That slight clatter in the background is the sound of deckchairs being rearranged:
1. Independent, Feb. 7th 2007:
EU bows to car lobby on pollution limits
If you hear a series of loud booms, don't panic:
2. BBC, Feb. 7th 2007:
Booming India expects 9.2% growth
There is plenty of room on the lifeboat for first-class passengers:
3. BBC, Feb. 6th 2007:
Climate change 'affecting' China
At least 300,000 people in north-west China are short of drinking water because of unseasonably warm weather, which officials link to climate change. Parts of Shaanxi province face drought after January saw as little as 10% of average rainfall, state media say.
Cocktails are now being served in the VIP lounge:
4. LA Times, Feb. 5th 2007:
To stabilize atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide — the primary contributor to global warming — CO2 emissions would have to drop 70% to 80%, said Richard Somerville, a theoretical meteorologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla. Such a reduction would bring emissions into equilibrium with the planet's ability to absorb carbon dioxide. The last time the planet was in balance was more than 150 years ago, before the widespread use of coal and steam engines.
What would it take to bring that kind of reduction?
"All truck, all trains, all airplanes, cars, motorcycles and boats in the United States — that's 7.3% of global emissions," said Gregg Marland, a fossil fuel pollution expert at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Closing all fossil-fuel-powered electricity plants worldwide and replacing them with windmills, solar panels and nuclear power plants would make a serious dent — a 39% reduction globally, Marland said. His calculation doesn't include all the fossil fuels that would have to be burned to build the greener facilities, though. [...]
I'll have a quadruple Chivas, please. Yes, on the rocks.
* The post heading is a recent quote from Derrick Jensen.
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
Brother Udo And The Monk Thelonius
One of the best April Fool's day articles ever was about Udo of Aachen, a Medieval Monk with an ultra density mind who purportedly had been studying probability and fractals in the 13th century, with the help of his sidekick monk Thelonius, leaving a Bethlehem Star in the shape of the Mandelbrot set in an illuminated manuscript. "Not since the Piltdown-Sokal Theorem was discovered to have first been proved in 1907 by a provincial Russian electrical engineer, and not in 1979 by Piltdown and Sokal as originally had been thought, has the date of a first proof been so misjudged."
I am sure I saw yesterday a post here at Qlipoth featuring that illuminated ms and a link to the original April Fool's article, and then it disappeared! I suspect it was intended as a kind of a wry comment on the gullibility of "conspiracy theorists"(?) but it's rather more suggestive of the ability to disseminate hoaxes enjoyed by the authoritative spectacle...
Monday, February 05, 2007
That Was The Rubicon Five Rivers Back
AMY GOODMAN: Here with me now is one of al-Marri’s attorneys, Jonathan Hafetz, an attorney with the Brennan Center for Justice here in New York City. Welcome to Democracy Now!- here
JONATHAN HAFETZ: Good morning.
AMY GOODMAN: So start from the beginning. How was al-Marri picked up?
JONATHAN HAFETZ: Well, he was arrested at his home by FBI agents, charged with a crime, and then, as you pointed out, shortly before trial and actually literally on the eve of a hearing to suppress illegally seized evidence that was taken from his home without a warrant, the government essentially just pulled the plug on the criminal justice system and by the stroke of a pen transferred him to a military brig to legal limbo, where he had no rights, was held incommunicado and has been detained without charges now for going on four years.
AMY GOODMAN: What is this brig where he is held?
JONATHAN HAFETZ: The brig is a military prison in South Carolina. It typically houses individuals from the military who are convicted, court-martialed for offenses. But he's in a isolated wing of the brig. He's never seen another prisoner. The only individuals he's permitted to see are his captors, the military guards, and now his lawyers are able to see him, but the first seventeen months he was held completely incommunicado. His lawyers were not able to contact him. We had no contact with him.
AMY GOODMAN: For how long?
JONATHAN HAFETZ: For seventeen months.
AMY GOODMAN: For almost a year and a half.
JONATHAN HAFETZ: That's correct. Even the International Committee for the Red Cross was not able to go in. I mean, it was essentially secret detention on US soil. We had no way of knowing if he was alive.
AMY GOODMAN: And what exactly was the charge?
JONATHAN HAFETZ: Well, there was no charge. There were just allegations made, hearsay allegations, allegations we believe that were obtained from detainees through illegal methods, other detainees possibly through torture that the government did not present in court. There has been no hearing, no witnesses, nothing that would resemble what we understand as due process.
AMY GOODMAN: And explain what you mean when on the eve of -- you're saying on the eve of trial?
