Selling arms to thugs

Remember, kids, we're fighting to spread democracy. No matter what those pinheads say:

The United States has accelerated arms sales to some of the world's most repressive and undemocratic regimes since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, according to a new report from leading arms trade researchers.

The report, from the Arms Trade Resource Center at New York-based New School University's World Policy Institute, says the increase in sales and military grants is a payoff to countries that have either joined what the White House calls its "war on terror" or have backed the United States in its military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.

A majority of U.S. arms sales to the developing world also go to regimes "defined as undemocratic by our own State Department" or foreign ministry, says the study.

"New Great Game" kicks into high gear

Now that the BTC pipeline is up and running, Pepe Escobar offers a warm welcome to the 21st century's newest pseudo-state: Pipelineistan.

Long way to go in Iraq?

How long will it take to quell the insurgency in Iraq? A British think tank says at least five years. Juan Cole says perhaps 15.

It's worth noting that Cole says the US will probably have to stick around till then. I respectfully disagree. There's very little evidence to suggest that a continued US presence will help the situation calm down; there's plenty of evidence suggesting that the occupation only makes things worse, as I've mentioned on a few occasions recently.

I admit that there aren't any easy answers on the table, but the one thing that would change the dynamics of the ongoing violence in Iraq is if the US announced a timetable for withdrawal. A reasonable one, not some hazy prediction that's more about years than months.

Of course, this doesn't look likely to happen anytime soon. The House just shot down the first vote on withdrawal and the antiwar movement remains demobilized.

So what now? Steve Shalom has a detailed response to this question.

Random global stories

There are a lot of major stories in the world that get short thrift in the media. I don't need to tell you that.

I try to pass along relevant stories about underreported areas when they come along, but I have to admit that doesn't happen too often. So, today, here's some reading on what's going on in Haiti, Bolivia, Colombia, and a mix of countries ravaged by last December's South Asian tsunami.

AI slams US human rights record

Amnesty International released its 2005 Human Rights Report yesterday. It reserves particularly harsh language for the United States, even more so than AI usually does in these reports:

Four years after the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, human rights are in retreat worldwide and the United States bears most responsibility, rights watchdog Amnesty International said on Wednesday.

From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe the picture is bleak. Governments are increasingly rolling back the rule of law, taking their cue from the U.S.-led war on terror, it said.

"The USA as the unrivalled political, military and economic hyper-power sets the tone for governmental behaviour worldwide," Secretary General Irene Khan said in the foreword to Amnesty International's 2005 annual report.

"When the most powerful country in the world thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights, it grants a licence to others to commit abuse with impunity," she said.

[...]

"The detention facility at Guantanamo Bay has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the practice of arbitrary and indefinite detention in violation of international law," Khan said.

Let's repeat that: the "gulag of our times." Where's Solzhenitsyn when you need him?

Abusing the Koran; Abusing Tillman

More evidence corroborating the abuse of the Koran at Gitmo has emerged in the form of FBI documents uncovered by the ACLU. From the Washington Post:

Detainees told FBI interrogators as early as April 2002 that mistreatment of the Koran was widespread at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and many said they were severely beaten by captors there or in Afghanistan, according to FBI documents released yesterday.

The summaries of FBI interviews, obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union as part of an ongoing lawsuit, include a dozen allegations that the Koran was kicked, thrown to the floor or withheld as punishment. One prisoner said in August 2002 that guards had "flushed a Koran in the toilet" and had beaten some detainees.

But the Pentagon said yesterday that the same prisoner, who is still in custody, was reinterviewed on May 14 and "did not corroborate" his earlier claim about the Koran.

This doesn't substantially change what we know about the Koran flushing controversy, but it does suggest that all of those people making a huge fuss over Newsweek's sourcing problems should pipe down a bit.

On that note, E&P's Greg Mitchell adds an interesting twist. He wonders:

Where, in the week after the Great Newsweek Error, is the comparable outrage in the press, in the blogosphere, and at the White House over the military's outright lying in the coverup of the death of former NFL star Pat Tillman? Where are the calls for apologies to the public and the firing of those responsible? Who is demanding that the Pentagon's word should never be trusted unless backed up by numerous named and credible sources?

Where is a Scott McClellan lecture on ethics and credibility?

The Tillman scandal is back in the news thanks not to the military coming clean but because of a newspaper account. Ironically, the newspaper in question, The Washington Post -- which has taken the lead on this story since last December -- is corporate big brother to Newsweek.

Actually, the US media never would have made an issue out of the manipulation of Tillman’s death if his family didn’t speak out. As Mitchell points out, it’s been known since December that the Army fudged the investigation and lied in order to maintain the heroic narrative. Until this week, the press just shrugged.

Reds on top

Random note: If you enjoy soccer and missed yesterday's Champions League Final, you should do your damnedest to hunt down a copy of the game. It was amazing.

The Fallen

ABC News has issued an announcement:

One year since honoring the American service men and women killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, Ted Koppel and ABC News "Nightline" will again pay tribute to the fallen by devoting an extended broadcast to reading the names and showing the photographs of more than 900 service members who have been killed in those countries over the last year.

Titled "The Fallen," the special "Nightline" broadcast will air Memorial Day, Monday, May 30, 2005, at 11:35 p.m. ET on the ABC Television Network. ABC News Radio will air excerpts of the program.

Hopefully, this won't be met with the same sort of disgraceful behavior that last year's broadcast encountered.

On Left and Right

I agree almost completely with what Robert Paul Wolff says here.

The whole left/right divide in the US means very little to me at the moment. In fact, I've increasingly found myself becoming more closely aligned with right libertarians during the Bush years, and that's something I would have had trouble predicting in, say, the late 1990s.

Today the major questions at the heart of this country are ones of militarism and imperialism. Until these forces are defeated, or at least rolled back, the old political categories are largely irrelevant.

This is not to say that there isn't room for disagreement even now, but I think the priority of all reasonable Americans should be to stop this country's murderous rampage. It is destroying countless lives and exacerbating those inequalities and injustices that make this world such an ugly place sometimes, while threatening to condemn future generations to an even darker, more violent, and more unjust one.

Next step for "Bolivarian revolution"?

