Innocent Birds

I am not a speechwriter. Still, I feel compelled to help the president out, to make my small contribution to the New World Order. Here is what President Bush will announce to the nation and the world in early April 2006:

Iran has flouted the international community and continues in its determined path to manufacture nucular weapons.

Iran has announced that it will destroy Israel, and once it has a nucular weapon it will do so.

Iran is the prime sponsor of terrorism, and once it has nucular weapons it will give them to terrorists to detonate in New York, London, and Tel Aviv. It will also put nucular weapons on missiles aimed at Europe and the U.S.

I have said that I will not remain idle while dangers gather. Nevertheless, I am mindful of those that say that there is still time to pursue diplomatic action, however unlikely it is to succeed. But I am here to announce that we no longer have that luxury.

Thousands of Iranian birds will begin their journey along their migratory pathways in the next few days. Their routes will bring them to Europe and the United States. This is a fact, and nobody can accuse the United States of making it up. [smirk]

Intelligence gathered by the U.S. and British governments shows that Iranian scientists have developed a mutated strain of the H5N1 virus that can be transmitted from human to human. World health agencies and experts have warned that such a virus will lead to a bird-flu pandemic that can potentially kill 150 million human beings. Iranian birds have already infected and killed innocent birds of our allies in Europe.

Even a single bird carrying the mutated strain can transmit it to countless other birds and humans, causing a nightmare of unimaginable proportions.

I demand that the Iranian government immediately destroy all strains of the mutated virus and provide to the international community incontrovertible proof that it has done so.

While we are at it, I demand that the Iranian government immediately destroy all its dual-use nuclear facilities, as well as all the knowledge it has about nucular weapons, including all physics books written after September 27, 1905.

I demand that the Iranian government immediately open up all its military, industrial, scientific, health care, and agricultural facilities for full and unconstrained international inspections.

I demand that the Iranian government immediately and verifiably destroy the wetlands at Gilan, Khuzestan, and Hamoon that breed the deadly birds that will attack us.

The Iranian government has 24 hours to comply with these just demands. Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict, commenced at a time of our choosing.

Iran and Bird Flu: The Perfect Casus Belli?, Jorge Hirsch

"Nothing that is taken seriously is spared."

...Forced Westernization, development, Arab nationalism, Pan-Arabism, socialism: all that failed. What's left? Religious identity, the collective conscience ordered around the inheritance of a tradition. Push this recovery movement to the end and you've got fundamentalism, so that it's no longer a matter of rediscovering habitual religiosity, but rather the truth of sources hijacked by the corruption of the present. The pretext/affair of the caricatures of Mohammed has demonstrated the immense resentment felt by populations that feel despised, abandoned by history, in a situation of perpetual failure in relation to a West that does not measure how the penetration of its ways of doing things and of thinking is destructive to the existing social order, notably in this Islam that, as much as a faith, is a way of life. The West is blind to the impact of globalization of the economy and customs, to how it disaggregates the traditional family and violently changes the relationship between men and women and between generations. We're talking about an existential uprising.

Aren't you struck by the rise in derision toward all religion?

Yes. There's some new quality to derision as it has been practiced, say, the last two or three decades in Europe. It illustrates the "departure" of religion that we talked about. We've gone beyond anti-religious criticism like we once knew, which expressed hostility on principle to a system one fought as contrary to the spirit of freedom. The opposition could be very violent, but it supposed a sort of agreement: you believe in the authority of revelation, but we believe in the autonomy of reason. The dissension was inexpiable, but there was an implicit consensus with regard to the stakes and the grounds of the confrontation - including recourse to deadly ridicule.
With derision, we step out of this implicit agreement. What is rejected is the very ground for belief. That's what makes it more hurtful for a religious awareness than traditional anti-clericalism or atheism, which could clash, but which had strong foundations. With derision, religious awareness is abused in its most profound being: the sense of [a] certain significance to existence, the sense of ultimate questions before death, and beyond that, salvation. Religious people are overridden by a smug superficiality.

The political world is not spared either ...

No, of course not. Nothing that is taken seriously is spared. Derision has become a sort of criterion for hyper-modernity. For very prosperous societies, we should undoubtedly see that as the reflex of a spoiled child. It is an ideological epiphenomenon that pushes the liberal faith of our societies to the limit: everything goes along on its own, so why ask dramatic questions? Seriousness is quite out of fashion ... It goes without saying that the more committed one is in one's faith or political action, the more this rejection of seriousness hits you in the face. And then imagine the reaction in societies where the difficulty of existence still preserves all its
weight ...

The West Is Blind to the Impact of Globalization on the Economy and on Morals: an interview with Marcel Gauchet in Le Monde, Saturday 11 March 2006

"the standing ponds of stinking waters"

"[B]y the one they deceive the souls of people, for they preach the letter of the Spirit, and by the other they pick their purses. (...) those writings which they live by, were not writings that proceeded produced from any Schollars, according to humane art, but from Fishermen, Shepherds, Husbandmen, and the Carpenters son, who spake and writ as the Spirit gave them utterance, from an inward testimony. Yet now these learned schollars have got the writings of these inferior men of the world so called, do now slight, despise and trample them under feet, pressing upon the powers of the earth, to make laws to hold them under bondage, and that lay-people, trades-men, and such as are not bred in schools, may have no liberty to speak or write of the Spirit. Any why so? Because out of these despised ones, doth the spirit rise up more and more so clearer light, making them to speak from experience (....) But now the learned schollars having no inward testimony of their own to uphold their trade by a customary practice, they hold fast the old letter, getting their living by telling the people the meanings of those trades-mens words and writings; but alas, they mightily corrupt their meaning, by their multitude of false expositions and interpretations; for no man knows the meaning of the spirit, but he hath the spirit."

- Gerrard Winstanley, "The New Law of Righteousness"

Define "Paradox"

A "new paradox of journalism" has emerged in which the number of news outlets continues to grow, yet the number of stories covered and the depth of many reports is decreasing, according to an annual review of the news business being released today by a watchdog group.

Many television, radio and newspaper newsrooms are cutting their staffs as advertising revenue stagnates, but blogs and other online ventures lack the size or inclination to generate information, reports the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a research institute affiliated with the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

The study depicts the media in an interregnum - with the reach of print, radio and television reduced, but the promise of an egalitarian online "citizen journalism" unfulfilled.

"It's probably glib and even naive to say simply that more platforms equal more choices," project Director Tom Rosenstiel said. "The content has to come from somewhere, and as older news-gathering media decline, some of the strengths they offer in monitoring the powerful and verifying the facts may be weakening as well."

-truthout

Black Ops

Free Iraq:

Muqtada Al-Sadr has pointed out that:

"the American forces had provided an air cover, with several drones circling the Sadr city, and then cutting off all wireless communication throughout Sadr city, just before the setting off of the six car explosions that resulted in the death of around 60 people and the injury of 200 others in Sadr city on Sunday."
Al-Sadr: The cars exploded under American air cover (In Arabic) March 13, 2006

There is also a recent report that a police patrol in Basrah had captured, last Thursday (March 9, 2006) night, three persons in the act of planting a bomb near the Iraqi Islamic Party headquarters in Basrah. Upon investigation, they found out that the three were British wearing Arabic garb in disguise. Immediately afterwards, the British army arrived and arrested the police patrol along with their captives. The British then released the British captives and detained the Iraqi policemen.

Basrah police capture three British wearing Arabic garb (In Arabic) March 12, 2006

No, It's Not More Complex

Even the man who maintains we should be "strong against Hamas" should be able to find a little compassion in his heart for the children whose lives hang by a thread, or more accurately, by a shell fragment or by the gun sights of IDF snipers - for example, Udai Tantawi, 13, who was killed in the Askar refugee camp in Nablus, and Mundal Abu Alia, 13, who was killed near his village adjacent to Ramallah, on the way to Kokhav Hashahar.