JONATHAN HAFETZ: Well, the trial was a few weeks away, but the judge had scheduled a hearing to suppress illegally seized evidence. The government can't present evidence at a trial that’s been taken from someone's home without a warrant. And there was a hearing to find out whether that had happened, and instead of going forward with the hearing, as would normally happen, the government showed up with an order, a one-page order from the President saying, ‘You're an enemy combatant. We're going to dismiss the criminal case, and we’re going to snatch Mr. al-Marri and put him in a brig.’
AMY GOODMAN: And what does “enemy combatant” mean, that he had been fighting on the battlefield?
JONATHAN HAFETZ: Well, the term “enemy combatant” means essentially whatever the government says it means. They've used different definitions in different cases.
AMY GOODMAN: Invented by this administration?
JONATHAN HAFETZ: Yeah. The concept of enemy combatant is not a concept that's identified under the laws of war. The government claims it's a customary use of the laws of war or, you know, law of armed conflict, but there is no such thing as enemy combatant as the administration’s used its term.
Sunday, February 04, 2007
Ey, wie schmeckt der Coffee süße
The Italian conquest of Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee, resulted in the espresso craze in Italy. During the Second World War, each Italian soldier carried an espresso maker in his mess kit. The Starbucks aesthetic__garish, fascistic murals combined with Futurist mechanization of the work force and absurdist shouting__can be traced to Mussolini.
America's love of coffee has always been tied to the affection for conquest. Coffee fueled the "winning of the West" and the usurpation of the former colonies of Spain at the turn of the century. Guatemala, Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia etc. have all been virtual colonies since then, with frequent US armed interventions etc to ensure servitude. These nations constitute the mainstay of our coffee supply, and much blood has been spilled to maintain it. Coffee was the blood of the Indian, and gave one the adrenal rush needed to achieve "manifest destiny". Coffee was "Joe", as in Joe Nobody or John Doe, as the racist dehumanization of the native people's refuted any necessity for their identification. This name was changed to "Java" in the 60's, when the US helped install the Dictator Suharto in Indonesia, who murdered so many of his subjects at the behest of insecure multi-nationals. Although this was a proxy war, not directly fought by us, coffee's taste still reflects the power imparted by the struggle. Its flavor was enriched and it grew in popularity. Whether Indian or Indonesian, coffee was the blood of the vanquished, and it tasted good.
Now, in the global economy, coffee is grown across the entire subjugated third world. When Starbucks sell a bag of beans it's always marked with the region from where it sprang, making the consumer an imperial cannibal connoisseur.
Ian Svenonius, The Bloody Latte
Saturday, February 03, 2007
Brzezinski very deliberately NOT saying "no"
From the World Socialist Website, here's more on Zbigniew Brzezinski's astonishing address to the CFR on February 2nd:
Following the hearing, this reporter asked Brzezinski directly if he was suggesting that the source of a possible provocation might be the US government itself. The former national security adviser was evasive.
The following exchange took place:
Q: Dr. Brzezinski, who do you think would be carrying out this possible provocation?
A: I have no idea. As I said, these things can never be predicted. It can be spontaneous.
Q: Are you suggesting there is a possibility it could originate within the US government itself?
A: I’m saying the whole situation can get out of hand and all sorts of calculations can produce a circumstance that would be very difficult to trace.
As a poster called HamdenRice points out on this thread :
"Zbig is hired as a strategic consultant for what he knows, what insiders tell him, not what he guesses. This testimony is not idle speculation; this is what his sources are telling him."
It's pointless to ask why this story isn't all over the mainstream media. But why isn't it all over the left blogosphere?
Following the hearing, this reporter asked Brzezinski directly if he was suggesting that the source of a possible provocation might be the US government itself. The former national security adviser was evasive.
The following exchange took place:
Q: Dr. Brzezinski, who do you think would be carrying out this possible provocation?
A: I have no idea. As I said, these things can never be predicted. It can be spontaneous.
Q: Are you suggesting there is a possibility it could originate within the US government itself?
A: I’m saying the whole situation can get out of hand and all sorts of calculations can produce a circumstance that would be very difficult to trace.
As a poster called HamdenRice points out on this thread :
"Zbig is hired as a strategic consultant for what he knows, what insiders tell him, not what he guesses. This testimony is not idle speculation; this is what his sources are telling him."
It's pointless to ask why this story isn't all over the mainstream media. But why isn't it all over the left blogosphere?
Friday, February 02, 2007
Zbigniew Brzezinski, "conspiracy theorist": A new 9/11 to justify an attack on Iran.