Is Venezuela going socialist? Lee Sustar investigates.

At least 8,000 treasures looted from Iraq still missing

From today's Independent:

Evidence of how quickly and irretrievably a country can be stripped of its cultural heritage came with the Iraq war in 2003.

The latest figures, presented to the art crime conference yesterday by John Curtis of the British Museum, suggested that half of the 40 iconic items from the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad still had not been retrieved. And of at least 15,000 items looted from its storerooms, about 8,000 have yet to be traced.

Yet another tragedy associated with this war. The damage extends far beyond this, too, as many historic sites have been irreperably harmed by the occupation and the ensuing chaos in country, a point that Curtis made in a complementary report for the British Museum.

The issue of looting, you might recall, was a hot button topic following the invasion when conservative commentators ganged up on the initial reports of its magnitude. It's painful to go back and read what they said back then.

On to Iran, part xvii

AIPAC's holding its annual get together. The Washington Post's Dana Milbank reports on its grand scale, quoting from promotional material:

this is the "largest ever" conference, with its 5,000 participants attending "the largest annual seated dinner in Washington" joined by "more members of Congress than almost any other event, except for a joint session of Congress or a State of the Union address." The group added that its membership "has nearly doubled" over four years to 100,000 and that the National Journal calls it "one of the top four most effective lobbying organizations."

I know I'm pretty hard on Israel in general, and maybe not the most objective observer in this case, but there's something very wrong when a significant percentage of Congress continues to flock to AIPAC while there's an ongoing espionage investigation against the lobbying group.

In any case, the major theme of the conference seems to be the threat that Iran's nuclear activity poses. Milbank describes a multimedia show, "Iran's Path to the Bomb," that ran throughout:

The exhibit, worthy of a theme park, begins with a narrator condemning the International Atomic Energy Agency for being "unwilling to conclude that Iran is developing nuclear weapons" (it had similar reservations about Iraq) and the Security Council because it "has yet to take up the issue." In a succession of rooms, visitors see flashing lights and hear rumbling sounds as Dr. Seuss-like contraptions make yellowcake uranium, reprocess plutonium, and pop out nuclear warheads like so many gallons of hummus for an AIPAC conference.

This is worrying, but by no means surprising. June's almost here and, in accord, the US is starting to show impatience with the EU-led negotiations with Iran (June is also the month Scott Ritter claims Bush has signed off for military activity).

I don't think Bush is going to be able to press hard for military action against Iran on his own, no matter the influence of the "crazies" or even if the UN starts turning the screws on Khatami. But it seems wholly plausible -- in fact, probable -- that Israel is going to do something. That's the way things have been set up for some time.

I expect that once Israel acts and Iran retaliates, the US will then get involved in some kind of military confrontation. This might even be the plan that the Sharon and Bush governments have agreed to, since it would bypass the necessity for propaganda organs to drum up a pretext that the American public, already growing weary of war in Iraq, would accept.

If you would have asked me about the potential for US military activity against Iran three years ago, I wasn't nearly as skeptical then as I am now. It would truly be an act of lunacy to try to take Iran on, considering the chaos in Iraq, which Iran would be sure to exploit via the Shi'ite bloc, and the overstretch apparent in the US military.

Unfortunately, there is every indication that a significant number of people around Bush believe that Iranians only need a little bit of encouragement to overthrow the existing government, and that a US confrontation would help tip the scales in their favor. As far as I can tell, virtually every knowledgeable observer of Iran rejects this premise, sans the Ledeenites.

Vanishing Wetlands

This is a special report from the St. Petersburg Times. The temptation might be to view the trend of diminishing wetlands or overdevelopment as a Florida specific topic, but it would be a mistake to do so.

(via Public Domain Progress)

Palestine, 2015?

The Independent reports on a new RAND project that attempts to sketch out what a viable Palestinian state might look like in 2015. Interesting stuff.

Dasht-e Leili

Since Newsweek and Afghanistan are in the news a lot lately, I got to thinking: Has anyone bothered to follow-up on what happened at Dasht-e Leili back in 2001? The last news I've seen on this dates back to 2002.

Newsweek, for one, ran an investigative piece in August 2002. It didn't find any evidence of American complicity in the massacre, but then again the newsmagazine didn't press the Pentagon too hard on details. Refresh your memory here.

Tillman

It's not good to have your star recruit in the "war on terror" shot dead by his fellow troops. Nor is it prudent to cover-up the details of his death, try to spin it into a heroic tale, and then piss off his family in the process.

For a military that's growing increasingly desperate to lure recruits onto the battlefield, this story can't help.

Frontline World

I only recently stumbled on to PBS' Frontline World series, and it's worth a gander if you can catch it. It deviates from the typical Frontline exposés by spending a half-hour telling a story usually from some place that's outside of the American media's narrow lens, rather than delving deep into one specific topic for an hour or more.

The episode that caught my eye was on the UN's efforts to disarm Liberia following its ongoing, catastrophic civil war. One rarely gets a chance to see images from Africa that aren't offensive caricatures here in the US, and reporter Jessie Deeter delivered a storyline that was compelling, concise, and informative. It didn't go excessively deep into background and didn't assume the audience was familiar with the conflict, which is probably a good thing considering how poorly the entire continent is covered here.

After taking a look at the FW website, it appears that there are a lot of other interesting episodes. Many of them are available online, too.

Laura goes to Palestine

Juan Cole blogs about events in Israel/Palestine, linking the harsh greeting Laura Bush received over the weekend when she visited several historic and holy sites to the Pollard case, the AIPAC investigation, and the animosity fomented by Bush's "New Gulag" policies. He even drops in a reference to the Salah Shehade assassination, which seems like ancient history even though it happened less than three years ago.

Cole's post is worth a read, especially since news coming out of the region has been relatively slow of late.

More Clues to Uzbeks' Uprising

The precise details about what's happened since the uprising in Uzbekistan's eastern city of Andizhan on May 13 are still unclear, and so is the death toll.

The NY Times has a correspondent in country who is doing an admirable job sifting through the evidence. Here's his latest account:

[L]engthy interviews with more than 30 survivors who fled to Kyrgyzstan, combined with accounts collected by opposition workers and human rights groups, consistently indicate that what happened was not as the official version would have it.