And do not say it is a necessary thing that can be denounced, for the sake of the state's security and for the sake of preserving the lives of our own children. There is no necessity to kill the enemy's children in order to save our own children. There is no atonement and forgiveness granted because it is claimed that there was no intent - this, in contrast to their despicable terrorism. Our right to defend ourselves does not give us the right to take actions that do not meet the test of human and Jewish morality.

My outcry is that of a father trying to survive the last 10 years, since the fall of our son, and who does not find respite and does not find tranquillity in revenge operations, and cannot live in an environment that sanctifies killing and more killing, ours and theirs.

- Yona Bargur

A "stunning development": Moussaoui trial halted.

Three days after the FBI is caught lying:

Independent:

"An angry federal judge today halted the trial of confessed al-Qa'ida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, calling an unexpected recessed to consider whether US government violations of her rules against coaching witnesses should remove the death penalty as an option. "

BBC:

"Judge Leonie Brinkema is considering whether to rule out the possibility of executing Moussaoui because of 'egregious' government misconduct. "

Can anyone believe that this flouting of the judge's clearly-stated rules is the result of yet more incompetence on the part of the Bumbling Bush Gang? Much more plausibly, Xymphora suggests that the government is deliberately sabotaging the trial before things get out of hand:

"The final move, worthy of The Trial, is for the government to tank its own case in order that the defense of Moussaoui not raise issues issues of guilt that point, not at the defendant, but at the Bush Administration which is instructing the prosecution attorneys. "

The FBI's lies, the Washington Post, Zacarias Moussaoui and the United States of Amnesia

First, a historical note, courtesy of the Washington Post:

Six years before the Sept. 11 attacks, Philippine police took down an al Qaeda cell in Manila that, among other things, had been plotting to fly explosives-laden planes into the Pentagon -- and possibly some skyscrapers. The CIA knew about the plot, known as Operation Bojinka. So did the FBI. "We told the Americans about the plans to turn planes into flying bombs as far back as 1995," a Philippine inspector says.

Now, today's news, courtesy of the Washington Post:

FBI Knew al-Qaeda Pilots Training in U.S.

Agency Knew of Flight Training Before 9/11, Moussaoui Jury Told

By Timothy Dwyer and William Branigin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, March 7, 2006; 12:57 PM

A top FBI expert on the al-Qaeda terrorist network testified in court today that the agency knew before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that the group's leader, Osama bin Laden, had sent followers to an Oklahoma flight school to train as pilots and was interested in hijacking airplanes.

FBI agent Michael Anticev said investigators understood that bin Laden used the flight school in Norman, Okla., to train pilots to fly his own aircraft. He also acknowledged that the FBI knew before the Sept. 11 attacks that al-Qaeda was training pilots to hijack planes, but he said the agency believed the aim was to carry out conventional hijackings and fly the aircraft to other countries, rather than crash them into buildings.

Is this excuse even remotely plausible?

Do Popes shit in the woods?

MASCAL Mass Casualty Training Exercise, November 3, 2000

Two months before the attacks, Italian security officials had anticipated the possibility of planes hijacked by Muslim extremists attacking the G8 summit in Genoa (which George W. Bush had attended). The BBC reported:

Up to 20,000 police and military personnel are involved in the security operation. The huge force of officers and equipment which has been assembled to deal with unrest has been spurred on by a warning that supporters of Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden might attempt an air attack on some of the world leaders present.

Anti-aircraft missiles have been deployed at the airport, and naval vessels are patrolling the seas. "It looks like we're at war," said one resident inside the red zone, Attilio Cipollina. The summit has sparked massive media interest in Italy, with Wednesday's headlines dominated by the security alerts. La Repubblica also comments that this may be the last G8 summit as the pillars of international politics crumble under the pressure of globalisation.

What was the FBI up to while all this was going on? Here is some more very recent history, from Paul Thompson's Complete Timeline at the Center for Cooperative Research:

August 23-27, 2001: Minnesota FBI Agents Convinced Moussaoui Plans to Do Something with a Plane, Undermined by FBI Headquarters

In the wake of the French intelligence report (see August 22, 2001) on Zacarias Moussaoui, FBI agents in Minnesota are “in a frenzy” and “absolutely convinced he [is] planning to do something with a plane.” One agent writes notes speculating Moussaoui might “fly something into the World Trade Center.” [Newsweek, 5/20/02] Minnesota FBI agents become “desperate to search the computer lap top” and “conduct a more thorough search of his personal effects,” especially since Moussaoui acted as if he was hiding something important in the laptop when arrested. [Time, 5/27/02; Time, 5/21/02] They decide to apply for a search warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). “FISA allows the FBI to carry out wiretaps and searches that would otherwise be unconstitutional” because “the goal is to gather intelligence, not evidence.” [Washington Post, 11/4/01] Standards to get a warrant through FISA are so low that out of 10,000 requests over more than 20 years, not a single one was turned down. Previously, when the FBI did not have a strong enough case, it allegedly simply lied to FISA. In May 2002, the FISA court complained that the FBI had lied in at least 75 warrant cases during the Clinton administration, once even by the FBI director. [New York Times, 8/27/02] However, as FBI Agent Coleen Rowley later puts it, FBI headquarters “almost inexplicably, throw[s] up roadblocks” and undermines their efforts. Headquarters personnel bring up “almost ridiculous questions in their apparent efforts to undermine the probable cause.” One Minneapolis agent's e-mail says FBI headquarters is “setting this up for failure.” That turns out to be correct. [Time, 5/21/02; Time, 5/27/02]

Unsettling

via AlertAndAlarmed

Something New

Marcos: We always turn to look towards the bottom, not only in our own country, but in Latin America particularly. When Evo Morales presented this invitation for his presidential inauguration, we said that we were not turning our gaze upwards, neither in Bolivia nor in Latin America, and in that sense, we don't judge governments, whose judgment belongs to the people who are there. We look with interest at the Bolivian indigenous mobilization, and the Ecuadorian one. In fact, they are mentioned in the Sixth Declaration.The struggle of the Argentine youth, fundamentally, this whole piquetero movement, and of the youth in general in Argentina, with whom we strongly identify with. Also with the movement to recover memory, of the pain from what was the long night of terror in Argentina, in Uruguay, in Chile. And in that sense, we prefer to look at the bottom, exchange experiences and understand their own assessments of what is happening.We think, fundamentally, that the future story of Latin America, not only of Mexico but for all of Latin America, will be constructed from the bottom--that the rest of what's happening, in any case, are steps. Maybe false steps, maybe firm ones, that's yet to be seen. But fundamentally, it will be the people from the bottom that will be able to take charge of it, organizing themselves in another way. The old recipes or the old parameters should serve as a reference, yes, of what was done, but not as something that should be re-adopted to do something new.
















Sixth Declaration of the Selva Lacandona

Straight Talking: Cheney at the Institute of Petroleum in 1999

In Autumn 1999, Dick Cheney was CEO of Halliburton. Via Energy Bulletin, this is a brief extract from the full text of his speech to the Institute of Petroleum in London.

"... for over a hundred years we as an industry have had to deal with the pesky problem that once you find oil and pump it out of the ground you’ve got to turn around and find more or go out of business. Producing oil is obviously a self-depleting activity. Every year you’ve got to find and develop reserves equal to your output just to stand still, just to stay even. This is true for companies as well in the broader economic sense as it is for the world. A new merged company like Exxon-Mobil will have to secure over a billion and a half barrels of new oil equivalent reserves every year just to replace existing production. It’s like making one hundred per cent interest discovery in another major field of some five hundred million barrels equivalent every four months, or finding two Hibernias a year.

For the world as a whole, oil companies are expected to keep finding and developing enough oil to offset our seventy one million plus barrel a day of oil depletion, but also to meet new demand. By some estimates there will be an average of two per cent annual growth in global oil demand over the years ahead along with conservatively a three per cent natural decline in production from existing reserves. That means by 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from?