On February 1st 2007, , the Former National Security Advisor to President Carter addressed the Senate Committee On Foreign Relations.
Mr. Brzezinski seems worried, as well he might. This is a man who knows his Washington:
Mr. Brzezinski seems worried, as well he might. This is a man who knows his Washington:
A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks; followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure; then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran; culminating in a "defensive" U.S. military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
A mythical historical narrative to justify the case for such a protracted and potentially expanding war is already being articulated. Initially justified by false claims about WMD's in Iraq, the war is now being redefined as the "decisive ideological struggle" of our time, reminiscent of the earlier collisions with Nazism and Stalinism. In that context, Islamist extremism and al Qaeda are presented as the equivalents of the threat posed by Nazi Germany and then Soviet Russia, and 9/11 as the equivalent of the Pearl Harbor attack which precipitated America's involvement in World War II.
Thursday, February 01, 2007
Well, he would, wouldn't he?
The BBC reports:
"On the poisoning of ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko in London, Mr Putin said he did not believe in conspiracy theories."
This tell us something worth remembering about the cant term "conspiracy theory", what it's good for, and what kind of people routinely use it as a blunt but dependable weapon.
"Mr Litvinenko was a vehement critic of Mr Putin. Mr Putin said Mr Litvinenko "did not possess any secrets" that could have damaged Russia. "
Oh, really? So why did they confiscate his books?
"On the poisoning of ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko in London, Mr Putin said he did not believe in conspiracy theories."
This tell us something worth remembering about the cant term "conspiracy theory", what it's good for, and what kind of people routinely use it as a blunt but dependable weapon.
"Mr Litvinenko was a vehement critic of Mr Putin. Mr Putin said Mr Litvinenko "did not possess any secrets" that could have damaged Russia. "
Oh, really? So why did they confiscate his books?
Allegations against the Russian Government
Litvinenko alleged that agents from the FSB co-ordinated the 1999 Russian apartment bombings that killed more than 300 people, whereas Russian officials blamed the explosions on Chechen separatists. This version of events was suggested
earlier by David Satter,[14] and Sergei Yushenkov, vice chairman of the Sergei Kovalev commission created by the Russian Parliament to investigate the bombings. However, Litvinenko provided many new factual details in his book. In December 2003 Russian authorities confiscated over 4000 copies of the book en route to Moscow from the publisher in Latvia.[15]
The War on Terror as Jaws 2
Keith Olbermann on the scaremongering lies in Bush's grotesque State of the Union speech:
President claimed to stop four terror plots, but where is the evidence?
President claimed to stop four terror plots, but where is the evidence?
Molly Ivins (1944-2007)
What stuns me most about contemporary politics is not even that the system has been so badly corrupted by money. It is that so few people get the connection between their lives and what the bozos do in Washington and our state capitols. Politics is not a picture on a wall or a television sitcom that you can decide you don't much care for.
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Monday, January 29, 2007
Sunday, January 28, 2007
Franz thinks of everything and nothing, uncertain if reality is becoming dream, or dream reality
Jean-Luc Godard, Bande à part
So, my young charmer, your mission in life is to lure men into lonely ruins --- to be robbed and tortured!
George Fitzmaurice, Son of the Sheik
Encouraged by an indulgent grandfather who was his ideal, what chance had Julio Desnoyers to be other than a youthful libertine?
Rex Ingram, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Qlipothim!
The blog has changed to the new format: sign in with our gmail address (klippot). Password is unchanged.
Looks Like, Waddles Like, Quacks Like
Iraqi militants posing as Americans kill 4 U.S. soldiers
Associated press
BAGHDAD — Four American soldiers were abducted during a sophisticated sneak attack last week in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, the U.S. military confirmed Friday. It said three were shot to death and a fourth was mortally wounded with a gunshot to the head when they were found in a neighbouring province, far from the compound where they were captured.
Two of the four were handcuffed together in the back seat of an SUV near the southern Iraqi town of Mahawil. A third dead soldier was on the ground nearby. The fourth soldier died on the way to the hospital, the military said in a statement issued late Friday that confirmed details reported by The Associated Press earlier.
On Jan. 20, the day of the raid on a security meeting in Karbala, the military said five soldiers were killed repelling the attack.
The brazen assault, 80 kilometres south of Baghdad, was conducted by nine to 12 militants posing as an American security team, according to two senior U.S. military officials as well as Iraqi officials. They travelled in black GMC Suburban vehicles — the type used by U.S. government convoys — had American weapons, wore new U.S. military combat fatigues, and spoke English.
