic state that uniquely rejected both sides in the cold war."
Thom Hartmann says that watching the BBC documentary, "The Power of Nightmares," is "like taking the Red Pill in the movie The Matrix."
It's the story of idealism gone wrong, of ideologies promoted in the US by Leo Strauss and his followers (principally Wolfowitz, Feith, and Pearle), and in the Muslim world by bin Laden's mentor, Ayman Zawahiri. Both sought to create a utopian world through world domination; both believe that the ends justify the means; both are convinced that "the people" must be frightened into embracing religion and nationalism for the greater good of morality and a stable state. Each needs the other in order to hold power.
Whatever your plans are for tonight or tomorrow, clip three hours out of them and take the Red Pill. Get a pair of headphones (the audio is faint), plug them into your computer, and visit an unofficial archive of the Curtis' BBC documentary at the Information Clearing House website. (The first hour of the program, in a more viewable format, is also available here.)
For those who prefer to read things online, an unofficial but complete transcript is on this Belgian site.
But be forewarned: You'll never see political reality - and certainly never hear the words of the Bush or Blair administrations - the same again.
From E&P:
While it has been known for months that the death of former football star Pat Tillman in Afghanistan was due to friendly fire, in contrast to how it was first reported, a two-part Washington Post probe that appeared on Sunday and Monday went much further, laying blame on the Pentagon for what looks like a deliberate misinformation campaign.
David Zucchino in Monday's Los Angeles Times added more to the story, noting the changing Pentagon story, and adding that even the "amended Pentagon conclusion is contradicted by Afghans who were there the night of April 22."
Zucchino wrote that Tillman's parents "say the military has deceived them and stonewalled their attempts to find out how their son died." His mother said, "I'm disgusted by things that have happened with the Pentagon since my son's death."
His father added: "The investigation is a lie. It's insulting to Pat."
Doug Jehl of the NY Times reports:
A classified cable sent by the Central Intelligence Agency's station chief in Baghdad has warned that the situation in Iraq is deteriorating and may not rebound any time soon, according to government officials.Nothing extraordinary here. Things seem to be unfolding as expected.
The cable, sent late last month as the officer ended a yearlong tour, presented a bleak assessment on matters of politics, economics and security, the officials said. They said its basic conclusions had been echoed in briefings presented by a senior C.I.A. official who recently visited Iraq.
The officials described the two assessments as having been "mixed," saying that they did describe Iraq as having made important progress, particularly in terms of its political process, and credited Iraqis with being resilient.
But over all, the officials described the station chief's cable in particular as an unvarnished assessment of the difficulties ahead in Iraq. They said it warned that the security situation was likely to get worse, including more violence and sectarian clashes, unless there were marked improvements soon on the part of the Iraqi government, in terms of its ability to assert authority and to build the economy.
Writing for Salon, Baruch Kimmerling offers some advice to his fellow Israelis:
Despite the last four violent years of the Al-Aqsa intifada, a growing portion of the Palestinians, particularly those who live in the territories conquered by Israel in 1967, are prepared, for lack of choice, to relinquish the dream of Greater Palestine. Despite the injustice in this concession, they are willing to relinquish their family property and part of their national assets, on condition that they get a state and that their own and their people's lives improve.
In exchange, the Palestinians ask simply that even if we do not return the lands and homes that were usurped in 1948, at least we will recognize their catastrophe and their suffering, and that our society and state were founded and built upon the ruins of the Arab society and culture.
The Palestinians do not even expect that we ask for their forgiveness -- just that we recognize the historical facts. In the political and practical realm, they are entitled to expect that we will take direct responsibility as a society and as a state for the rehabilitation of the Palestinian refugee society that we have created. Also, they have every right to demand that we will not force upon them a "subcontractor" regime, like Arafat's Palestinian Authority, that violates all their human and civil rights.