Rather, it appears that a poorly conceived armed revolt to Mr. Karimov's centralized government set off a local popular uprising that ended in horror when the Uzbek authorities suppressed a mixed crowd of escaped prison inmates and demonstrators with machine-gun and rifle fire.

The few hours of defiance culminated, the survivors say, in a desperate push by hundreds and perhaps thousands of Uzbek citizens, marching and crawling before the firing soldiers, some chanting "freedom" as people died around them.

Much about the events in Andijon, a city of 300,000 in the country's main cotton belt, remains unknown. Uzbekistan has blocked free travel to diplomats, human rights investigators and journalists seeking access to the city.

The scale of death is fiercely contested. Mr. Karimov said 32 Uzbek troops and 137 other people had been killed. An opposition party says that at least 745 civilians died in Andijon and Pakhtaabad, a border town, the next day. The International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, a Vienna-based group, says Uzbek troops may have killed 1,000 unarmed people.

An independent visit to Andijon by a photographer working for The New York Times also found indications that the death toll was much larger than Mr. Karimov has said. Bullet-riddled bodies were returned to families with numbered toe tags and certificates, families told the photographer and her translator. The numbers on the tags, they said, ranged from the teens to the hundreds.

In more contextual pieces, Trevor Royle describes how the response to the actions of the Karimov regime relates to the new "great game" in Central Asia and Ahmed Rashid explains why the prospects for democratization look grim in Uzbekistan.

Settling in for the long haul

In typically Orwellian fashion, the US now claims it's building four permanent bases in Iraq to facilitate its eventual withdrawal from the country.

The military is trying to divert attention from its long term presence in Iraq by emphasizing how many bases it's going to be handing over to Iraqis. But let's get serious here. For obvious reasons, you don't want to have an excess number of bases in a foreign country when your presence is extraordinarily unpopular. All you need are a few strategically located "lily pads" that will provide the proper launch points for future military action and to serve as a deterrent to any adversaries in the region.

Unseen & Untold

The LA Times has conducted an investigation into why American newspapers are hesitant to publish images of the dead and wounded in Iraq. After a "review of six prominent U.S. newspapers and the nation's two most popular newsmagazines during a recent six-month period," the general conclusion is that these media outlets are afraid of making their readership uncomfortable, provoking hostile responses (read: sending pro-war yahoos into a tizzy), and contributing additional pain to the families of any of the casualties.

While I'm sympathetic to the editors who have some tough decisions to make on which photos to run, their sensitivities, however well-intentioned, translate into censorship. They're a primary reason why Americans continue to see Iraq through a cartoon lens.

Until that changes, the media in this country is doing a disservice to everyone involved in this war. If Americans are willing to sign off on the carnage abroad, then surely it's not asking too much of them to get upset at the dinner table a few times when a marine gets blown to bits by an RPG or a six year old Iraqi gets a bomb dropped on his house.

We live in a violent world. And when Americans contribute to that violence, as is the case with Iraq, they most definitely shouldn't be allowed to hide from it.

How oil is changing the world

The Globe and Mail is running an extensive, 7-day series on "peak oil" related topics. Check out the list of stories here.

Looking forward to 2025

The future of America can be seen today in Lakeland, Florida. At least, that's what the research of a bunch of economists at Wake Forest University suggests.

Fueling the insurgency

Reuters reports that "Washington is far behind in plans to pump $21 billion into Iraq's reconstruction, bogged down by an insurgency that has killed hundreds of contractors and diverted funds to security."

This sort of story implies that if all those terrorists and "foreign fighters" hadn't shown up in Iraq, the country wouldn't be anything like the basketcase it is now. Milk and honey might be flowing.

This is a convenient narrative for an occupying power and, you might recall, Naomi Klein did a rather convincing job turning it on its head in her Harper's article, "Baghdad Year Zero."

In that September 2004 essay, Klein concluded that the insurgency didn't undermine Iraq's rehabilitation from the outset. To the contrary, the resistance exploded precisely because of the way the Busheviks went about trying to rebuild the country via Bremer's privatization scheme. She wrote:

The great historical irony of the catastrophe unfolding in Iraq is that the shock-therapy reforms that were supposed to create an economic boom that would rebuild the country have instead fueled a resistance that ultimately made reconstruction impossible. Bremer’s reforms unleashed forces that the neocons neither predicted nor could hope to control, from armed insurrections inside factories to tens of thousands of unemployed young men arming themselves. These forces have transformed Year Zero in Iraq into the mirror opposite of what the neocons envisioned: not a corporate utopia but a ghoulish dystopia, where going to a simple business meeting can get you lynched, burned alive, or beheaded. These dangers are so great that in Iraq global capitalism has retreated, at least for now.

The insurgency today is an entirely different beast than what existed right after the invasion. But the main point is that, until the late summer of 2003, there was no significant insurgency to speak of. Sure, there were ex-military and Baathists, and even those notorious foreign fighters, who conducted low-level operations against US targets and infrastructure in the immediate aftermath of the war. Yet these elements showed little tactical acumen and drew little support from the general population, unlike today, when the insurgency seems to grow stronger and more adept with each passing day.

Here it's worth mentioning a new report by Carl Conetta of the PDA, which describes in great detail how the occupation and resistance feed on each other. The executive summary is available here and Kevin Zeese lays out some of its claims in this article.

Americans would do well to take note of Conetta's survey. It doesn't suggest that "staying the course," whatever the hell that means, is a viable or wise option. That path only leads to more carnage, instability, and money wasted. In other words, the longer the occupation continues, the worse things will get.

The Family World System

This is an interesting review of Göran Therborn's Between Sex and Power, yet another history of the family in the 20th century.

Double standards

When Arabs protest in Lebanon demanding an end to an occupation, their actions are branded as ushering in an "Arab Spring." When Arabs protest in Iraq demanding an end to an occupation, their actions are, well, generally ignored.

Oh, and it turns out that there are double standards afoot when it comes to blaming the media for inciting Arabs, too. Shocking!

Lies

Summarizing the case for impeachment in Salon, Juan Cole looks at the lies that led to war in Iraq.