None of the American or Iraqi officials would allow use of their names because of the sensitive nature of the information.
The confirmation has emerged after nearly a week of inquiries. The U.S. military in Baghdad initially did not respond to repeated requests for comment on reports that began emerging from Iraqi government and military officials on the abduction and a major breakdown in security at Karbala site.
Within hours of the AP report that four of the five dead soldiers had been abducted and found dead or dying about 40 kilometres to the east of Karbala, the military issued a long account of what took place.
It said, “Two soldiers were found handcuffed together in the back of one of the SUVs. Both had suffered gunshot wounds and were dead. A third soldier was found shot and dead on the ground. Nearby, the fourth soldier was still alive, despite a gunshot wound to the head.”
The mortally wounded soldier was rushed to the hospital by Iraqi police but died on the way, the military said.
The military also said Iraqi police had found “five SUVs, U.S. army-type combat uniforms, boots, radios and a non-U.S. made rifle” near Mahawil, in neighbouring Babil province.
“The precision of the attack, the equipment used and the possible use of explosives to destroy the military vehicles in the compound suggests that the attack was well rehearsed prior to execution,” said Lt.-Col. Scott Bleichwehl, spokesman for Multi-National Division-Baghdad.
“The attackers went straight to where Americans were located in the provincial government facility, bypassing the Iraqi police in the compound,” said Lt.-Col. Bleichwehl. “We are looking at all the evidence to determine who or what was responsible for the breakdown in security at the compound and the perpetration of the assault.”
The Karbala raid, as explained by the Iraqi and American officials, began after nightfall at about 6 p.m. on Jan. 20, while American military officers were meeting with their Iraqi counterparts on the main floor of the Provisional Joint Co-ordination Centre in Karbala.
Iraqi officials said the approaching convoy of black GMC Suburbans was waved through an Iraqi checkpoint at the edge of Karbala. The Iraqi soldiers believed it to be American because of the type of vehicles, the distinctive camouflage American uniforms and the fact that they spoke English. One Iraqi official said the leader of the assault team was blond, but no other official confirmed that.
A top Iraqi security official for Karbala province told the AP that the Iraqi guards at the checkpoint radioed ahead to the compound to alert their compatriots that the convoy was on its way.
Iraqi officials said the attackers' convoy divided upon arrival, with some vehicles parking at the back of the main building where the meeting was taking place, others parked in front.
The attackers threw a grenade and opened fire with automatic rifles as they grabbed two soldiers inside the compound. Then the guerrilla assault team jumped on top of an armoured U.S. Humvee and captured two more soldiers, the U.S. military officials said.
One U.S. soldier was killed in the melee at the compound, and three were wounded.
The attackers captured four soldiers and fled with them and the computer east toward Mahawil, the U.S. military officials said.
The Iraqi officials said the four were captured alive and shot just before the vehicles were abandoned.
Police who became suspicious when the convoy of attackers and their American captives did not stop at a roadblock chased the vehicles and found the bodies, the gear and the abandoned SUVs.
Three days afterward, the U.S. military in Baghdad announced the arrest of four suspects in the attack and said they had been detained on a tip from a Karbala resident. No further information was released about the suspects.
The Defence Department has released the names of troops killed last Saturday but clearly identified only one as being killed because of the sneak attack.
Capt. Brian Freeman, 31, of Temecula, Calif., “died of wounds suffered when his meeting area came under attack by mortar and small arms fire.” Freeman was assigned to the 412th Civil Affairs Battalion, Whitehall, Ohio.
The only other troops killed that day in that region of Iraq were four army soldiers said to have been “ambushed while conducting dismounted operations” in Karbala.
The four were identified as 1st Lt. Jacob Fritz, 25, of Verdon, Neb.; Spc. Johnathan Chism, 22, of Gonzales, La.; Pte. 1st Class Shawn Falter, 25, of Cortland, N.Y., and Pvt. Johnathon Millican, 20, of Trafford, Ala. All were with the 2nd Battalion, 377th Parachute Field Artillery Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, of Fort Richardson, Ala.
Friday, January 26, 2007
Attack on Iran draws nigh
The idea is to weaken Iran financially, because 85% of Iran's export income comes from oil and 40% of gasoline used in Iran is imported (even though it is the fourth-largest producer of crude oil) because of a lack of local refining capacity.
Financial-futures analyst Gary Dorsch reports that, contrary to analysis in the press that holds warm weather as the cause of falling oil prices, the real reason is that an excess of 700,000 barrels of oil is being produced by OPEC countries. [2] Only Saudi Arabia has the spare capacity to bring market prices down.