Governments and the national oil companies are obviously controlling about ninety per cent of the assets. Oil remains fundamentally a government business. While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East with two thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies; even though companies are anxious for greater access there, progress continues to be slow. It is true that technology, privatisation and the opening up of a number of countries have created many new opportunities in areas around the world for various oil companies, but looking back to the early 1990’s, expectations were that significant amounts of the world’s new resources would come from such areas as the former Soviet Union and from China. Of course that didn’t turn out quite as expected.

[...]

Oil is unique in that it is so strategic in nature. We are not talking about soapflakes or leisurewear here. Energy is truly fundamental to the world’s economy. The Gulf War was a reflection of that reality. The degree of government involvement also makes oil a unique commodity. [...] It is the basic, fundamental building block of the world’s economy. It is unlike any other commodity. "

"The Long War with the Irreconcilable Wing of Islam"

The War on Terror might last 70 years. That's what Newt Gingrich says, and Rumsfeld is listening to him.

"CBS executives declined to comment"

Digital product placement alters TV landscape

A breakthrough in television advertising debuted without fanfare last spring as a brand-name box of crackers appeared on the CBS sitcom "Yes, Dear" for about 20 seconds, seen but hardly noticed by millions of viewers. Unbeknownst to them, the image of Kellogg's Club Crackers had been digitally painted onto the top of a coffee table after the scene was filmed, launching the latest advance in a growing marketing practice known in the industry as product placement but derided by critics as "stealth advertising."

The "Yes, Dear" episode in April 2005 marked the first commercial use of a patent-pending innovation dubbed Digital Brand Integration, or DBI, developed by New York-based Marathon Ventures, and grew out of an unprecedented marketing deal with CBS. ...

- via Persistence of Vision

Ivor Cutler's ivory cutlery

R.I.P.

Lie down, pussy,

And I'll turn on the hoover.

Populism, noun

Noam Chomsky:

Latin America has, I think, the most important popular movements anywhere: the MST (Landless Workers Movement) in Brazil, the indigenous movements in Bolivia, others. That accounts for the vibrancy and vitality of democracy in much of Latin America today -- denounced in the West as "populism," a term that translates as "threat to elite rule with marginalization of the public in systems with democratic forms but with only limited substance," those naturally preferred by concentrated private and state power. (via Lenin)

The Anthraxed Senate

Dragged back up from the Memory Hole: "the most significant political attack on US democracy in recent history":

Five labs traced the anthrax that was sent to Congress in 2001 to the U.S. government biowarfare lab at Fort Detrick. The Washington Post reported this in December, 2001. The FBI is not investigating, and has destroyed the stock that was crucial evidence in this case. This does not necessarily lead [to] the conclusion that the FBI or the military was behind sending the letters to Senators Daschle and Leahy. It is important to remember that the lab at Fort Detrick is illegal and the work done there illegal, under the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) and under the U.S. law that implements it. So, any investigation that led to one or more individuals working on biological weapons for the U.S. government would reveal criminal activity by the government. That's reason enough for the coverup.

- David Swanson, recommending Francis Boyle's new book, "Biowarfare and Terrorism".

Seventeen days after Daschle and Leahy received their anthrax letters, the Patriot Act was passed by the Senate. Daschle also acceded to Bush and Cheney's separately-expressed wishes that there be no independent investigation of the 9/11 atrocities.

I'd like to thank everyone who made this possible.

The star of Ireland’s newest Oscar winning film today told about the heavy handed tactics of US immigration officials who refused him entry to America to attend the awards. Ruaidhri Conroy, who starred in action short Six Shooter, said he was barred from entering the States because he overstayed a visa by two days in 1998. [...] “I was escorted onto the plane by four officers and they said if you behave we won’t handcuff. They were very heavy,” he said. [...] Conroy, who had a seat reserved at the 78th Annual Academy Awards in Hollywood for the ceremony, revealed how he spent 22 hours in custody at Los Angeles’ LAX airport before being sent home.

- The sheer unabashed pettiness of it! But is there method in this apparent madness?

They are all of the same mind.

"A terrorist is not just someone with a gun or a bomb, but also someone who spreads ideas that are contrary to Western and Christian civilization."
- General Jorge Videla

Holy Terror and the Power of Prayer

Lady Claire:
How do you know you're...God?

Earl of Gurney:
Simple. When I pray to Him I find I'm talking to myself.

(From The Ruling Class, Act One, by the great Peter Barnes)

Not enough family...

Two Iraqi women whose husbands and children were killed by US troops during the Iraq war have been refused entry into the United States for a speaking tour. The women were invited to the US for peace events surrounding international women’s by the human rights group Global Exchange and the women’s peace group CODEPINK. In a piece of painful irony, the reason given for the rejection was that the women don’t have enough family in Iraq to prove that they’ll return to the country.

(via Under the Same Sun )

Implications

I want to call to the attention of the House the juxtaposition of two news stories. One [..] relating to 9/11. It says 'Federal officials where repeatedly warned in the months before the September 11, 2001 terror attacks that Osama bin Laden and Al-Queda were planning aircraft hijacking suicide attempts according to a new report that the Bush administration had been repressing'. And this from the front page of the Washington post, 'a newly leaked video recording the high level government deliberation the day before Katrina hit shows disaster officials emphatically warning President Bush that the storm posed a catastrophic threat to new Orleans and the gulf coast, and a grim faced Bush personally assuring state leaders that his administration was fully prepared [..] to help'.

Do we see a pattern here? 9/11? Katrina? They knew something was going to happen and they didn't act. They knew that if they went into Iraq that we were looking at a disaster, that there was no way we were going to be able to run that country. They know that global climate change poses a threat to the entire planet, nothing is being done, a pattern of recklessness, indifference, callousness. The implications are deadly for the people of the United States. - Rep. Dennis Kucinich

To Transfer, Verb

Far-right leader Baruch Marzel this week staged his second visit, backed by armed settlers, to the Arab town of Sakhnin in less than a month. He was kept to the edge of the Galilean town by police but allowed to take up position on elevated points so that he and his followers could photograph the area.

Marzel, a former head of the outlawed anti-Arab Kach party, is now a leader of the Jewish National Front, a group of far-right extremists. He was joined on the trip by Itamar Ben Gvir, a settler leader based in Hebron who is suspected of belonging to Jewish underground organisations.

Marzel and Ben Gvir said they wanted to tour Sakhnin as part of their bid to monitor illegal construction in Arab communities.

The pair and 50 followers tried to visit Sakhnin once before, on February 7, but were turned back by police. In a radio interview before that visit Ben Gvir warned that the group would be armed and would not hesitate to open fire if attacked. Most of the group have permits to carry guns because they live in the settlements.

The police relented on this second occasion after Marzel threatened to petition the High Court if his way was blocked.

The group's goal appears twofold. First, as the spokesman of Sakhnin council, Ghazil Abu Raya, observed, they are trying to create "an unnecessary provocation". Marzel and his followers want publicity for the causes of the hardline settlers, especially as the election draws near, and hope that a confrontation with Arab citizens will win them popular support.

And second, they are hoping to draw a parallel between unlicensed building in Arab communities and unlicensed construction in settlement outposts in the West Bank in the hope that it will garner sympathy for their claims that they are being discriminated against.

The settlers have been particularly motivated to draw such parallels since the government took an uncharacteristically harsh line in dismantling the outpost of Amona in the central West Bank on February 1. Marzel argues that, while illegally constructed buildings in Jewish settlements are bulldozed, illegally built buildings in Arab communities are allowed to stand.

By highlighting illegal building in Arab towns and villages, the settlers have everything to gain: either they will raise the pressure on the government to increase the number of house demolitions in Arab communities; or they will make keeping its promises to dismantle the settlement outposts - the only demand being made of Israel by Washington - far more difficult.

Marzel has pulled similar stunts before at election time. In January 2003, when he stood for the Herut party, he and MK Michael Kleiner made a "campaign stop" in the Arab town of Umm al-Fahm, again declaring that they were armed and there to inspect illegal construction.

But this time, after the Gaza disenagagement and the dismantlement of Amona, he has more support. Members of the Knesset from the far-right National Union party toured an unrecognised village in the Negev on February 5, again ostensibly to monitor illegal building.