Simply recognizing the Palestinian narrative, their collective memory, and their suffering -- a narrative Israel is part of, just as the Palestinians are part of the Israeli story -- is necessary for the maturation of Israeli society itself. Strength is not only military. Our true strength will emerge when we are able to look self-critically in the mirror -- and when we understand that the more that Palestinian society and people are rehabilitated, the better it will be for us as well, as Jews and as human beings. If the past, with all its burdens, cannot be forgotten either by us or by the Palestinians, at least we must strive to create a common and empathetic narrative of the past, where each of us recognizes the suffering of the other. That open path of memory, trod by both peoples, would bring greater security to Israel, in the long run, than any wall.
"Despite the public outrage surrounding the Abu Ghraib prison scandal," Rachel Rothschild of The Princetonian reports, "new research by psychology professor Susan Fiske on prisoner abuse found that the incident was not an isolated event. According to her review of more than 25,000 studies and 8 million participants, anyone is capable of these atrocities."
The Strategic Hamlet Program is making a comeback. Just what every rapacious imperial power needs...
FAIR follows-up on the recent CNN-PSYOPS story. No, not that CNN-PSYOPS story, silly.
For anyone interested in the lil' tiff among top liberal bloggers Matthew Yglesias, Kevin Drum, and Atrios triggered by Peter Beinart's recent TNR piece, I offer my take on things from two years ago.
Amazingly, this story by Anne Barnard of the Boston Globe suggests that returning residents of Fallujah are being forced to participate in labor schemes devised by the US military.
Todd Shields of Media Week reports that 99.8% of the FCC's indecency complaints in 2003 were filed by one of Brent Bozell's front groups, the Parents Television Council.
(via atrios)
Joshua Frank and Merlin Chowkwanyun say it's about time liberals and leftists abandon the Democratic party.
"Unless the world's wealthiest countries comply with their past pledges," reports Jim Lobe, "some 45 million children in the world's poor countries will die needlessly over the next decade, according a new report released Monday by British-based development group, Oxfam."
Frank Rich describes the "Nascarization of news" in an article for the NY Times.
Check out interviews with some real reporters on the ground in Iraq -- Dahr Jamail and Patrick Cockburn.
Rob Walker steals some of Doug Rushkoff's thunder in an article for the NY Times Magazine.
A Chicago Tribune investigation has uncovered a variety of voting glitches in six different states. Amongst the findings from the election just gone by:
More than 181,000 dead people were listed on the rolls in the six swing states, despite efforts to clean up the country's voting system after the 2000 election.On a related front: 'Programmer Built Vote Rigging Prototype at Republican Congressman's Request!'
Thousands more voters were registered to vote in two places, which could have allowed them to cast more than one ballot.
Further, more than 90,000 voters in Ohio cast ballots without a valid presidential choice. Either they decided not to choose a candidate, the machine failed to register their choice, or they mistakenly voted for more than one candidate.
And the FBI is investigating allegations that Republicans in Florida mounted a large-scale campaign to tamper with ballots.
The Basque separatist group ETA set off 5 bombs around Madrid on Friday. Juan Cole finds it curious that the bombings have received so little attention in the media:
If these bombings had been carried out by al-Qaeda, it would be front-page news and something of concern to Washington.
That it isn't raises the question of anti-Muslimism. Is the difference in the way that the American press responds to ETA from the way it responds to al-Qaeda a form of racism?
"Can America afford 'the China price'?" wonders Business Week. "It's the question U.S. workers, execs, and policymakers urgently need to ask."
In The Nation, Peter Dreier and Kelly Candaele argue that, rather than wallowing in self-pity or moving their party even further to the right, Democrats should begin pushing for an increase in the minimum wage.
"Those who insist on pointing out the widening economic divide in the United States are invariably accused by conservatives of fomenting 'class warfare.' Well," they assert, "perhaps a bit of class warfare is just what's needed. There are thousands of new progressive activists who have emerged from this presidential election ready for the next battle. Engaging in a vigorous fight to raise our meager minimum wage is clearly the morally right thing to do. But it may also be the politically astute thing for Democrats to do."
You aren't supposed to see the carnage in Iraq, writes Mark Morford.
You aren't supposed to know. You are to remain ignorant and shielded, and, if you're like most Americans, you have been very carefully conditioned to think Bush's nasty Iraq war is merely this ugly little firecracker-like thing happening way, way over there, carefully orchestrated and somewhat messy and maybe a little bloody but mostly still patriotic and good and necessary and sponsored by none other than God his own angry Republican self.