Add to that the growing hue and cry about the rising "Iran threat" that one hears in the Gulf Arab states. The Saudi government, elites and Muslim scholars are issuing increasingly dire predictions about the growth of Iranian power; they are manufacturing hysteria about an "Iran threat". Even Yusuf Qaradawi, the famous Egyptian preacher with a slot on Al-Jazeera, is criticizing Iran for allegedly spreading sectarian strife in Iraq. [3]
During the final stop in US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's recent trip to the Middle East, in Kuwait City, where Robert Gates, the defense secretary, joined her, Arab foreign ministers from Egypt, Jordan and the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council stood together to produce a united front against Iran.
In related news, Mujahedeen Khalq has released a list of more than 32,000 Iraqis working as agents of the Iranian regime for the Al Quds Brigade.
Oh wait, the U.S. struck a deal with MK very early on after the invasion.
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Faint heart never won fair lady
"Gambling is now a diverse, vibrant and innovative industry", says Tessa Jowell, Britain's Culture Secretary. ("Industry"? "Culture"? Well, she can certainly take dictation.)
One vibrant and innovative ad is located above a urinal in London:
- Courtesy of Dougald Hine, who comments:
One vibrant and innovative ad is located above a urinal in London:
- Courtesy of Dougald Hine, who comments:
I am struggling here. I can't seem to find anything beyond the single entendre. Or even much of a connection to poker. Unless the message is: "Gamble on our site and you can win enough to pay for a prostitute."Are we in Iraq for the oil? No, the oil is just the means to the end. The end is even more diverse and vibrant innovation, forever.
Monday, January 22, 2007
"Some Sort of Crank" (Conspiracy Praxis, Vol. 74)
NI police colluded with killers
Police colluded with loyalists behind over a dozen murders in north Belfast, a report by the Police Ombudsman of Northern Ireland has confirmed.
Nuala O'Loan's report said UVF members in the area committed murders and other serious crimes while working as informers for Special Branch.
It said two retired Assistant Chief Constables refused to cooperate with the investigation.Special Branch officers gave the killers immunity, it said. The officers ensured the murderers were not caught and even "baby-sat" them during police interviews to help them avoid incriminating themselves. The Special Branch officers "created false notes" and blocked searches for UVF weapons.
The report, published on Monday, called for a number of murder investigations to be re-opened. But it is unlikely that any of the police officers involved will be prosecuted - the ombudsman said that evidence was deliberately destroyed to ensure there could not be prosecutions.
[...]
They also paid almost £80,000 to leading loyalist Mark Haddock, jailed for 10 years last November for an attack on a nightclub doorman. The ombudsman's investigation began more than three years ago when Belfast welder Raymond McCord claimed that his son, also called Raymond, had been killed by a police informer. The former RAF man, 22, was beaten to death and his body dumped in a quarry in 1997. Mr McCord has said he wants those who murdered his son to be put in prison. He said he had received a death threat at the weekend from the UVF.
Mr McCord said that during his campaign of justice for his son he had been made to feel by police that he was "some sort of crank".
Sunday, January 21, 2007
Thursday, January 18, 2007
Nicht eilen, bitte
Sinfonia (1968–69), for eight amplified voices and orchestra, was part of a wider pattern of response to the musical crisis of the 1960s, during which avant-garde composers began once again to look to music of the past for material and inspiration – a turn towards so-called "meta music", or music about music. The third movement of Sinfonia is one of the most famous and remarkable examples of this approach: a dense fabric of verbal quotations contained within a musical quotation, the Scherzo from Mahler's Symphony No. 2, which is borrowed virtually wholesale and then used as a kind of musical armature around which Berio concocts a dazzling semantic and musical labyrinth, including further quotations (from Mahler, Ravel and Debussy, among others) and chattering texts drawn from Samuel Beckett's The Unnameable.
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Iraq? Everything's going swimmingly.
On 'chaos' as policy: two posts by Jeff Wells:
1. January 16th 2007: It was evident even before the invasion that the war's intention included making a failed state of Iraq. That that's not yet conventional wisdom shows just how much too many still want to believe bad policy is made in good faith.
2. May 2nd 2005: Civil War? Let's put it this way: do you believe the idealogues of invasion ever intended to leave Iraq a strong, united country? Its atomization into impotent, submissive bantustans has been on the neoconservative agenda nearly as long as there have been neoconservatives.
