A brief review

And, yes, of course there was a map, no matter what you've heard.

Homecoming

This should be, ahem, interesting:

The dizzying high point of Showtime's new Masters of Horror series, the hour-long Homecoming (which premieres December 2) is easily one of the most important political films of the Bush II era. With its only slightly caricatured right-wingers, the film nails the casual fraudulence and contortionist rhetoric that are the signatures of the Bush-Cheney administration. Its dutiful hero, presidential consultant David Murch (Jon Tenney), reports to a Karl Rove–like guru named Kurt Rand (Robert Picardo) and engages in kinky power fucks with attack-bitch pundit Jane Cleaver (Thea Gill), a blonde, leggy Ann Coulter proxy with a "No Sex for All" tank top and "BSH BABE" license plates. Murch's glib, duplicitous condescension is apparently what triggers the zombie uprising: Confronting an angry mother of a dead soldier on a news talk show, he tells this Cindy Sheehan figure, "If I had one wish . . . I would wish for your son to come back," so he could assure the country of the importance of the war. The boy does return, along with legions of fallen combatants, and they all beg to differ.

How fitting that the most pungent artistic response to a regime famed for its crass fear-mongering would be a cheap horror movie. Jaw-dropping in its sheer directness, Homecoming is a righteous blast of liberal-left fury (it was greeted with a five-minute ovation in Turin, the most vocal appreciation seeming to come from the American filmmakers and writers in attendance).

Allegedly, Showtime's running a free preview this weekend, so even if you don't normally get the channel, you might have a chance to tune in if you have cable or satellite tv.

Press abuse

The LA Times reports:

As part of an information offensive in Iraq, the US military is secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops in an effort to burnish the image of the US mission in Iraq.

The articles, written by US military "information operations" troops, are translated into Arabic and placed in Baghdad newspapers with the help of a defense contractor, according to US military officials and documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times.

...The operation is designed to mask any connection with the US military. The Pentagon has a contract with a small Washington-based firm called Lincoln Group, which helps translate and place the stories. The Lincoln Group's Iraqi staff, or its subcontractors, sometimes pose as freelance reporters or advertising executives when they deliver the stories to Baghdad media outlets.

And links it to what's been going on at home:

The arrangement with Lincoln Group is evidence of how far the Pentagon has moved to blur the traditional boundaries between military public affairs - the dissemination of factual information to the media - and psychological and information operations, which use propaganda and sometimes misleading information to advance the objectives of a military campaign.

The Bush administration has come under criticism for distributing video and news stories in the United States without identifying the federal government as their source and for paying American journalists to promote administration policies, practices the Government Accountability Office has labeled "covert propaganda."

Yes, for an administration that cannot abuse the word democracy enough, they sure don't have much reverence for it, nor a free, independent, incisive media. Planting stories, threatening to bomb media outlets...what's next?

Europe's environmental costs

Interesting piece of news from the Independent:

Europe's claim to the moral high ground over the environment has been comprehensively challenged in a devastating report on its failings in the battle against global warming and pollution. It says Europe is devouring the world's natural resources at twice the global rate.

Climate change on a scale unseen on the European continent for 5,000 years is now under way, according to the report, which warned yesterday that at current rates three quarters of Switzerland's glaciers will have melted by 2050.

Urban areas of Europe will double in size in just over a century, as life expectancy rises and more live alone. Increasing urban sprawl means that in 10 years, an open space in Europe three times the size of Luxembourg has been built on. Air travel is likely to double by 2030 and marine ecosystems, water resources and air quality are all threatened.

In European-related climate change news, some British researchers have concluded that "Atlantic Ocean currents that make northern Europe warmer than it would otherwise be have weakened by about a third over the last 50 years," and "could eventually trigger fairly abrupt European cooling."

Separate research earlier this year reported similar findings. Needless to say, that's not good.

Ruing mistakes

For misleading the American people, and launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C sent his legions into Germany and lost them, Bush deserves to be impeached and, once he has been removed from office, put on trial along with the rest of the president's men. If convicted, they'll have plenty of time to mull over their sins.

So who's the author of this quote? Michael Moore? Chomsky? Gabriel Kolko? Guess again.