And hence you and I both have no real idea what the hell goes on in Iraq, no real images to gnaw on and be deeply horrified and saddened by, except for maybe a tiny handful of carefully sanitized snapshots of bombed-out Iraqi cities and maybe some grainy video of U.S. soldiers enjoying a dusty game of pickup football and a turkey dinner at the posh military digs way, way outside of Baghdad.
...You have to seek the facts yourself. You have to dare yourself to click, to take it in, to see if you can, in fact, handle the truth.
It is not easy. It is definitely not pleasant. But in this time of ever escalating numbers of war dead and flagrant BushCo lies and sanitized BS about the real effects of war, all coupled with a simmering plan to attack Iran and maybe North Korea someday real soon, seeking out such visceral truth is no longer just optional. It is, perhaps, the most patriotic thing you can do.
The AP has uncovered photographs that appear to show Navy SEALs abusing detainees in Iraq, dating back to May 2003. As Seth Hettena notes, this "could make them the earliest evidence of possible abuse of prisoners in Iraq. The far more brutal practices photographed in Abu Ghraib prison occurred months later."
Chris Mooney notes that the scientific consensus on climate change is, well, astonishing. Let's see Frank Luntz and those industry front groups spin this.
“We are seen as a hypocritical bully in the Middle East and we have to stop!” If only it were that simple, declares Ray McGovern.
In the LA Times, James Traub has a succinct dissection of why conservatives are so concerned about the UN's oil-for-food scandal.
Ian Welsh looks at the likelihood of an economic meltdown of epic proportions in 2005.
Chris Hedges nicely summarizes the limitations of war reporting, particularly of the "embedded" variety, in this review for the NYRB.
Here's a relevant excerpt:
War is presented primarily through the distorted prism of the occupiers. The embedded reporters, dependent on the military for food and transportation as well as security, have a natural and understandable tendency, one I have myself felt, to protect those who are protecting them. They are not allowed to report outside of the unit and are, in effect, captives. They have no relationships with the victims, essential to all balanced reporting of conflicts, but only with the Marines and soldiers who drive through desolate mud-walled towns and pump grenades and machine-gun bullets into houses, leaving scores of nameless dead and wounded in their wake. The reporters admire and laud these fighters for their physical courage. They feel protected as well by the jet fighters and heavy artillery and throaty rattle of machine guns. And the reporting, even among those who struggle to keep some distance, usually descends into a shameful cheerleading.
Those who cover war dine out on the myth about war and the myth about themselves as war correspondents. Yes, they say, it is horrible, and dirty and ugly; for many of them it is also glamorous and exciting and empowering. They look out from the windows of Humvees for a few seconds at Iraqi families, cowering in fear, and only rarely see the effects of the firepower. When they are forced to examine what bullets, grenades, and shells do to human bodies they turn away in disgust or resort to black humor to dehumanize the corpses. They cannot stay long, in any event, since they must leave the depressing scene behind for the next mission. The tragedy is replaced, as it is for us at home who watch it on television screens, by a light moment or another story. It becomes easier to forget that another human life has been ruined beyond repair, that what is unfolding is not only tragic for tens of thousands of Iraqis but for the United States.
It says a lot about the state of America when there's a need to lobby the government to stop torturing people. But so be it.
In related news, the Boston Globe follows up on the story of the infamous "torture jet" being used to shuttle detainees around to places where they can be roughed up without those pesky things known as "legal and moral restraints."
Dead Iraqis? Americans don't seem to know or care about them, writes Jeffrey Sachs. Nor are they confronted with the real face of war, as can be seen here.
Summarizing a recent LA Times story, E&P reports that Doug Feith and the Pentagon are still running the Office of Strategic Influence:
The Pentagon in 2002 was forced to shutter its controversial Office of Strategic Influence (OSI) when it became known that the office planned to plant false news stories in the media. But now officials say that much of its mission, including using misinformation in the Iraq war and the war on terrorism, has been taken over by other offices within the government, the Los Angeles Times reported today.This shouldn't be too much of a surprise. As FAIR noted two years ago, Rumsfeld admitted that the Pentagon would still engage in OSI-like activities, even after promising to shut the office down.