Why won't the Democrats impeach Bush and Cheney? Beacuse they're still useful for something. Exactly what that is, we have yet to see. But no doubt we will, sometime before November 4th 2008.
1. January 16th 2007: It was evident even before the invasion that the war's intention included making a failed state of Iraq. That that's not yet conventional wisdom shows just how much too many still want to believe bad policy is made in good faith.
2. May 2nd 2005: Civil War? Let's put it this way: do you believe the idealogues of invasion ever intended to leave Iraq a strong, united country? Its atomization into impotent, submissive bantustans has been on the neoconservative agenda nearly as long as there have been neoconservatives.
Why won't the Democrats impeach Bush and Cheney? Beacuse they're still useful for something. Exactly what that is, we have yet to see. But no doubt we will, sometime before November 4th 2008.
Principles
Glenn Greenwald:
When I began writing about the Bush administration's violations of FISA, what confounded me at first was the sheer pointlessness of the lawbreaking. It was not merely that the FISA court has always allowed the President -- all presidents -- to do whatever eavesdropping they wanted, and that bypassing it was therefore unnecessary.
That is true. But more significantly, if the President wanted FISA changed, even radically, to vest him with still greater powers, the unprecedentedly compliant post-9/11 Congress was as eager as could be to grant all of his wishes and to give him whatever new powers he wanted. It did so repeatedly, at exactly the time (October, 2001) when he ordered eavesdropping in violation of the law.
(...)
The reason Bush violated the law when eavesdropping is the same reason Lithwick cites to explain his other lawless and extremist measures -- because he wanted purposely not to comply with the law in order to establish the general "principle" that he was not bound by the law, to show that he has the power to break the law, that he is more powerful than the law.
What you gonna do about it?
The Bush Gang is planning some show trials just before the 2008 'election':
Prosecutors could use hearsay evidence or secondhand testimony, but could not use information obtained under torture. Even so, that would mean that virtually any information obtained by the CIA would appear to be admissible because, in the view of Justice Department legal opinions, none of the harsh techniques it used amounted to torture.
Handy, that.
Monday, January 15, 2007
Saturday, January 13, 2007
Do You Want Total War?
*Prime Minister Tony Blair, defending his interventionist policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, said Britain should carry on influencing world affairs through fighting wars as well as peacekeeping.
*Washington intelligence, military and foreign policy circles are abuzz today with speculation that the President, yesterday or in recent days, sent a secret Executive Order to the Secretary of Defense and to the Director of the CIA to launch military operations against Syria and Iran.
*Some Somali officials with the TFG, however, openly boast that U.S. ground forces are in Somalia, while others stick to the party line and flatly deny it. And in a telephone interview today from Mogadishu with NEWSWEEK, the TFG's interior minister, Hussein Aidid, confirmed that U.S. ground forces were involved in the mop-up in southern Somalia.
*OK, so the question is: Was the U.S. assault on the Iranian consulate in Irbil--sovereign Iranian territory--legal? Does the President have the power to invade another country without authorization under the war powers act? I would think not, but I just spoke to a Democratic Member of Congress who was freaked by the obvious attempt to provoke the Iranians into a military response, but said that it might have been legal if the people and information seized were directly involved in attacks on U.S. citizens.
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Salted Peanuts
MEMORANDUM FOR THE PRESIDENT (PDF)
(via - "According to Woodward, Kissinger recently gave a Bush aide a copy of a memo he wrote in 1969 arguing against troop withdrawals from Southeast Asia")
(via - "According to Woodward, Kissinger recently gave a Bush aide a copy of a memo he wrote in 1969 arguing against troop withdrawals from Southeast Asia")
Sunday, January 07, 2007
Saturday, January 06, 2007
"Selective MEMRI"
A few years ago Brian Whitaker of the Guardian wrote what is now a classic expose of the Middle East Media Research Institute (Memri). The article deserves to be reprinted, republished and (re)linked to over and over again.
A couple of recent posts by Angry Arab reminded me of the need to link to it again. In other words, blog it.
Angry Arab:
A couple of recent posts by Angry Arab reminded me of the need to link to it again. In other words, blog it.
Angry Arab:
Now, I know why the Russian, Chines[e], and British ambassadors in Lebanon speak fluent Arabic (the Chinese ambassador has a PhD in Arabic literature and she never uses a translator), while the US ambassador has been practicing the word fa-la-fil for the last two years. Keep trying.