Shifting the burden

No kidding.

Taking Boris Johnson's lead

Fascism Then. Fascism Now?

Unless you want to make yourself sick, it's best not to try to draw analogies between the 1930s and today...

It's on!

Chomsky vs. Dershowitz! Starting in about 45 minutes, here. Should be entertaining...

Update: Debate archived here.

The Salvador option?

Kevin Drum consolidates today's two major articles from the NY Times and LA Times on the alleged Shia "death squads" that make up a good portion of the Iraqi government's security forces. However, as Drum points out by referencing a month-old Knight Ridder piece, this is hardly a revelation. Indeed, people like Robert Dreyfuss have been yelling about this for some time, but their cries have been generally ignored.

Still, the major question that remains is if the makeup of the squads is a direct consequence of US decision making. On cue, Laura Rozen dusts off an old Newsweek article suggesting so...

Steps towards peace?

Was the recent Cairo meeting of Iraqi political groups the first solid steps towards peace? Gareth Porter says maybe. At least, it's a positive first step.

In a related development, Jim Lobe reports on the recent overtures made by the Americans for Iranian help to quell the situation in Iraq. As Lobe puts it,

Washington's growing reliance on and support for regional diplomacy marks a serious setback to neoconservatives who, long before the Iraq war, had championed the unilateral imposition of a Pax Americana in the Middle East that would put an end to what in their view constituted the chief threats to Israel's security – Arab nationalism and Iranian theocracy.

Now, two and a half years after invading Iraq to put that peace into place, the administration finds itself seeking the support of both forces, just as the realists had warned.

Ironic? Perhaps. But sounds more like desperate pragmatism to me.

Makeup linkage

After this post, I'll be back on a near-daily posting schedule. At least, that's what I hope.

* Close call? Tom Regan of the CS Monitor rounds up some of the early press coverage of the "Bush wanted to bomb Al Jazeera" allegations. As Jeremy Scahill points out, the motive for the proposed sorties over Qatar was to eliminate scrutiny of the first American assault on Fallujah, in April 2004. While the Bushies and much of the American press have laughed off the allegations, the British government only gave them added credibility by issuing a subsequent press gag. For running developments on this story, see "Don't Bomb Us - A blog by Al Jazeera Staffers."

* Speaking of Fallujah, the American military finally admitted the obvious: White Phosphorous was used on the city's civilian population in November 2004. Alas, George Monbiot reminds us that "we shouldn't forget that the use of chemical weapons was a war crime within a war crime within a war crime."

* Let us also not forget that the one year anniversary of the second assault on Fallujah -- which reduced it completely to rubble -- just passed. Read retrospectives from Mike Marqusee and Dahr Jamail, then check out Jamail's IPS report on the conditions inside the devastated city today.

* This comparative travelogue by Robin Wright of the Washington Post is a vivid indicator of how the situation in Iraq has gotten worse over the last three years.

* Make way for "our monsters." The LA Times and Guardian report on the revelations of torture in Iraq overseen by the government's notorious security forces. Grisly photos, here.

* Iyad Allawi, the West's preferred strong man in Baghdad, has also chimed in that the human rights situation in Iraq right now is worse than it was under Saddam.

* Video of contractors indiscriminently shooting up Iraq civilians in cars is now spreading around the internet. See here, for example.

* The Independent's Philip Thornton reports on the release of a new study, "Crude Designs," that details the rather blatant theft of Iraq's oil wealth by the West.

* This Washington Post report, citing some of Anthony Cordesman's latest findings, confirms again that there are relatively few "foreign fighters" in Iraq (besides the Americans). Nevertheless, as Jonathan Finer notes, officials have "long emphasized the influence of groups such as al Qaeda in Iraq, an insurgent network led by a Jordanian, Abu Musab Zarqawi" in "an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of the insurgency in the eyes of Iraqis, by portraying it as terrorism foisted on the country by outsiders."