Old hat, you say? Quite, but until something actually happens on this front, it's worth pounding away.

After tying the Downing Street Memo to previous exposes of Bush's fraudulent march to war, Cole asks at the end of his essay:

Why has there not been more outrage in the United States at these revelations? Many Americans may have chosen to overlook the lies and deceptions the Bush administration used to justify the war because they still believe the Iraq war might have made them at least somewhat safer. When they realize that this hope, too, is unfounded, and that in fact the war has greatly increased the threat of another terrorist attack on U.S. soil, their wrath may be visited on the president and the political party that has brought America the biggest foreign-policy disaster since Vietnam.

At this point, we can only hope. That news like the Downing Street Memo continues to fall on deaf ears doesn't instill much confidence, though.

Brutality behind every corner, it seems

There's more news on the torture front of late, from mock executions in Iraq, to taxi drivers tortured to death and "young, poorly trained soldiers in repeated incidents of abuse" in Afghanistan.

Alas, no recent reports of Koran desecration. How 'bout that, Newsweek? Eh? Oh, wait...

(via left end of the dial)

Inequality and more

Writing in the Boston Globe, Derrick Z. Jackson finds it rather odd that the mainstream press is all of a sudden discovering class in America. Where the hell have they been?

Meanwhile, in a related piece, Paul Street revisits those "triple evils that are interrelated" -- militarism, poverty, and racism. His conclusion:

With the help of a terrorist and imperialist "war on terror" and a spineless Democratic non-opposition, the Radically Regressive (and Repressive) Republicans are stripping the government of its positive social and democratic aspects. American public policy toward the poor and disadvantaged is increasingly reduced to policing and repressive "functions," which are expanding in ways that are more than merely coincidental to the assault on social supports and programs. State and society are criminalizing and thereby deepening social inequality and related social problems through self-fulfilling policies of racially disparate (racist) mass surveillance, arrest, and incarceration - a perfect homeland counterpart to America's racially disparate (racist) militarization of global US empire and its attendant social, political, and economic problems.

Market discipline and fiscal retrenchment are meant for the poor and the powerless; it's only the left hand of the state that must be "starved." The rich and powerful few are mainly exempt from market strictures and the sharpening of the public-fiscal knife. They are free to gorge themselves at the public trough, profiting from the amply fed and murderously flexing right hand of the racist, imperial, and mass-incarceratory state.

On that cheery but unfortunately spot-on note, it turns out that the Pentagon cannot account for more than $1 trillion. Thank god we have all those welfare queens driving around in Cadillacs. If we didn't, then, gosh, people might actually pay attention to the actions of the "right hand" of the state.

Bad week in Iraq

In an analytic piece, UPI's Martin Sieff takes on some of the "bad news" from Iraq over the past week. This includes announcements that troop withdrawals are highly unlikely, there were nearly more car bombings in the past month than in all of 2004, and, perhaps most disturbing for US, diplomatic moves are drawing Iran and Iraq closer together.

Sieff adds that these developments are

likely to come as a cold shock to the U.S. public and to hawkish media commentators who had assumed national parliamentary elections in Iraq Jan. 30, the election of a national assembly and the eventual creation of a coalition government from the Shiite and Kurdish parties who dominate it would isolate the Sunni Muslim insurgency in central Iraq and undermine its support.

Instead, the opposite has happened. The wave of terror bombings that have killed more than 400 people over the past month indicates the insurgents remain more formidable and implacable than ever, and there is no significant sign of their support eroding in the Sunni community.

Credit to Sieff, because he was one of the few analysts to dare suggest this might happen following the January 30 elections. Most were too busy fawning at the fulfillment of Bush's "bold" vision and lamenting all the "good news" that, shucks, just wasn't being reported in the "MSM."

Giggles

I try to keep the degree of snark on this blog low, but these two posts from James Wolcott and Matthew Yglesias are too good to pass up.

Uzbek confusion

Reports from Uzbekistan continue to roll in with a murkiness that I'm having trouble processing.

Today's NY Times has an article on the events in country. Unfortunately, it doesn't really clarify things.

Refugees initially claimed thousands of deaths from the clashes with military and police, although a mix of activist groups, opposition parties, and human rights monitors have since lowered that number to anywhere between 300 and 750.

The Karimov government is of course downplaying these figures further, and admitted on Tuesday that 169 were struck down. It's now claiming the civilians were killed at the hands of rebels.

Hopefully things will sort themselves out soon. For further background, there's a decent primer on the overall situation in Uzbekistan over at Open Democracy. The ever-dependable Jim Lobe has a piece on the bungled American response, as well.

Quiet Transformation?

On Wednesday, David Ignatius wrote in the Washington Post of Pentagon-led efforts to build a "Colonial Office" of sorts to transform "the military services, the State Department and other agencies in ways that would help the United States do better what it botched so badly in Iraq." As it turns out, the White House reinforced this initiative with a Bush speech last night.

Ignatius' piece is worth reading in full, not only because it relates directly to a post of mine from yesterday about American militarism. The one thing I want to highlight is his reference to Thomas P.M. Barnett as "the most influential defense intellectual writing these days," which I would have to agree with. I'm somewhat astonished by how many of Barnett's ideas are now set assumptions within the Pentagon, particularly his "core-gap" thesis, which appears in DoD force transformation literature as underlining a historic shift from what's called "Globalization II" to "Globalization III."

That sounds terribly wonkish, right? Indeed it is, but Barnett is someone to pay close attention to. To his credit, he runs a very transparent and accessible website that also features a rather self-indulgent blog. It's worth taking a browse around there, especially the material on the Esquire article he turned into his influential book, The Pentagon's New Map. For the truly brave among you, there's a Barnett lecture available at CSpan that provides a nice window into his worldview.

I mention this not because I find Barnett terribly persuasive (far from it), but because he is very influential amongst the cadre of people crafting defense strategy and looking to implement the policies that are supposed to ensure the New American Century.

Beyond Gitmo, etc.

In a sp!ked column on the Newsweek controversy, Brendan O'Neill seeks to "highlight a problem with the public debate about Guantanamo: it seems that some journalists, lawyers and campaigners are less interested in analysing, much less critiquing, the 'war on terror' than in speculating about what dodgy and degrading things might be taking place behind closed cages in Camp X-Ray."