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
Monday, January 01, 2007
Friday, December 29, 2006
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
The Embarrassment of the Wretched
Ran HaCohen
A recurrent theme in anti-Palestinian propaganda (usually misnamed "pro-Israel") is "Don't Single Out." The idea is that evil should be addressed everywhere; the greater the evil, the greater the protest against it should be; and since there are worse cases of evil than Israel's, Israel should not be criticized. Not now, at least: perhaps after all other evils have been eradicated.
The article by Julius and Schama is no exception: you'll find this cliché as argument number three:
"[T]hough the call [to boycott Israel] purports to affirm universal, human rights values, it is incapable of explaining why it seeks a boycott of Israel, alone among the nations of the world. It says nothing about the abuses and human rights breaches inflicted on Israel's citizens. It says nothing about the egregious human rights abuses committed elsewhere in the world (Darfur, Chechnya, and many other places)."
Let's apply the Don't-Single-Out argument to the writers themselves. If, as they claim, evils should be addressed top-to-bottom, then Schama and Julius must either consider the proposed boycott the greatest evil on earth, or else they have already done their best to address all greater evils.
Is the proposed boycott really the greatest evil on earth? Well, I haven't heard of a single human injured, killed, or even suffering because of it. But while Julius and Schama were busy writing their article, Gaza had been under Israeli siege for months on end. Numbers of dead reached historic levels; a million and a half human beings have been locked in the tiny Strip, deprived of proper medical care and on the verge of starvation. Schama and Julius don't even mention this evil.
At the same time, the U.S. government has been using Julius' and Schama's tax money to train and arm one party of the feared Palestinian civil war – coincidentally, the party that lost the recent democratic elections. Schama and Julius don't mention this evil, either. But they did find the time to single out the call for boycott and to write against it. And they do have the nerve to blame the initiators of the boycott of "singling out," i.e., of hypocrisy.
Tuesday, December 26, 2006
Christmas Spirit
"If our moral duty to provide health, education and housing to our people impedes us from paying debt, we won't hesitate two seconds," Correa said at a news conference with Venezuela's Chavez. "We don't rule out a unilateral moratorium on our external debt."
Sunday, December 24, 2006
Saturday, December 23, 2006
Christlike
The "Christmas truce" is a term used to describe the brief unofficial cessation of hostilities that occurred between German and British troops stationed on the Western Front of World War I during Christmas 1914. The truce began on Christmas Eve, December 24, 1914, when German troops began decorating the area around their trenches in the region of Ypres, Belgium, for Christmas. They began by placing candles on trees, then continued the celebration by singing Christmas carols, namely Stille Nacht (Silent Night). The British troops in the trenches across from them responded by singing English carols.
The two sides continued by shouting Christmas greetings to each other. Soon thereafter, there were calls for visits across the "No Man's Land" where small gifts were exchanged — whisky, jam, cigars, and the like. The artillery in the region fell silent that night. The truce also allowed a breathing spell where recently-fallen soldiers could be brought back behind their lines by burial parties. Proper burials took place as soldiers from both sides mourned the dead together and paid their respects. At one funeral in No Man's Land, soldiers from both sides gathered and read a passage from the 23rd Psalm:
"The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul. He leadeth me in the path of righteousness for his name's sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil."
The truce spread to other areas of the lines, and there are many stories — some perhaps apocryphal — of football (soccer) matches between the opposing forces. The film Merry Christmas (film) suggests that letters sent home from the war related that the score was 3-2 in favor of the Germans.
In many sectors, the truce lasted through Christmas night, but in some areas, it continued until New Year's Day.
The truce occurred in spite of opposition at higher levels of the military. Earlier in the autumn, a call by Pope Benedict XV for an official truce between the warring governments had been ignored.
British commanders Sir John French and Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien vowed that no such truce would be allowed again. (However, both had left command before Christmas 1915.) In all of the following years of the war, artillery bombardments were ordered on Christmas Eve to ensure that there were no further lulls in the combat. Troops were also rotated through various sectors of the front to prevent them from becoming overly familiar with the enemy. Despite those measures, there were a few friendly encounters between enemy soldiers, but on a much smaller scale than the previous year.
During Easter 1916 a similar truce also existed on the Eastern Front.
- from Wikipedia, with many links.
The two sides continued by shouting Christmas greetings to each other. Soon thereafter, there were calls for visits across the "No Man's Land" where small gifts were exchanged — whisky, jam, cigars, and the like. The artillery in the region fell silent that night. The truce also allowed a breathing spell where recently-fallen soldiers could be brought back behind their lines by burial parties. Proper burials took place as soldiers from both sides mourned the dead together and paid their respects. At one funeral in No Man's Land, soldiers from both sides gathered and read a passage from the 23rd Psalm:
"The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul. He leadeth me in the path of righteousness for his name's sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil."