“Some of the ongoing efforts include having U.S. military spokesmen play a greater role in psychological operations in Iraq, as well as planting information with sources used by Arabic TV channels such as Al Jazeera to help influence the portrayal of the United States,” the Times revealed.
It cited an incident on Oct. 14 when a Marine spokesman announced, via CNN, the start of the Fallujah offensive, which did not actually happen for another three weeks. The idea was to see in advance how the insurgents would respond. The Times referred to this as just one of the “psy-op” episodes so far.
“These efforts have set off a fight inside the Pentagon over the proper use of information in wartime,” the newspaper reported. “Several top officials see a danger of blurring what are supposed to be well-defined lines between the stated mission of military public affairs -- disseminating truthful, accurate information to the media and the American public -- and psychological and information operations, the use of often-misleaing information and propaganda to influence the outcome of a campaign or battle.
Here's what to expect over the next four years of Bush's reign, from the horse's mouth:
For now, Rove's goals are at once more immediate and more lofty: to design a legislative and philosophical agenda that will lead to further GOP gains, and beyond that to a political dominance that could last for decades, as FDR's New Deal did. The core principles are clear to anyone who listened to a Bush stump speech. They are drawn from a well of conservative (and, in the 19th-century sense, "liberal") dogma: that only free-market democracies respectful of traditional moral values can bring us a planet of fulfilled citizens secure from terror. In fact, Rove's formulation is a new hybrid, willing to use big government in the service of markets and morality. Asked to name Bush's biggest accomplishment thus far, Rove replied in a flash: "His clear-eyed explanation of how to win the war on terrorism. It was the defining moment of our time." In other words, the Architect plans to be fully engaged in formulating foreign policy--and, while he isn't thought of as a leading neocon, his views are squarely within that camp.(via daily kos)
On domestic policy, Rove has a theme at the ready: "the ownership society" he says the president wants to build. It's a bland phrase, but the ideas behind it are hardly status quo. One is to consider abolishing the income-tax system, replacing "progressive" (meaning graduated) rates with a flat tax or even a national sales tax or value-added tax. Another is to rechannel massive flows of tax money from Social Security to private savings accounts and into expanded medical savings accounts. Yet another is a crusade Bush and Rove have been pursuing since Texas: a national cap on damage awards in lawsuits.
In all cases, Rove wants to force Democrats to defend taxes and lawyers. Trained in the ways of direct-mail targeting, he doesn't want to seduce the whole country, just an expanded version of what he's already got. He's aiming at fast-growing exurban areas, where small-business entrepreneurs--mostly Gen-Xers--tend to distrust the New Deal paradigm of government. "We want to pay increased attention to those vibrant small-business climates," says Rove.
And it is in these places, where suburbs meet what's left of the countryside, that the GOP's conservative stands on social issues are welcome even (perhaps even especially) among younger families searching for stability and reassurance in a world of Darwinian economics. In the next term, Rove said, Bush will push--hard--for a constitutional amendment to define marriage as a union of man and woman, and for "strict constructionist" judges. "Voters like the president because he doesn't blink and he doesn't waver," says Rove, "and he isn't going to start. He says he values life, and he means it." The cold calculus: force Democrats to defend gay rights and unfettered access to abortion.
"The Fallujah offensive has virtually disappeared from the news cycle," declares Pepe Escobar in the Asia Times Online. "But history - if written by Iraqis - may well enshrine it as the new Guernica. Paraphrasing Jean-Paul Sartre memorably writing about the Algerian War (1956-62), after Fallujah no two Americans shall meet without a corpse lying between them: the up to 500,000 victims of the sanctions in the 1990s, according to United Nations experts; the up to 100,000 victims since the beginning of the invasion of Iraq, according to the British medical paper The Lancet; and at least 6,000 victims, and counting, in Fallujah, according to the Iraqi Red Crescent."
John Ashcroft was bad enough, but Bush's new nominee for Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, is even worse, writes Nat Hentoff.