He elaborates:

...these attacks on Guantanamo do nothing whatever to challenge American and British military intervention in Afghanistan, which created Guantanamo, or elsewhere in the continuing 'war on terror'. Just as challenging political leaders over the legality of the Iraq war is not the same thing as challenging them over the Iraq war, so debating the prisoner-of-war camp created by the 'war on terror' is not the same thing as challenging the 'war on terror'. We could do worse than recall what twentieth-century Hungarian thinker Georg Lukacs said of opportunism, 'which begins always with effects and not causes, parts and not the whole, symptoms and not the thing itself.'

It is time to stop obsessing over alleged mistreatments in Guantanamo and focus instead on 'the thing itself' - the problem of Western intervention abroad.

In a related piece that takes up the issue of the Newsweek scandal along with the recent Galloway firestorm in the Senate, William Rivers Pitt can't help but note the absurdity of it all:

It takes an irate Scot to play the role of the dogged opposition in the U.S. Senate, and it takes a Newsweek article by the guy who got Clinton impeached to ruin America's reputation in a Muslim world reeling from invasions, torture, rape and murder. Yes, you almost have to laugh. It's either that, or start breaking things.

That's a 'yeppers' on both articles.

Just like 'Nam

The London Times says Fallujah's now a "giant gated community."

I prefer the term Kurt Nimmo used a few months ago: "strategic hamlet."

Looking this war in the face

Sydney H. Schanberg has some questions:

If we believe that the present war in Iraq is just and necessary, why do we shrink from looking at the damage it wreaks? Why does the government that ordered the war and hails it as an instrument of good then ask us to respect those who died in the cause by not describing and depicting how they died? And why, in response, have newspapers gone along with Washington and grown timid about showing photos of the killing and maiming? What kind of honor does this bestow on those who are sent to fight in the nation's name?

Anyone in the media want to take a decent stab at them?

Terrorist nabbed

I guess the hypocrisy of letting a terrorist roam free around the country finally became too much of a PR problem, so the US has arrested Luis Posada Carriles.

Jerry Meldon & Robert Parry penned a good article on the Cuban exile last month, which paid particular attention to Posada's connection to the Bush gang. Noam Chomsky also talked about Posada a bit in his overview of US terrorism against Cuba.

For more fun reading, head over to GWU's National Security Archive.

Iraqis Endure Worse Conditions Than Under Saddam, UN Survey Finds

The NewStandard's Chris Shumway reports on the recent release of the UNDP's "Iraq Living Conditions Survey 2004."

Researchers determined that some 24,000 Iraqis died as a result of the US-led invasion in 2003 and the first year of occupation. Children below the age of 18 comprised 12 percent of those deaths, according to survey data.

The study also indicates that the invasion and its immediate aftermath forced more than 140,000 Iraqis to flee their homes.

The 370-page report evaluating the survey, which was in turn based on interviews conducted with more than 21,000 Iraqi households during the spring and summer of 2004, might not end the controversy over civilian casualty figures, but the study’s authors drew a narrower range of estimated deaths. They report that the total number of war dead is between 18,000 and 29,000.

On the face of it, this is a substantially smaller estimate than the widely-cited Lancet figure of ~100k, but it still is within that report's confidence interval. More importantly, though, the studies don't speak to the same issues. As Shumway alludes, the Lancet survey tried to account for all "excess deaths," while the new UNDP survey does not. They also do not deal with the same time periods.

Still, the UNDP report's greatest contribution comes in providing a window into the damage the war has inflicted across virtually all of Iraqi society, particularly in areas like health care, nutrition, infrastructure, and education. Check out Shumway's article for a summary of just how bad things are.

Memos, memos everywhere

Public Domain Progress: "These past five years have been a memorable time!"

Sure have.

War money

Tim at Democratic Left Infoasis quotes Paul Krugman's latest column noting, amongst other things, that the US will soon be spending "as much on defense as the rest of the world combined," and then asks:

Can that be true? That's truly obscene. What is that money going to be used for? 'The War to Provoke and Encourage More Terrorism' (American politicians call it the 'War on Terrorism' for some reason)? Continuing the illegal and horrific occupation of Iraq? Spare me. This is complete madness.

Imagine you had a neighbor that spent over half of his paycheck every month on weapons and home security equipment. You would rightly observe that this person was insane and a danger to himself and others. Why can't we look in the mirror and see that, when it comes to so-called "defense" spending, the same thing is true of us as Americans? Our military spending is insane and dangerous to ourselves and others.

Yes, unfortunately, it's true. The news comes from an article in Jane's that references a recent publication from those notorious peaceniks at PricewaterhouseCoopers entitled, "The Defence Industry in the 21st Century - Thinking Global...or thinking American?"

Far from expressing outrage, the report mostly recommends that defense-related industries around the globe start cozying up to the fatted calf of the Western Hemisphere if they wish to thrive in the 21st century. Currently, more than 98% of all of US military expenditures go into the coffers of American companies, and PWC encourages interested parties in Europe and Asia to work to change that.

As for the Pentagon, it seems more than willing to spend itself into oblivion to counter a strategic environment full of assymetric threats. The dominant thinking emerging out of places like the DoD's Office of Force Transformation puts a premium on investments in high technology and moves to achieve "full spectrum dominance." This two-pronged approach promises to be exorbitantly expensive, dwarfing even Cold War spending.

Analysts like Chalmers Johnson and Andrew Bacevich have suggested that the history of the 21st century will be heavily influenced by whether or not America can come to grips with its militarism. Confronting and rolling back the Pentagon's budget will have to be at the forefront of any attempt to claim this country's moral conscience and pull it back from the brink of disaster.

Neutering the media

If you head over to the Progressive Review and scroll down the page a bit, you'll find this:

BUSH WINS MAJOR BATTLE IN WAR ON FREE PRESS
* Semiotic Tsunami over Koran in Toilet Story
* Rightwing Assault on Public Broadcasting Grows
* Two in Five Say Press is Too Free
* PBS, Others Already Censoring Own Broadcasts

These stories have been floating around for a few days and getting attention in a variety of media outlets and on blogs.