Hasin el-Raafiyeh, chairman of the Council for Unrecognized Villages, all of which have no running water, electricity or other public services, criticised the MKs. "You came here to taunt us. See how the Bedouin live. Are you willing to live this way?"

El-Raafiyeh was highlighting the specious nature of the settlers' comparison. Although the settlers' very presence in the West Bank is illegal under international law, the overwhelming majority of their homes have been declared legal under Israeli law. Only a tiny number of houses have been refused permits in what the government calls "illegal outposts", usually built on private land owned by Palestinians. Militant settlers knowingly choose to live in these outposts when they have many other places to live.

In Arab communities, on the other hand, the situation is very different. According to official statistics, there are tens of thousands of illegal Arab homes. Most are unlicensed because the planning authorities have refused to draw up master plans for Arab communities, making it near-impossible to receive permits for new house-builidng. Arab home-owners build on their own private land but cannot get a license to legalise their homes. In most cases, because 93 per cent of land in Israel is state-owned and reserved for Jews, they have nowhere else they can live.

The comparison being drawn by the settlers is a worrying trend. Some have already started privately asking why, if settlers were "transferred" from their homes in Gaza, is it not possible for Arabs to be transferred - that is, ethnically cleansed - from their homes inside Israel?

Marzel's continuing freedom to spread his racist message is also a major cause for concern. According to files from the Kach party obtained three years ago by the Shin Bet secret service Marzel is still an active leader of Kach, despite the fact that it was outlawed as a terrorist organisation in 1994.

Justice Michael Cheshin, a judge who tried unsuccessfully to bar Marzel's candidacy at the last general election, observed of the documents: "An examination of the material brought before us shows that Marzel is the leader, or one of the important leaders, of Kach. There is absolutely no doubt Marzel is [still] connected [to the movement] and ... working for the same disgusting aims as in the past."

All In The Family

"I do not see a likelihood of a filibuster," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. "This [Samuel Alito] might be a man I disagree with, but it doesn't mean he shouldn't be on the court."

Hm.

The Democrats aren't just letting the Republicans get away with murder, however, some of them are also reaping the benefits of the Bush wars. We constantly hear about Dick Cheney's ties to Halliburton and how his ex-company is making bundles off US contracts in Iraq. But what we don't hear about is how Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein and her husband are also making tons of money off the "war on terror."

The wishy-washy senator now claims Bush misled her leading up to the invasion of Iraq. I don't think she's being honest with us though; there may have been other reasons she helped sell Bush's lies. According to The Center for Public Integrity, Senator Feinstein's husband Richard Blum has racked in millions of dollars from Perini, a civil infrastructure construction company, of which the billionaire investor wields 75 percent of Perini's voting share.

In April 2003 the US Army Corps of Engineers dived out $500 million to Perini to provide services for Iraq's central command. A month earlier in March 2003, Perini was awarded $25 million to design and construct a facility to support the Afghan National Army near Kabul. And in March 2004, Perini was awarded a hefty contract worth up to $500 million for "electrical power distribution and transmission" in the southern Iraq.

Senator Feinstein, who sits on the Appropriations Committee as well as the Select Committee on Intelligence, is reaping the benefits of her husband's investments. The Democratic royal family recently purchased a 16.5 million dollar mansion in the flush Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco. It's a disgusting display of war profiteering and the leading Democrat, just like Cheney, should be called out for her offense.

And that's exactly why the Bush administration is so darn bullet-proof. The Democratic leadership in Washington is just as crooked and just as callous.

- Joshua Frank

American Islarmism

December 08, 2005
U.S. Helps Some Iran-Backed Terror

Inter Press Service
Dahr Jamail and Harb al-Mukhtar

BAGHDAD, Dec 8 (IPS) - After the U.S. forces and the bombings, Iraqis are coming to fear those bands of men in masks who seem to operate with the Iraqi police.

Omar Ahmed's family learnt what it can mean to run into the police, their supposed protectors.

Omar was driving with two friends in the Adhamiya district of Baghdad at night Sep. 1 when they were stopped at a police checkpoint.

"The three of them were arrested by the police even though there was nothing in the car," an eyewitness told IPS, speaking on condition of anonymity.

They did not return home for days, and the family began to search the morgues, common practice now when someone is arrested by the Iraqi police and does not return.

"Five days after they were arrested we found Omar's body in the freezer in a morgue, with holes in the side of his head and shoulders," a friend of the family told IPS.

"We don't know if the other two men are dead or alive," he said. "But we know these men were guilty of nothing other than driving their car at night. We have no security and the problem is that police are killing and disappearing the Iraqi people every day now."

The 'death squads' as they have come to be called are getting more active with just a week to go before the Dec. 15 election.

On Tuesday this week Iraqi police said they found 20 bodies dumped at two different locations in western Iraq, according to the al-Sharqiyah television network.

Eleven bodies of men wearing civilian clothes were found dumped on the main road between Baghdad and the Jordanian border. The bodies were found near al-Rutbah city, with their hands tied behind their backs.

Police said that nine bodies, also of civilians, and riddled with bullets, were found on the side of a road near Fallujah on Monday.

Signs are emerging that such killing is the work of death squads backed by Iran-backed Shia forces that dominate the government, and therefore the police.

Abdullah Omar, a 39-year-old unemployed engineer who now sells petrol and cigarettes on the black market says he survived one such Shia squad.

"I was sleeping on the roof of my house one night because it was so hot and we had no electricity as usual," Omar told IPS. "I was awakened by a loud explosion nearby, and immediately surrounded by strange men wearing night-vision goggles."

Omar says he was thrown to the ground by the men, handcuffed and blindfolded. "They started to beat me using the end of their guns," he said. "Then they searched my house, took my gun which I told them I had, then they took me away."

His 32-year-old wife Sumia, a teacher, was also handcuffed and taken away.

Omar says he saw about ten pick-up trucks carrying at least 100 men wearing black masks before a bag was placed over his head. He was taken to the back of a truck, and beaten up until he fainted.

Sumia was beaten up too. "I received so many kicks to my stomach," she told IPS. "I heard Abdullah screaming in pain, so I fought until they handcuffed me and beat me until I couldn't do anything else."

The two were taken to the Iraqi police station in Suleakh, Baghdad, where they were interrogated and accused of owning a mortar.

"I explained to them that I don't know anything about mortars," said Omar. "And that I have never had anything to do with the resistance, but they said so many insulting words to me, and beat me further."

Sumia, who was also interrogated, pleaded with the policemen to let them return home to care for their young children. "They would not give me a headscarf to cover my head," she told IPS. "They kept asking me about mortars and wouldn't let me go to look after my children. We know nothing about any mortars.."

Omar said the next morning he was moved into another room where he saw men lying handcuffed, with their heads covered with sacks. "They were lying on the ground without a blanket or pillow."

In a while, he said he saw 14 men wearing black masks enter the room carrying whips. "I watched them beat the prisoners. They told them this was their breakfast."

Abdullah and Sumia were later taken home, and warned that if security forces were attacked in their neighbourhood, they would be detained again.

Omar said the men who detained him and his wife were members of the Shia Badr Army, a militia affiliated with Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

Tensions in Baghdad run high, as people who live in areas not controlled by the Badr Army face daily threats of being kidnapped or killed by members of the militia.

"The Badr Army is conducting a campaign to destroy other political parties and their electoral advertisements," said Saleh Hassir, a doctor at a Baghdad medical centre. "We see black paint and tears on ex-prime minister Allawi's posters and those of the Sunni groups, but pictures of al-Hakim remain unaffected."

The doctor says the Americans have helped bring in new Iran-backed terror.

"So many of us are against Iraq being controlled by these fundamental Islamic Iranian loyalists like al-Hakim," the doctor told IPS. "Now we are seeing the suffering and ultimate dictatorship they have brought us here with the help of the Americans."