* Norman Solomon takes up the hot topic of an Iraq withdrawal: "In the United States, while the lies behind the Iraq war become evermore obvious and victory seems increasingly unreachable, much of the opposition to the war has focused on the death and suffering among U.S. soldiers. That emphasis has a sharp political edge at home, but it can also cut another way -- defining the war as primarily deplorable because of what it is doing to Americans. One danger is that a process of withdrawing some U.S. troops could be accompanied by even more use of U.S. air power that terrorizes and kills with escalating bombardment (as happened in Vietnam for several years after President Nixon announced his 'Guam Doctrine' of Vietnamization in mid-1969). An effective antiwar movement must challenge the jingo-narcissism that defines the war as a problem mainly to the extent that it harms Americans." Mind you, he wrote this a week before Seymour Hersh reported that such a bombing strategy was precisely what was being considered to offset a troop drawdown.

* Seeking to "explain why congressional Democrats had been so reluctant...to push for a serious inquiry regarding the Bush administration misleading the American public on Iraqi WMDs," Stephen Zunes reminds us that, unfortunately, "the Democrats were as enthusiastic about the United States invading and occupying Iraq as were the Republicans and that the WMD claims were largely a means of scaring the American public into accepting the right of the United States to effectively renounce 20th century international legal norms in favor of the right of conquest."

* Gilbert Achcar and Steve Shalom pick apart John Murtha's proposal to withdraw and redeploy some American troops from Iraq, arguing that "the anti-war movement needs to be careful not to confuse Murtha's position with its own."

* The long promised second investigation of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which will allegedly probe whether the Bush administration and its allies in the Pentagon manipulated Iraq intelligence, is beginning to take shape.

* Murray Waas reports that, on September 21, 2001, President Bush "was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda." Of course, the Bush administration has been unwilling to disclose this piece of information, in large measure because it's another piece of evidence that confirms they were dishonest in their efforts to "market" the Iraq war to the American public.

* Rolling Stone profiles John Rendon, "Bush's general in the propaganda war." Think Progress has more on the Rendon Group, too.

* The story of "Curveball," the notorious Iraqi informant, just got a little more detailed.

* Gary Leupp's timeline of the Niger Uranium deception and the Plame case is pretty comprehensive, if admittedly incomplete.

* Russ Baker weighs in on the latest revelations about Bob Woodward being implicated in the Plame case. Woodward was allegedly told by an "senior administration official" (probably Stephen Hadley) of Plame's identity before the Rove/Libby smear campaign picked up full speed. See also: "Is Woodward's Revelation a Bombshell or a Smokescreen?" and Joan Didion's excellent take on Woody from a few years ago.

* In related news, Patrick Fitzgerald has moved for a new grand jury, much to Karl Rove's chagrin.

* "They had to destroy American democracy at home in order to save the world for democracy." Judith Coburn says that's what happened with Vietnam and Watergate, and it's no surprise that's what's happening today.

* Not to be outdone by the Iraqi police, ABC News recently shined some light on the preferred torture techniques of the CIA.

* The Washington Post reports that, under the guise of fighting terrorism, the Pentagon is getting deeply immersed in domestic spying.

* Tom Regan runs down press coverage of the Padilla indictment and Democracy Now! asks the obvious question, "Why did the Bush Administration Hold Jose Padilla for 3 Years as an Enemy Combatant?" The "Dirty Bomb" charge was dropped, suspiciously, because the evidence allegedly produced against Padilla was obtained via torture.

* Europe's reportedly in an "uproar" over the CIA's torture flights and hidden prisons. Good.

* The Guardian reports that some reality is leaking out of the British government: "A confidential Foreign Office document accuses Israel of rushing to annex the Arab area of Jerusalem, using illegal Jewish settlement construction and the vast West Bank barrier, in a move to prevent it becoming a Palestinian capital."

* To much acclaim, Condi Rice brokered a deal on turning over a Gaza border crossing to the Palestinians. Ramzy Baroud explores the meaning of this move.

* Peter Hirschberg of IPS speculates about what Sharon's defection from Likud may mean.

* Michael Neumann responds to Jeff Halper's recent essay on the links between Israel and American empire. Both authors make several excellent points.

* Ominous news: Pakistani earthquake victims now face the winter, head on.

* The UN says hunger is killing more than 6 million children a year. What a pity. If only we had the resources to do something about this.