What ProRev deserves credit for is simply grouping them together under a headline that reads, in part, "War on Free Press." That is precisely what's going on here, and everyone needs to recognize it as such.

Viewed in isolation, each story is worrisome. But when viewed in conjunction with one another, and factoring in the sort of rhetoric coming out of Washington, they paint a far more disturbing picture. I'm not sure enough people recognize the gravity of this situation.

Going nuclear

While the Washington Post outlines Bill Frist's likely actions in the Senate, Ira Chernus and Tom Engelhardt navigate the slippery slope between all sorts of "nuclear" rhethoric.

Demonize, Disguise, Divert

Maybe I should lay off this story a bit, but I thought Robert Jensen and Pat Youngblood put it well when they concluded their piece on the Newsweek scandal thusly:

...why the focus on the Newsweek story? It's part of the tried-and-true strategy of demonize, disguise, and divert. Demonize the news media to disguise the real causes of the resistance to occupation and divert attention from failed U.S. policies.

The irony is that the U.S. corporate news media deserve harsh criticism for coverage of the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq -- not for possibly getting one fact wrong, but for failing to consistently challenge the illegality of both wars and the various distortions and lies that the Bush administration has used to mobilize support for those illegal wars.

We should hold the news media accountable when they fail. But we should defend journalists when they are used by political partisans who are eager to obscure their own failures.

I also thought this comment from Bill Van Auken was rich:

A Defense Department spokesman, Brian Whitman, denounced the Newsweek report Sunday as “irresponsible” and “demonstratively false.” He said the magazine “hid behind anonymous sources, which by their own admission do not stand scrutiny. Unfortunately, they cannot retract the damage that they have done to this nation or those who were viciously attacked by these false allegations.”

The Pentagon’s chief spokesman Lawrence Di Rita went further, declaring, “They printed a story based on an erroneous source or sources that was demonstrably wrong and that resulted in riots in which people were killed.”

The White House weighed in as well on Monday. “The report has had serious consequences,” spokesman Scott McClellan said. “People have lost their lives. The image of the United States abroad has been damaged.”

He went on to criticize the magazine for failing to retract the story and failing to live up to a “certain journalistic standard.” This from an administration whose “standards” include relentlessly planting false stories in the media, covertly paying columnists to promote its policies and passing off government-funded propaganda as news.

Oil-for-food distraction

One of my (many) pet peeves is the contrived outrage over the UN's oil-for-food scandal.

This is not to say that there aren't issues or figures worth investigating. But if we're going to pay so much attention to the sanctions and related corruption, it's crucial that we don't lose the proper perspective and contextualize events properly.

Namely, we acknowledge: the heavy toll of the sanctions; that this toll was primarily a product of the US and UK's desire to maintain the embargo as a tool of regime change (ironic, because rather than driving a wedge between Hussein and Iraqis, it actually forged a closer bond since the public became so dependent on the government's food rations); and that the most severe corruption affiliated with the oil-for-food exchanges happened right under the US' nose.

So it comes as no surprise that the Guardian reports today:

A report released last night by Democratic staff on a Senate investigations committee presents documentary evidence that the Bush administration was made aware of illegal oil sales and kickbacks paid to the Saddam Hussein regime but did nothing to stop them.

The scale of the shipments involved dwarfs those previously alleged by the Senate committee against UN staff and European politicians like the British MP, George Galloway, and the former French minister, Charles Pasqua.

In fact, the Senate report found that US oil purchases accounted for 52% of the kickbacks paid to the regime in return for sales of cheap oil - more than the rest of the world put together.

"The United States was not only aware of Iraqi oil sales which violated UN sanctions and provided the bulk of the illicit money Saddam Hussein obtained from circumventing UN sanctions," the report said. "On occasion, the United States actually facilitated the illicit oil sales.

This is in line with previous reports, notably a joint investigation by the Financial Times and Il Sole 24 Ore, the Italian business daily.

I also find it extremely odd that, for many, outrage over corruption seems to extend only to this one issue. One hardly ever hears those individuals who flog "UNSCAM" reference or express concern about the corruption at the heart of the current US occupation of Iraq, what's been called potentially "the biggest corruption scandal in history."

Operation Matador

As American Leftist notes, it's awfully hard to find much discussion of "Operation Matador" in the media now.

Knight Ridder's Hannah Allam comes through again, though, with this story:

The U.S. military hails last week's "Operation Matador" as a success that killed more than 125 insurgents. But local tribesmen said it was a disaster for their communities that's made them leery of ever again assisting American or Iraqi forces.

The battle, which pitted some Iraqi tribes against each other, underscored the complex tribal politics that compound the religious and ethnic tensions plaguing Iraq.

In interviews, influential tribal leaders and many residents of the remote border towns said the 1,000 U.S. soldiers who swept into their territories in the weeklong campaign that ended over the weekend didn't distinguish between the Iraqis who supported the United States and the fighters battling it.

"The Americans were bombing whole villages and saying they were only after the foreigners," said Fasal al-Goud, a former governor of Anbar province who said he asked U.S. forces for help on behalf of the tribes. "An AK-47 can't distinguish between a terrorist and a tribesman, so how could a missile or tank?"

Goud was the only tribal leader who spoke on the record. Two others reached by phone in western villages expressed similar views, but said they didn't want their names published because the foreign insurgents were still holding some of their tribesmen hostage.

To be fair, the piece notes that tribal leaders initially reached out to Iraqi and American officials for help with dealing with the insurgents. What they didn't appreciate was the fact that the Americans decided to "do a Fallujah" and invade, bomb, and destroy their towns to save them from the foreign menace.

A Tale of Two Stories

Via Daily Kos:

The tale of two stories at the Washington Post:

"British Intelligence Warned of Iraq War"
By Walter Pincus
May 13, 2005
-- Page A18 --

"Newsweek Apologizes: Inaccurate Report on Koran Led to Riot"
By Howard Kurtz
May 16, 2005
-- Page A01 --

Burying the really important stuff. Glad to see the Post hasn't changed much.

Jim Lobe has a question:

Who is the "son of a bitch" referred to in this comment by a U.S. Defence Department spokesman?