The Seasoned Pro's Opinion:

Warning of the outcome of a possible civil war in Iraq, Negroponte said sectarian civil war in Iraq would be a "serious setback" to the global war on terror. Note - he did not say it would be a "serious setback" to the Iraqi people, over 1,400 of whom have been slaughtered in sectarian violence touched off by the bombing of the Golden Mosque last week in Samarra.

No, the violence and instability in Iraq would be a "serious setback" to the global "war on terror."

But it's interesting for him to continue, "The consequences for the people of Iraq would be catastrophic," whilst feigning his concern. Because generating catastrophic consequences for civilian populations just happens to be his specialty.

If we briefly review the political history of John Negroponte, we find a man who has had a career bent toward generating civilian death and widespread human rights abuses, and promoting sectarian and ethnic violence.

Remember when Negroponte was the US ambassador to Honduras, from 1981 to 1985? While there he earned the distinction of being accused of widespread human rights violations by the Honduras Commission on Human Rights while he worked as "a tough cold warrior who enthusiastically carried out President Ronald Reagan's strategy," according to cables sent between Negroponte and Washington during his tenure there.

The human rights violations carried out by Negroponte were described as "systematic."

These violations Negroponte oversaw in Honduras were carried out by operatives trained by the CIA. Records document his "special intelligence units," better known as "death squads," comprised of CIA-trained Honduran armed units which kidnapped, tortured and killed hundreds of people. Victims also included US missionaries (similar to Christian Peacemaker Teams in Iraq) who happened to witness many of the atrocities.

Negroponte had full knowledge of these activities, while he made sure US military aid to Honduras increased from $4 million to $77.4 million a year during his tenure, and the tiny country became so jammed with US soldiers it was dubbed the "USS Honduras."

It is also important to remember that Negroponte oversaw construction of the air base where Nicaraguan Contras were trained by the US. This air base, El Aguacate, was also used as a secret detention and torture center during his time in Honduras.

While Negroponte was the US ambassador to Honduras, civilian deaths sky-rocketed into the tens of thousands. During his first full year, the local newspapers carried no less than 318 stories of extra-judicial attacks by the military.

He has been described as an "old fashioned imperialist" and got his start during the Vietnam War in the CIA's Phoenix program, which assassinated some 40,000 Vietnamese "subversives."

Negroponte's death squads used electric shock and suffocation devices in interrogations, kept their prisoners naked, and when a prisoner was no longer useful he was brutally executed.

Outraged at the human rights abuses by the Reagan-Bush administration, in 1984 Nicaragua took its case to the World Court in The Hague. The decision of the court was for the Reagan-Bush administration to terminate its "unlawful use of force" in international terrorism and pay substantial reparations to the victims. The White House responded by brushing off the court's findings and vetoed two UN Security Council resolutions that affirmed the judgment that all states must observe international law.

In the middle of Negroponte's tenure in Iraq, the Pentagon (read Donald Rumsfeld) openly considered using assassination and kidnapping teams there, led by the Special Forces.

Referred to not-so-subtly as "the Salvador option," the January 2005 rhetoric from the Pentagon publicized a proposal that would send Special Forces teams to "advise, support and possibly train" Iraqi "squads." Members of these squads would be hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga militia and Shia Badr militiamen used to target Sunni resistance fighters and their sympathizers.

What better man to make this happen than John Negroponte? His experience made him the perfect guy for the job. What a nice coincidence that he just happened to be in Baghdad when the Pentagon/Rumsfeld were discussing "the Salvador option."

Fast forward to present day Iraq, which is a situation described by the Washington Post in this way: "Hundreds of unclaimed dead lay at the morgue at midday Monday - blood-caked men who had been shot, knifed, garroted or apparently suffocated by the plastic bags still over their heads. Many of the bodies were sprawled with their hands still bound."

The Independent newspaper from London recently reports that hundreds of Iraqis each month are tortured to death or executed by death squads working out of the Shia-run Ministry of Interior.

March Maminess

Radical Women Of Color Blog Carnival II.

Sell

Describe the structure of your website. [How does it work?]

Lee: The website is a big database. It keeps collecting information as it gets streamed in from all of our various correspondents. It's always clicking and learning and sorting information. So you have 500 correspondents out there at random moments saying, "Here's a great jeans story that I saw in my town." "Here's a great music story that I think is really important." And the website is a database, which is a mechanism that collects this and sorts this and then it also publishes it out. So that you get all this really complicated voluminous information and it's easy to fit understanding segments.

Publishes it for whom?

Gordon: Publishes it for anybody who's interested in this culture. It's marketers who want to market to them. It's media people. It's copywriters at advertising agencies. It's, you know, a news person from Associated Press. There's such a broad range of people that are interested in the culture for various reasons that, if you think about it, that's what we're provided is a resource for all that information.

What kinds of companies hire you?

Gordon: Manufacturers of apparel, health and beauty, cosmetics and fragrances; people who are manufacturing footwear; movie studios; sports associations; electronics companies; advertising agencies.

- Merchants Of Cool


Kewlaboration:

AMY GOODMAN: That is one person's experience getting this chip put into their hand. Liz McIntyre, how well known is this becoming? Are doctors actually doing this?

LIZ MCINTYRE: Yes, there are some doctors. In fact, at the Verichip website you can find them. They are in several states across the country. It is being sold to them to increase their revenue for their practices, of all things. It is being pushed a lot to doctors that deal with geriatric patients because they feel like there will be a big market there. So, yeah, we are seeing more on the Verichip front although only about 70 people so far have been implanted. Of course, what you were just talking about are people who we call ‘do-it-yourself implanters,’ people who are putting little chips between the webbing, in the webbing between their thumbs and their pointer fingers, and this is being done by people -- not very many, just kind of 20 and 30 tech types who want a cutting-edge way to, say, open their front doors, access their computer systems, that kind of thing. Many of these chips that they are using are hobbyist’s chips you can buy for under $3. They may not even be sterilized. Our concern here is they are setting an example for young people, sort of breaking down a mental barrier to getting uniquely numbered, and of course, the precursor to being monitored and tracked in society. And the other thing is that, you know, they are getting them to stick these devices in themselves like piercings almost, and I can see where some high school kids might think this is really cool and not consider they could do serious damage to their hands. There could be infection that could result from it. And just the fact that making a part of your body a key to any kind of a valuable asset could be asking for some serious trouble.

NY State Sued To Force Adoption Of Voting Machines

New York Times.

Crusaders

According to Abbas, immediately thereafter Bush said: "God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them."

When asked about sending troops to Iraq, [Tony Blair] said: "That decision has to be taken and has to be lived with, and in the end there is a judgment that - well, I think if you have faith about these things then you realise that judgment is made by other people," he said. Asked to explain what he meant, Mr Blair replied: "If you believe in God, it's made by God as well."













Michelangelo, The Last Judgment (detail): the damned in hell

September 10th, 2001

Donald Rumsfeld announces that the Pentagon has lost track of $2,300,000,000,000.

Beauty and the Beast

Sign a new petition in support of Sibel Edmonds.

Abolishing the electorate

Jeb Bush in Florida.
Secretary of State Bruce McPherson in California.
Diebold everywhere.

What we have to be trained out of:

Altruism.

Themes, Few Variations

The "drama of collective denial"over the CIA manuals [on "Implicit and Explicit Terror"] was one act in the national drama of Ronald Reagan's reelection. As Newsweek explained in a special issue on the 1984 election, "It was the conscious intent of [Reagan's] managers to paint him as a kind of nation icon."

"Paint RR as the personification of all that is right with, or heroized by, America," a Reagan campaign strategy memo advised. "Leave Mondale in a position where an attack on Reagan is tantamount to an attack on America's idealized image of itself - where a vote against Reagan is, in some subliminal sense, a vote against a mythic AMERICA." [talics in the original]

...

Newsweek's special issue [after the election] led off with a piece titled "America: Reagan Country": "It was the night that Ronald Reagan became Mr. America. In a star-spangled blowout, the American people reaffirmed their identification with his can-do-confidecne, his patriotic pride, and their vote transcended party and ideology: It was more than 52 million Americans roaring "Thank you!" to a president who had made the country feel good about itself..."