* In climate change news, a handful of new studies suggest, independently, that: 1) sea levels are "rising twice as fast as they were 150 years ago and man-made greenhouse emissions are the prime cause"; 2) the negative effects of climate change will be felt, disproportionately, in the Third World; 3) water vapor is contributing to the greenhouse gas effect; and 4) Greenland's ice cap is melting at an alarming rate, with potentially disastrous consequences for Europe.

* "None of us want to live in a country that allows something like Katrina to happen," writes Tom Andre in a recent dispatch from New Orleans. "We may very well have lost the soul of a great American city, and it was preventable. I think we might have all lost a bit of ourselves, too: this is America, and it did happen here. My hope is that the long-term legacy of the hurricane is that now there will be enough people who shout loud enough to make sure that it doesn't happen again." Unfortunately, that's turning out to be wishful thinking, as last week's Frontline made clear.

* Joseph Kay and Barry Grey provide some perspective on the recently-announced 30K job cuts by GM.

* "Those who still feel that welfare reform was a bad idea should also recognize that there is no going back," writes Christopher Jencks in a review of American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare. "America will not revive welfare 'as we knew it' in the lifetime of anyone reading this article. For that we can thank Bill Clinton."

* "A slew of new essays and studies show that fighting against inequality is the battle of our time," says David Moberg in In These Times.

* Ken Tomlinson, the CPB's former director and noted scourge of Bill Moyers, has gotten himself in a fair bit of trouble for being a partisan hack and abusing his power. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

* Michael Massing looks at some of what's wrong with the media in a two-part NYRB eulogy feature.

* Media Lens dissects the pathetic tale of the Guardian's smear job on Noam Chomsky.

* Michael Klare weighs the odds of the most likely "wag the dog" option for Bush.

* Louis Menand's review of Tony Judt's post-war history of Europe is a good read.

* Lastly, I hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving.

Patience

Back soon. I've been under the weather and it's taking me a little while thumbing through what I feel I need to thumb through before resuming things. Apologies.

Worthy links

Obviously, I've been on an unannounced hiatus of late. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to go back on one for about another week or so. In the meantime, I leave you some worthwhile links.

* The Washington Post recently reported as revelatory what should have been known by any serious news consumer: the US is running a system of "black sites" around the world, undisclosed prisons where detainees from the "war on terror" are being held and, presumably, tortured. Related: Brian Foley on "Why Most Americans Don't Care About Gitmo (and Why They Should)" and Jane Mayer asks, "Can the CIA legally kill a prisoner?"

* The Independent reports on RAI television's documentary about the Americans' use of white phosphorous against the civilian population of Fallujah during the November 2004 assault. Again, this has been reported on several occasions previously, just not in the American press. And, today, we get confirmation from an unlikely source: US military literature.

* Was the Iraqi Constitution Vote Fixed? asks Kevin Zeese. Nearly a month after the election, charges of irregularities and fraud abound from Nineveh province, where results essentially determined the fate of the referendum.

* October's count of 90 US soldiers killed in Iraq was the highest monthly toll since January.

* A smoking gun? We now know, via the NY Times, that the Bushies mounted one of their primary pieces of evidence regarding an Iraq-Al Qaeda connection on an informer whose testimony was widely seen as fraudulent.

* George Monbiot does an admirable job tackling the media's evasion and disingenuous criticisms of last fall's Lancet study on Iraqi mortality, as well as its preference for low-balled figures that fail to approximate the true scale of the war. "We can expect the US and UK governments to seek to minimise the extent of their war crimes," he observes. "But it's time the media stopped collaborating."

* Due to the confluence of events and some crafty maneuvering on the part of Democrats, the LA Times reports that "Bush War Policy Is Now in Play."

* Michael Schwartz brings you some of the submerged news from "forgotten Iraq," where the "inexorable drumbeat of occupation and resistance" marches on with dwindling attention from Western audiences.

* A historian thumbing through NSA documents has come across evidence suggesting that the Gulf of Tonkin incident back in 1968, used by the Johnson administration to ratchet up military activity against Vietnam, was fabricated. As Eric Alterman notes, "The parallels between the Tonkin episode and the war in Iraq are far too powerful for political comfort."

* Welcome back, Mr. Chalabi!