"People are dead because of what this son of a bitch said. How could he be credible now?"

Is he an unnamed Defence Department source who told Newsweek magazine that he had read a government document detailing an incident where U.S. military personnel at the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, allegedly flushed a Koran down a toilet?

After all, that report, which was printed in a small item in last week's "Periscope" section of the magazine, spurred violent protests across the Muslim world, particularly in Afghanistan where at least 15 people were killed and the government of President Hamid Karzai badly shaken just a week before he was due to travel here.

Or is the "son of a bitch" U.S. President George W. Bush, whose administration began fixing intelligence at least eight months before invading Iraq in order to make the public believe that Baghdad posed a serious threat to the United States and its allies?

Hmm. That's a tough one.

And, well, this was certainly predictable, wasn't it?

Glenn, the Newsweek retraction has got me thinking: how many *other* MSM allegations of US military abuse/torture of prisoners were based on a single anonymous sources? How many of them depended solely on the "testimony" of Al Qaeda training camp graduates, who are taught to fabricate claims of abuse?

This could be the ideal challenge of bloggers (the media is hardly inclined to police itself), going through past stories with a fine tooth comb. (And I've no doubt many exist.)

Newsweek has set a precedent by retracting this one. Will other media outlets retract their own poorly sourced stories, when confronted?

Kinda sucks that we have all those pictures, reports, memos, and documents though.

Seriously, this whole fiasco is pissing me off big time. I know it shouldn't since it's par for the course for McClellan, Rove, Disinfopundit, etc., but still. How some people sleep at night is beyond me.

Orwell Rolls

I just realized the documentary "Orwell Rolls in His Grave" is available for viewing over at ICH. I haven't had a chance to see it yet, but several people have recommended it to me in the past.

Just passing along the info...

Newsweek capitulates

Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker has capitulated to the pressure and retracted the controversial Koran desecration piece. The AP provides the shortened outline of how the story unraveled:

Newsweek had reported in its issue dated May 9 that U.S. military investigators had found evidence that interrogators placed copies of Islam's holy book in washrooms and had flushed one down the toilet to get inmates to talk.

Whitaker wrote in [an editor's] note to readers [this week] that "We regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst."

Whitaker said in his editor's note that while other news organizations had aired charges of Quran abuse based on the testimony of detainees, the magazine decided to publish a short item after hearing from an unnamed U.S. official that a government probe had found evidence corroborating the charges.

But on Friday, a top Pentagon spokesman told the magazine that a review of the military's investigation concluded "it was never meant to look into charges of Quran desecration. The spokesman also said the Pentagon had investigated other desecration charges by detainees and found them 'not credible.'"

Whitaker added that the magazine's original source later said he could not be sure he read about the alleged Quran incident in the report Newsweek cited, and that it might have been in another document.

First things first: the initial report could have been sourced better. Michael Isikoff, the principal author of the contentious article, only had the one anonymous official and when the hammer came down, the official waffled. Isikoff got burnt. This was poor, but by no means abhorrent, journalism.

Secondly, and most importantly, the charge that the Koran was flushed hasn't been discredited. Newsweek's source doesn't repudiate the claim. According to the last paragraph above, he just got his referring documents mixed up (!). And, as noted, there's already plenty of other evidence to suggest that mistreatment of the Koran happened in several interrogations.

That prowarriors are using this incident to drum up support for press censorship, while the White House hops on board to wag its finger at the fourth estate, is appalling. These people have no shame. The din of manufactured outrage is sure to drown out any story of significance at least for the next week.

Support Citgo

Jeff Cohen has an interesting tip:

Citgo is a U.S. refining and marketing firm that is a wholly owned subsidiary of Venezuela's state-owned oil company. Money you pay to Citgo goes primarily to Venezuela -- not Saudi Arabia or the Middle East. There are 14,000 Citgo gas stations in the US. (Click here to find one near you.) By buying your gasoline at Citgo, you are contributing to the billions of dollars that Venezuela's democratic government is using to provide health care, literacy and education, and subsidized food for the majority of Venezuelans.

Instead of using government to help the rich and the corporate, as Bush does, [Hugo] Chavez is using the resources and oil revenue of his government to help the poor in Venezuela. A country with so much oil wealth shouldn't have 60 percent of its people living in poverty, earning less than $2 per day. With a mass movement behind him, Chavez is confronting poverty in Venezuela. That's why large majorities have consistently backed him in democratic elections. And why the Bush administration supported an attempted military coup in 2002 that sought to overthrow Chavez.

So this is the opposite of a boycott. Call it a BUYcott. Spread the word.

The Newsweek censorship campaign

I think Arthur Silber says what needs to be said about the Newsweek "Koran-flushing" controversy.

His point that the ensuing brouhaha will be used to wash the Downing Street memo story down the drain is particularly cogent, and important.

(via eschaton)

Uzbek massacre

This is a pretty harrowing report about the events in Uzbekistan, where soldiers have mowed down hundreds of protesters in an effort to suppress an uprising in the town of Andizhan.

The Asia Times Online's Pepe Escobar explains why you won't be hearing too much from the White House about this.

Election afterglow wears off

Knight Ridder's Hannah Allam reports that many of the worst fears about the Iraqi elections are coming true:

Two weeks of intense insurgent violence have made it crystal clear that Iraq's parliamentary elections, hailed in late January as a triumph for democracy, haven't helped to heal the country's deep divisions. They may have made them worse.

The historic election sheared off a thin facade of wartime national unity and reinforced ethnic and sectarian tensions that have plagued Iraq for centuries. Iraqis immediately began playing the roles the election results delivered to them: victorious Shiite Muslim, assertive Kurd, disaffected Sunni Arab. Within those groups lies a mosaic of other splits, especially between secularists and Islamists vying for Iraq's soul.

With little social cohesion, violence has soared, fueled by anger over foreign occupation and religious differences, while a semi-sovereign, disjointed government has taken over with little ability to control or appeal to groups behind the killings. At least 400 Iraqis have died in two weeks. U.S. casualties are also up. According to Icasualties.org, a Web site that tracks Iraq coalition casualties, 46 American service members died under fire in April, and 28 have died so far in May.