...

Buried in the coverage of mythic America's mythic election was Newsweek's own observation that "the president remained, as he always had been, a polarizing figure dividing the nation by sex, class, race and ideological persuasion; his America was lopsidedly white, male, conservative and well-to-do." What Reagan personifies, in other words, is the American logic of the minority.

***

Only July 7, 1987, a 24 year old Salvadoran refugee support worker named Yanira Corea was abducted outside the Los Anegles CIPES office. She was tortured and raped by three men. They interrogated her about the activities of coworkers, burnt her with cigarettes and carved the initials EM into her hands, which stand for escuardon de la muerte, death squad. They raped her with a wooden stick. One man said they should kill her., Another said, "No, this way we are going to let them know we are here."

Before releasing Corea, they cut her tongue and wrapped her underwear about her mouth, and they threatened to harm her three year old son if she did not give up her work. A few days before her abduction, Corea had received a letter with a stolen photo of her son. It contained petals of dried flowers with the note "Flowers in the desert die," a Salvadoran death squad warning. In El Salvador, Corea's father received a letter warning that he would be punished if she persisted in her political activities. In November, when Corea was in the New York office of MADRE while on a speaking tour, a paper was slipped under the door. It was the torn half of a poster announcing Corea's appearance. There was a handwritten threat "Do you know where your son is?" A crude drawing showed the torso of a decapitated child with the head lying nearby.

***

Another [George H. W] Bush-contra connetion is his son, Jeb. In February, John Ellis "Jeb"Bush, then the Dade County Republican Chairman and now Florida's secretary of commernce [now Governor], gave his father a letter from Doctor Mario Castejon, a Guatemalan politician seeking support for an international medical brigade to treat contra combattants in the field. In a March 3 letter responding to Castejon, the vice president suggested that he meet with North. This was at a time when the US government was prohibited from supplying the contras directly or indirectly with any aid, lethal or nonlethal.

Jeb Bush has been a key White House emissary to the Miami Nicaraguan community and a champion of the contra cause. He has appeared at numerous contra fundraising events. According to Nairn, US Customs agents from Miami reportedly told Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh that Jeb Bush may have been linked to contra arms shipments. Jeb Bush has acknowledged helping to raise funds for "humanitarian" aid, but strongly denies any involvement in arms shipments. "Sure, there's a pretty good chance that arms were shipped," he told Nairn, "but does that break any law? I'm not sure its illegal. The Neutrality Act is a completely untested notion, established in the 1800s."

As for George [H. W.] Bush, he agrees with Reagan that Oliver North is a hero.

***

[Father James] Fetlz said, "It's like death swooping down, it's like Attila's hordes."

Feltz described how the contras "headed for the region around El Guayabo. On the way they ran into a man named...'Chico' Sotelo. Chico had livestock and was not much for the revolution. Certainly he was no Sandanista. He had his money and his private property. But he made the mistake of pulling out his UNAG passbook. Well, all that had to do was see he belonged to the [National Union of Farmers and Ranchers] and they shot him on the spot, right there on the road....And they kept burning houses. The death march got as far as El Guayabo. There there's a little hamlet called San Francisco, and they killed several people there; they killed people if they were members of defense committees or shopkeepers or maybe members of the militia. But nobody was armed. They raped a fourteen year old girl. Thn they slit her throat and cut her head off. They hung the head on a pole along the road...

There was another special case of cruelty on that same contra operation. An eleven year old girl, Cristina Borge Diaz, as visiting her uncle. The uncle was on the contras'list, and they came and killed him. When they saw the little girl, they decided to have a little fun, so they used her for target practise. The first one took a shot at her from a galloping horse. He missed. 'Kill her,' he told a companion. And the other shot her in the back. The bullet came out her chest. Another bullet grazed her scalp, another hit her in the right hand, and another in the left hip. Then they left. The little girl lay there until a worker coming back from the fields found her that way, more dead than alive." Miraculously, said Fetlz, she recovered after treatment in Managua. She told her story to a meeting of Nicaraguan-based US missionaries and visiting US bishops in 1985.

[...]

Few in Congress took up the challenge of Respresentative Berkely Bedell (D-IA) and Robert Toricelli (D-NJ) upon their return from Honduras and Nicaragua. Declared Bedell in a speech to the House, "If the American people could have talked with the common people of Nicaragua, whose women and children are being indiscriminately kidnapped, tortured and killed by terrorists financed by the American taxpayers, they would rise up in legitimate anger and demand that support for the criminal activity be ended at once."

Holly Sklar, Washington's War On Nicaragua


Negroponte, An Experienced Professional.

Family Values

For the 56,000 Army marriages that have ended since the war on terror began, a Freedom Salute medal doesn't mean much. It isn't particularly valuable for this father, whose son returned from Iraq. He wrote:

"I need your help. My son's body showed up at my house for Christmas but [my wife] and I did not know the person who claimed to be [our son]. He was severely drunk every day for the whole week, belligerent, and generally just someone that nobody wanted anything to do with. He has nightmares every night of the murdered innocent children and civilian Iraqis. The Army has abandoned him as far as giving him help. They will go out of their way to help him re-enlist though."

A Freedom Salute medal isn't going to make things better for Pat Gunn, who got this response from the Army after she contacted a member of Congress when her son was redeployed to Iraq following a diagnosis of PTSD:

"SPC Gunn was wounded in the leg during an attack on his HUMVEE. The soldier behind him was literally torn in half. After returning from convalescent leave [Gunn] was informed he would be redeployed. [He] indicated he would not go back to Iraq [and] was sent to Heidelberg Hospital for evaluation. They concluded he was suffering some post traumatic stress from seeing his comrade killed so violently. They recommended he be retained and treated at Heidelberg, [which] was contacted by medical authorities from Iraq. After discussion of his case it was determined [that SPC Gunn be] treat[ed] downrange [as it] may be in his best interest mentally to overcome his fear by facing it. [SPC Gunn was] cleared for redeployment."

The Freedom Salute medal is just tin on a ribbon for the families of Marine Reservist Jeffrey Lucey, National Guardsman Doug Barber, and the dozens of other Iraq Veterans who have committed suicide after the Veterans Administration refused to treat them. Last year, the VA denied requests for care from over a quarter of a million veterans. Congress has tried to cut funding for veterans, and has grossly underestimated the needs of the soldiers returning from Iraq. You want to take care of our veterans? Quit making new ones.

85%

From a very recent Zogby poll of US soldiers in Iraq:

"85% said the U.S. mission is mainly 'to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9-11 attacks'"

What's the mesage, in March 2006? Same as it ever was: "Remember" September 11th, 2001 - but be very careful not to know too much about it. Otherwise, you might be tempted to have mercy on strangers who had nothing to do with it.

Somebody is trying to provoke a civil war in Iraq

The real question I ask myself is: who are these people who are trying to provoke the civil war? Now the Americans will say it's Al Qaeda, it's the Sunni insurgents. It is the death squads. Many of the death squads work for the Ministry of Interior. Who runs the Ministry of Interior in Baghdad? Who pays the Ministry of the Interior? Who pays the militia men who make up the death squads? We do, the occupation authorities.



Robert Fisk shares his Middle East knowledge

Reporter: Tony Jones

TONY JONES: Well, Robert Fisk is one of the most experienced observers of the Middle East and in his latest book, 'The Great War for Civilisation - the Conquest of the Middle East', he draws on almost 30 years of reporting from his base in Lebanon to look at the forces which have shaped current events and conflicts Robert Fisk, thanks for being there.

ROBERT FISK, WRITER & JOURNALIST: You're welcome.

TONY JONES: Now, unless you've changed your position in recent days, the one thing that you and President Bush agree on is there's not going to be a civil war in Iraq.