* Joshua Holland argues that the final report of the Volcker Committee, which has been investigating the Iraqi oil-for-food scandal, suggests that what the "Scandal Pimps" have been trying "to portray as a massive UN scandal has always been a relatively modest corporate scandal, interesting more for the players involved than because of its scale."

* This SF Chronicle report sums up some of the recent developments, largely in Italy, regarding the forged Niger uranium documents.

* Here's the Libby indictment. Karl's not off the hook yet, but there's a lot of (baseless?) speculation flying around that he's going to weasel his way out of punitive action from Fitzgerald. Meanwhile, as the larger mystery still remains unsolved and the neocons come under some overdue scrutiny, John Dean has taken it upon himself to read between the lines of the indictment. Plus: Scott Ritter on "Indicting America."

* Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, has notably come out with condemnations of the Cheney-led "cabal." He has also, to less fanfare, outed Cheney as the primary administrative force behind American gulag policies and tipped his hat to the centrality of oil in pre-war Iraq deliberations.

* Jim Lobe observes that, around Washington, Dick Cheney's becoming a political liability for Bush.

* Damn defectors. See also Bush's "Wall of Cronyism."

* Mark Engler argues that Bush is bad for American business.

* Dave Lindorff notes that impeachment of Dubya has "gone mainstream," with polls showing more than 50% of Americans approve of Congressional action "if it can be shown that he lied to get the US into a war with Iraq."

* Why is France burning? Check in with Ehsan Ahrari and Doug Ireland for some solid insight.

* On to Syria? William Arkin details some of the US military preparations for an attack and Ramzy Baroud argues that "to act as if the international uproar lead by the Bush Administration, more specifically the pro-Israeli elements within the administration, is a sincere endeavor to unmask the truth and bring Hariri's murderers to justice is to succumb yet to another mockery as sizeable as that of Iraq's alleged WMDs."

* Jeff Halper connects the disturbing dots between the politics of Israel and the ambitions of American empire, while Hasan Abu Nimah relays this concise and cogent quote from The Independent: "President Ahmadinejad calls for Israel to be wiped off the map, but Israel effectively wiped Palestine off the map 57 years ago, and where's the indignation over that?"

* The FBI's snooping around a lot more than it has in recent times. According to the Washington Post, the Bureau "now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year, according to government sources, a hundredfold increase over historic norms. The letters -- one of which can be used to sweep up the records of many people -- are extending the bureau's reach as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans."

* IPS' Barbara Litzlbeck summarizes some of the findings of a recent report on the potential economic costs of global climate change.

* David Peterson breaks down some of the findings of the latest Commonwealth Fund International Health Policy Survey.

* David Shipler: "There is no more telling indictment of reporters and editors than the surprise felt by most Americans in seeing the raw poverty among New Orleans residents after Hurricane Katrina. In an open society, nobody who had been watching television or reading newspapers should have been surprised by what Katrina 'revealed,' to use the word so widely uttered in the aftermath. The fissures of race and class should be 'revealed' every day by America’s free press. Why aren’t they?" Plus: Tim Wise examines the Big Lie about the poor in New Orleans.

* A Brandeis University analysis of a recent USDA report shows that hunger in the US has risen by 43% since 1999.

* Lew Rockwell in/famously lamented the rise of "Red State Fascism" last year. More recently, Chris Hedges revamped several of Rockwell's claims to ring the alarm about Christian-led Fascism in the US.

* In the Nation, Stephen Holmes reviews two new books from prominent CMLs Paul Berman and David Rieff. Interestingly, the section on Berman reads much like George Scialabba's delicious Nation review of Terror and Liberalism from 2003.

* Mark Crispin Miller, whose August article in Harper's and forthcoming book argue that the 2004 presidential election was probably stolen, alleges that John Kerry recently admitted that he, too, "now thinks the election was stolen." Kerry has, in his typical manner, gone back on this statement. See also, in related news: "Powerful Government Accountability Office report confirms key 2004 stolen election findings."

* Paul Rogat Loeb tells us about the "real Rosa Parks," a woman who, far from being a singular courageous voice in the wilderness, was deeply immersed in a broad movement for social change.

* Alex Cockburn dissects the latest Chomsky smear from the Guardian.