This piece comes on the heels of a widely-cited story from Newsday suggesting it's fair to say that Iraq is embroiled in civil war now.

Some may be tempted to see this as a regrettable, but inevitable outcome of Hussein's displacement. Indeed, analysts of a variety of stripes have long been predicting or expressing concern about a future break-up of the country. What's often missing from their discussion is the primary role the US presence plays in fomenting divisions and increasing tensions.

The brutalities of the occupation, coupled with the Americans' inabililty to provide security and restore civil services, makes the conciliatory process necessary for parliamentary procedures impossible. How can Iraqis have any confidence in "democracy" when their benevolent bestowers are so clearly trying to influence the construction of the government (Hello, Mr. Chalabi) and show such a clear ignorance of and insensitivity to their basic needs? Life is a cut-throat game of survival and power grabs in much of Iraq right now, and that's not despite the occupation. It's because of it.

The march to war

If, for whatever reason, you're having trouble wrapping your head around the significance of the "Downing Street Memo," then check out Mark Danner's forthcoming piece in the NYRB. He'll walk you through things, step-by-step.

Media reform

Bob McChesney's Free Press group sponsored the National Conference for Media Reform in St. Louis this weekend.

Apparently, Bill Moyers gave the keynote speech and laid the smack down on Kenneth Tomlinson, the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting who is agitating to fix the perceived "liberal bias" of PBS (read: eviscerate critical programming).

More from the conference via mediachannel.org. Also check out this excellent article on the PBS imbroglio from Salon's Eric Boehlert and Bob Parry's prescriptions for a progressive media infrastructure.

Gulf Stream reportedly slows

As far as I can tell, this piece of news slipped underneath most people's radar:

Climate change researchers have detected the first signs of a slowdown in the Gulf Stream — the mighty ocean current that keeps Britain and Europe from freezing.

They have found that one of the “engines” driving the Gulf Stream — the sinking of supercooled water in the Greenland Sea — has weakened to less than a quarter of its former strength.

The weakening, apparently caused by global warming, could herald big changes in the current over the next few years or decades. Paradoxically, it could lead to Britain and northwestern and Europe undergoing a sharp drop in temperatures.

One doesn't need to go out and rent The Day After Tomorrow to realize that this is quite an ominous development.

(via life-info.de)

Newsweek backs down

Newsweek is backpedaling on its short blurb in last week's edition about the desecration of the Koran at Guantanamo. The revelation sparked angry protests throughout the Muslim world, some of which turned violent, killing more than a dozen and injuring over 100.

The magazine's mea culpa in this week's edition explains that their main source for the allegation is not as confident as he was prior to its publication. Still, other sources in the piece written by Evan Thomas indicate that disrespect of the Koran was a quite common occurence at the Cuban detention center. Moreover, such an allegation is entirely consistent with past reports that religious offences towards Muslim men were used to break them down. Noted techniques include using scantily clad female interrogators and, my favorite, having these same women smear fake menstrual blood on their charges.

Anyone who takes the denials from Rumsfeld's henchmen seriously is a fool. From Abu Ghraib to the ACLU's constant arm-twisting, it's clear that the Pentagon cannot be trusted to divulge disparaging information or investigate itself.

Already, the usual suspects are spinning this into another instance where the press is exhibiting its bias against Bush and his "war on terror," recalling the Rathergate memo experience. They have a point. The same thing is poised to happen here: news that rings true getting lost in a haze of partisan bickering that is meant more to distract from the fundamental issues at hand than resolve them.

Ending the war

Mike Whitney provides some sage advice:

The success of the antiwar, anti-imperial movement depends on our ability to disseminate information beyond the corrupted grip of the mainstream press. The Dearlove memo provides the first real challenge to alternative media to step up to the plate, coordinate its efforts, and deliver the goods. I believe it is still possible get the message out through unconventional channels, and in doing so bring about a speedy end to the war in Iraq and a stunningly blow to media-octopus that’s strangling our democracy.

It can be done, with an intelligent coordinated attack that pools our collective talents, provides a clear message and repeats that message persistently from every vantage point until every American citizen knows the real truth about our criminal involvement in Iraq.

The war will only end when support for the war ends at home. We have a new weapon in that struggle; the truth. Let’s use it.

Like many, I let out a cynical "what else is new?" when the Times first reported the memo. It just confirmed the general narrative of the war that I thought everyone knew, but, obviously, that's not the case.

Iraq has gone from bad to worse recently, and support for the war in the US is on a steady decline. News about the memo is just starting to seep into the dominant, slumbering media organs. If the story gains traction, it could help loosen the bolts on the occupation. Then, perhaps, the long delayed push for impeachment can begin in earnest.

Endless war

This story from the London Times is riveting. It's up there with the best reporting I've seen during this horrible war.

And, well, it also betrays the fact that the war is far from over, a point that Patrick Cockburn hammers home in a piece from the Independent.

Plan Colombia nixed

The Independent reports that the US is scuttling Plan Colombia. This is, of course, a good thing.

Resuming things

I usually try to launch a comeback from a blog hiatus by summarizing the stuff that I've missed. I'm not going to do that now because, for one, I still don't have the time and, two, my Blogger problems caused me to lose a significant amount of my reconstruction work. I may try to revisit what I've missed later on if I can get time and just lock myself in front of the computer for a while. Mind you, I do this more for my own benefit than for readers'.

I've spent the last month+ not wholly avoiding media, but taking a step back of sorts. It's always interesting to see what stories get play when you're not in the fray. Thankfully, the usual suspects have soldiered on, keeping their eye on the ball without the glory of significant (or any) BlogAd revenue or stupendous numbers of hits. It's reassuring to know there is a mass of people online that just 'get it' and we need them to continue doing what they're doing to counter the rivers of disinformation in the mediasphere. Many of these folks can be found in the sidebar on the right and I, for one, am grateful for their efforts.

I'm not promising too much, but this blog restarts as of now. I'll try to keep up with posting, mostly because falling behind even a little bit makes it very tempting to go back on a hiatus. As for format, I'm not sure what you'll see. I went to round-up posts almost exclusively before my break, but I'm going to try to veer away from that approach for the time being.

Oh, and thanks for sticking around, too.