ROBERT FISK: Yeah, I listened to Bush. It made me doubt myself when I heard him say that. I still go along and say what I said before - Iraq is not a sectarian society, but a tribal society. People are intermarried. Shiites and Sunnis marry each other. It's not a question of having a huge block of people here called Shiites and a huge block of people called Sunnis any more than you can do the same with the United States, saying Blacks are here and Protestants are here and so on. But certainly, somebody at the moment is trying to provoke a civil war in Iraq. Someone wants a civil war. Some form of militias and death squads want a civil war. There never has been a civil war in Iraq. The real question I ask myself is: who are these people who are trying to provoke the civil war? Now the Americans will say it's Al Qaeda, it's the Sunni insurgents. It is the death squads. Many of the death squads work for the Ministry of Interior. Who runs the Ministry of Interior in Baghdad? Who pays the Ministry of the Interior? Who pays the militia men who make up the death squads? We do, the occupation authorities. I'd like to know what the Americans are doing to get at the people who are trying to provoke the civil war. It seems to me not very much. We don't hear of any suicide bombers being stopped before they blow themselves up. We don't hear of anybody stopping a mosque getting blown up. We're not hearing of death squads all being arrested. Something is going very, very wrong in Baghdad. Something is going wrong with the Administration. Mr Bush says, "Oh, yes, sure, I talk to the Shiites and I talk to the Sunnis." He's talking to a small bunch of people living behind American machine guns inside the so-called Green Zone, the former Republican palace of Saddam Hussein, which is surrounded by massive concrete walls like a crusader castle. These people do not and cannot even leave this crusader castle. If they want to leave to the airport, they're helicoptered to the airport. They can't even travel on the airport road. What we've got at the moment is a little nexus of people all of whom live under American protection and talk on the telephone to George W Bush who says, "I've been talking to them and they have to choose between chaos and unity." These people can't even control the roads 50 metres from the Green Zone in which they work.

TONY JONES: OK.

ROBERT FISK: There's total chaos now in Iraq.

TONY JONES: Let's go back, if we can, to start answering that question about who wants civil war. Back one week to the bombing of the golden shrine in Samarra. Now, most people do think the only people with reasons for doing that would be the Al Qaeda in Iraq group led by al-Zarqawi. You don't agree?

ROBERT FISK: Well, I don't know if al-Zarqawi is alive. You know, al-Zarqawi did exist before the American Anglo-American invasion. He was up in the Kurdish area, which was not actually properly controlled by Saddam. But after that he seems to have disappeared. We know there's an identity card that pops up. We know the Americans say we think we've recognised him on a videotape. Who recognises him on a videotape? How many Americans have ever met al-Zarqawi? Al-Zarqawi's mother died more than 12 months ago and he didn't even send commiserations or say "I'm sorry to hear that". His wife of whom he was very possessive is so poor she has to go out and work in the family town of Zarqa. Hence the name Zarqawi. I don't know if al-Zarqawi is alive or exists at the moment. I don't know if he isn't a sort of creature invented in order to fill in the narrative gaps, so to speak. What is going on in Iraq at the moment is extremely mysterious. I go to Iraq and I can't crack this story at the moment. Some of my colleagues are still trying to, but can't do it. It's not as simple as it looks. I don't believe we've got all these raving lunatics wandering around blowing up mosques. There's much more to this than meets the eye. All of these death squads that move around are part of the security forces. In some cases they are Shiite security forces or clearly Sunni security forces. When the Iraqi army go into Sunni cities they are Shiite soldiers going in. We are not making this clear. Iraqi troops, we've got an extra battalion. The Iraqi army is building up. The Iraqi army is split apart. Somebody is operating these people. I don't know who they are. It's not as simple as we're making it out to be. What is this thing when Bush says we have to choose between chaos and unity? Who wants to choose chaos? Is it really the case that all of these Iraqis that fought together for eight years against the Iranians, Shiites and Sunnies together in the long massive murderous Somme-like war between the Iranians and Iraqis - suddenly all want to kill each other? Why because that's something wrong with Iraqis? I don't think so. They are intelligent, educated people. Something is going seriously wrong in Baghdad.

TONY JONES: Can we look at one thing that might possibly be wrong, the Sunnis feel like they are being left out of the political equation. The Shias could end up running the majority of the government because they are indeed in the majority in a democracy.

ROBERT FISK: They do run the Government now. The Shiites do run the Government.

TONY JONES: Indeed. Couldn't that precisely be one of the reasons for the violence?

ROBERT FISK: Because the Sunnis don't have power anymore? But we've been saying this if the start. Don't you remember that after 2003 the Anglo-American invasion, the resistance started against the Americans and we were told they were Saddam remnants, 'dead-enders', that was the phrase used. Not anymore, because there are 40,000 insurgents, but that was the phase used at the time. They were Sunnis. They didn't like the fact they didn't have power. Then we captured Saddam and Paul Bremer, the number two pro-Consule in Baghdad, says, "Oh, we've got him," and everything was going to be OK. And then the insurgency got worse still. The reason was because people who wanted to join the insurgency feared that if they beat him out he might come back. Well, the moment Saddam was captured, they knew they could join the insurgency and Saddam wouldn't come back. I mean, there is something wrong in the narrative sequence that we've been given. You know, the idea that the Sunni community is suddenly sacrificing themselves en mass, strapping explosive belts to themselves and blowing themselves up all over Iraq because they don't have power anymore is a very odd reflection. I think what is going on among the Sunni community is much simpler. The Sunnis are not fighting the Americans because they don't have power and they're not fighting the Americans just to get them out - and they will get them out eventually. They are fighting the Americans so that they will say, "We have a right to power because we fought the occupying forces and you, the Shiites, did not," which is why it's very important to discover now that Moqtada al-Sadr, who has an ever-increasing power base among the Shiite community, is himself threatening to fight the British and Americans. Now, if the Shiites and Sunnies come together, as they did in the 1920s in the insurgency against the British, then we are finished in Iraq. And that will mean that Iraq actually will be united.

TONY JONES: But, Robert Fisk, what's is happening now, by all accounts and, indeed, the accounts of these Washington Post reporters who've been into the morgue and report hundreds of bodies of Sunnies who evidently have been garroted or suffocated or shot, are all saying that Moqtada al-Sadr's thugs have actually taken these people away and murdered them. That was in revenge for the Golden Shrine bombing.

ROBERT FISK: Yeah, look, in August, I went into the same mortuary and found out that 1,000 people had died in one month in July. And most of those people who had died were split 50/50 between the Sunnies and the Shiites, but most of them, including women who'd been blindfolded and hands tied behind their backs - I saw the corpses - were both Sunnies and Shiites. Now, I'm not complaining that the Washington Post got it wrong - I'm sure there are massacres going on by Shiites - but I think they are going on by militias on both sides. What I'd like to know is who is running the Interior Ministry? Who is paying the Interior Ministry? Who is paying the gunmen who work for the Interior Ministry? I go into the Interior Ministry in Baghdad and I see lots and lots of armed men wearing black leather. Who is paying these guys? Well, we are, of course. The money isn't falling out of the sky. It's coming from the occupation powers and Iraqi's Government, which we effectively run because, as we know, they can't even create a constitution without the American and British ambassadors being present. We need to look at this story in a different light. That narrative that we're getting - that there are death squads and that the Iraqis are all going to kill each other, the idea that the whole society is going to commit mass suicide - is not possible, it's not logical. There is something else going on in Iraq. Don't ask me to...

TONY JONES: Alright. But...

ROBERT FISK: Yeah, go on.

TONY JONES: No, it does seem to be impossible to explain, but, of course, this is exactly what people were saying in Bosnia before that war started up - that people were too intermarried, that you couldn't separate the community.

ROBERT FISK: Iraqi is not Bosnia. Iraqi is not Bosnia. Iraqi is not Bosnia. Iraqi is not Bosnia. We discovered here in Lebanon - and this city I'm talking to you from - that, during the civil war, which lasted from 1975 to 1990 and killed 150,000 people, that there were many outside powers involved in promoting death squads and militias here, and paying militias, not just Arab powers, but European powers were involved in stirring the pot in Lebanon. I think we're being very naive. Just because I can't give you the detail, like, of who ordered this death squad, doesn't prevent us saying that something is wrong with the narrative we're being given the press, from the West, from the Americans, from the Iraqi Government. There is something going wrong. Iraqis are not suicidal people. They don't go around blowing up mosques every day. It's not a natural thing for them to do. It's never happened before. I can't say to you, "Well, ok, here is the person who killed this person, or here's the person who left this explosive truck." All I am saying to you is that it is time we said, "Hang on a minute, this is not how it looks."

TONY JONES: What if you put Iran into this equation, because, as we all know, Iran is under tremendous pressure from the West and particularly from the United States at the moment. It has links to these Shia militias and, possibly, links too, to these people you are talking about in the Interior Ministry.

ROBERT FISK: No, no, no, that's wrong. The Iranians' link is with the Iraqi Government. The main parties in the government of Iraq which have been elected, who are there now dealing with the Americans, these are the representatives of Iran. Moqtada al-Sadr is irrelevant to Iran. Iranians are already effectively controlling Iraq because the two major power blocks, the two major parties who were elected and who Bush has just been talking to, these are effectively the representatives of Tehran. That's the point. Iran doesn't need to get involved in violence in Iraq.

TONY JONES: Unless the pressure from the United States ratchets up on Iran to the point where there are military threats against these nuclear facilities. Could it not therefore create havoc in Iraq?

ROBERT FISK: Well, you could say the same about Syria, too, couldn't you? And, of course the Americans are also accusing Syria of supporting the insurgents or letting them cross the border. But I think it it's much more complicated than that. For example, my sources in this area, who are pretty good, tell me that the Americans have already talked to the Syrians and are trying to do a deal with them to try and get the Syrians to help them over the insurgency and the price of Syria's help, I'm told, is that the Americans will ease off on the UN committee of inquiry into the murder of ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri, here in Beirut, only a few hundred metres from here, on the 14th February last year. You know, if the Americans are going to get out of Iraq - and they must get out, they will - they need the help of Iran and Syria. And I think you'll find that certain elements within the State Department are already trying to work on that. Now, we hear the rhetoric coming from Bush. I mean, he's got an absolute black-hole chaos in Iraq, he's got Afghanistan - not an inspiration to the world, it's been taken over effectively by narco warlords, many who work for Karzai, the man who's just been making jokes about the Afghan welcome for Bush - and Bush wants another conflict with Iran? I don't think the Americans are in any footing or any ability, military or otherwise, to have another war or to have another crisis in that region. They're in the deepest hole politically, militarily and economically in Iraq. The fact that the White House and the Pentagon and the State Department seem to be in a state of denial doesn't change that.

We had Condoleezza Rice here - literally in that building behind me - a few days ago saying that there are great changes taking place in the Middle East - optimistically. Well, sure, there is a mosque war going on in Iraq with the Americans up to their feet in the sand, there's an Iranian crisis, or so we're told, the Saudis are frightened the Iraq war will spill over into Saudi Arabia, the Egyptians don't know how to reconcile Syria and Lebanon, there are increasing sectarian tensions here in Lebanon. You would think that someone is building what used to be called Potemkin villages, you know, these extraordinary things that Catherine the Great's court favourites use to build, facades of villages, so that everything looked nice in Russia even though things were barbarous behind the facades. I mean, this is a barbarous world we're living in now in the Middle East. It's never been so dangerous here, either for journalists or soldiers but most of all for Arabs. Hence the thousands of people in the mortuary.

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U.S. strategy in Iraq: No, it's not Vietnam. This one's a civil war : All sides in today's Iraq debate share a common but unspoken assumption: the way to succeed in Iraq is to refight the Vietnam War, but the right way this time. Official strategy mirrors the Nixon administration playbook: win hearts and minds while handing the fighting over to the locals.

Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a universal law.

This qlipping offers an injunction fully consistent with Qant's categorical imperative:

"[T]he first condition for resolving whether to accept or to reject the doctrines which Hegel propounds (I am constrained to make explicit what I should have preferred to leave to be understood) is to read his books: and to put an end to the spectacle, half comical and half disgusting, of the accusation and the abuse of a philosopher by critics who do not know him, and who wage a foolish war with a ridiculous puppet created by their own imaginations, under the ignoble sway of traditional prejudice and intellectual laziness."

- Benedetto Croce, What Is Living And What Is Dead Of The Philosophy Of Hegel

"I never knew--in my gut, not my head--that I was capable of killing someone till that night."

A very eloquent witness to election theft, Florida 2004:

"I ran to the clerk and said, 'Is he taking the memory card?' The clerk pressed his lips together, closed his eyes, and nodded. I burst out the door after him."

The Bush Gang: "A veritable juggernaut of competence."

By the estimable Jack Riddler: "The awesome competence of the Bush regime" (a post buried in a DU forum):

Those who call the Bush mob "incompetent" make a fatal error. On some unconscious level, they seem to think that these criminals somehow share any of the goals of decent human beings, and have therefore "failed" to produce good results. But that, of course is the idea that motivates the Bush crime family: to produce evil results that happen to enrich their own class.

The situation in Iraq for example is not the result of "incompetence." It is all according to plan, which was to destroy that nation.

Over and over we see the awesome competence of the Bush regime in accomplishing their radical plans - at every stage very much thanks to the enablers who run the Democratic Party, and who have smoothed the way for the Bush mob in each of their following accomplishments:

*Stealing Election 2000.
*Trillion dollar giveaway to the rich, intentionally plunging the country into deficit.
*9/11. Exactly as desired.
*Stealing a sum specified as "2.3 trillion dollars" from Pentagon assets.
*Repealing the Bill of Rights in the USA PATRIOT Act.
*Getting dozens of other countries to pass their own PATRIOT acts.
*Invading Afghanistan. Exactly as planned, years in advance.
*Funnelling trillions more legally into the Pentagon.
*Establishing a Homeland Gestapo.
*Instituting Rule by Fear, color-coded no less.
*Railroading the idiot Congress into approving the war in Iraq.
*Accepting the assassination of Wellstone by whatever lower-level operative delivered it.
*Stealing Election 2002.
*Establishing "Total Information Awareness" and getting away with it, even after departure of Poindexter.
*Invading Iraq. Killing untold thousands.
*Getting the Iraqis into a civil war, with the intent of making sure that country never recovers.
*Covering up 9/11.
*Using 9/11 as an election device and excuse for everything.
*Stealing Election 2004.
*Using Katrina as the opportunity to empty out New Orleans and test out long-standing "civil disturbance" doctrines.
*Pushing through two right-wing Supreme Court appointments without a filibuster.
*Rewiring Americans overnight to believe Iran is now the enemy.

Wow! What a list! A veritable juggernaut of competence.

The Bush mob (almost) always get what they want, and the Democratic "leadership" (almost) always helps them when it counts. Yes, they had to take a loss on the first attempt to steal the entire Social Security fund, but there are many opportunities yet to come.

Yes, it's all at a time of awesome crisis to US-based capitalism, so much of it looks jerry-rigged but so what? It's not like the Bush mob invented the crisis of capitalism. So far, they're getting away with a particular plan to thrive in that crisis, by plundering everything, whether nailed down or not.

Competent at what they do, which is what they've always done: pillage and plunder.

And those who call them "incompetent" sadly serve to excuse and enable their crimes.

Jack Riddler follows up with two further posts in the same thread:

But you reminded me of something BIG I forgot: Enabling the Wall Street plunder of America. 9/11 and its hysteria (and the destruction of the SEC at Building 7) successfully distracted away from 200 plus ongoing securities fraud cases. In the end, we get an Enron trial and a few other high-profile trials, but think of all those who got away to plunder more later...

And:

Those who attack the Bush regime as "incompetent" because of the horrors it has wrought are in effect excusing criminal behavior as merely stupid behavior. It matters not whether they are competent or incompetent; they are criminal, that's what matters.