The truce spread to other areas of the lines, and there are many stories — some perhaps apocryphal — of football (soccer) matches between the opposing forces. The film Merry Christmas (film) suggests that letters sent home from the war related that the score was 3-2 in favor of the Germans.
In many sectors, the truce lasted through Christmas night, but in some areas, it continued until New Year's Day.
The truce occurred in spite of opposition at higher levels of the military. Earlier in the autumn, a call by Pope Benedict XV for an official truce between the warring governments had been ignored.
British commanders Sir John French and Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien vowed that no such truce would be allowed again. (However, both had left command before Christmas 1915.) In all of the following years of the war, artillery bombardments were ordered on Christmas Eve to ensure that there were no further lulls in the combat. Troops were also rotated through various sectors of the front to prevent them from becoming overly familiar with the enemy. Despite those measures, there were a few friendly encounters between enemy soldiers, but on a much smaller scale than the previous year.
During Easter 1916 a similar truce also existed on the Eastern Front.
- from Wikipedia, with many links.
Friday, December 22, 2006
Provoking Civil War in the Occupied Territories
Arthur Neslen:
So it's official. Britain is no longer simply boycotting a democratically elected Palestinian government. Following Tony Blair's visit, it is committing millions of pounds to Fatah militias that wish to overthrow it. Naturally enough, Blair's foreign policy initiative came two weeks after the US reportedly did the same thing, sending a shipment of 6,000 assault rifles to Fatah's elite Force 17 unit.
Thursday, December 21, 2006
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Monday, December 18, 2006
Sunday, December 17, 2006
Quote
Robert Fisk (via):
My colleague Patrick Cockburn tells me that at one point of great violence in Baghdad he saw an American colleague crawling out on his balcony to use a satellite phone to talk to somebody. Afterwards he said -- because there were a lot of bullets flying around -- who were you talking to? And the reporter said, "I was ringing someone up from the Brookings Institution -- we needed a quote about what was going on in Iraq."
Summary
Angry Arab:
Let me summarize UK and US policies in Iraq and Afghanistan: Both governments sent troops to overthrow the Taliban and the Ba`th regimes. Both governments are now working to bring the Taliban and the Ba`th back to power. OK.
Friday, December 15, 2006
1896
Antonio Labriola
Essays on the Materialist Conception of History
Essays on the Materialist Conception of History
I.
This class of studies, like many others, but this more than any other, is confronted with a great difficulty, indeed an irksome hindrance, in that vice of minds educated by literary methods alone which is ordinarily called verbalism. This bad habit creeps into and spreads itself through all domains of knowledge; but in studies which relate to the so-called moral world, that is to say, to the historico-social complexus, it very often happens that the cult and the dominion of words succeed in corrupting and blotting out the real and living sense of things.
In the field where a long observation, repeated experiences, the certain use of improved instruments, the general or partial application of the calculus have resulted in putting the mind into a constant and methodical relation with things and their variations, as in the natural sciences properly so-called – there the myth and superstition of words are left behind and vanquished; there the questions of terminology no longer have more than the secondary value of pure convention. In the study of human relations and actions, on the contrary, the passions, the interests, the prejudices of school, sect, class and religion, the literary abuse of the traditional means of representing thought, and scholasticism, ever vanquished and always reborn, conceal the actual things, or transform them involuntarily into terms, into words, into abstract and conventional fashions of speech.
We must, first of all, take account of this difficulty when we use the expression or the formula "materialistic conception of history." Many have imagined, do imagine, and will imagine that it is possible and convenient to penetrate into the sense of the phrase by the simple analysis of the words which compose it instead of arriving at it from the context of an explanation, from the genetic study of the formation of the doctrine, or from the polemical writings in which its partisans refute the objections of its opponents. Verbalism tends always to shut itself up in purely formal definitions; it gives rise in the minds to this erroneous belief, that it is an easy thing to reduce into terms and into simple and palpable expressions the agitated and immense complexus of nature and history and that it is easy to picture the multiform and complicated interlacings of causes and effects; in clearer terms, it obliterates the meaning of the problems because it sees in them nothing but questions of nomenclature.
If, moreover, it then happens that verbalism finds a support in certain theoretical hypotheses, for example, that matter indicates something which is below or opposed to another higher or nobler thing which is called spirit; or if it happens to be at one with that literary habit which opposes the word materialism, understood in a disparaging sense, to all that, in a word, is called idealism, that is to say, to the sum total of the anti-egoistic inclinations and acts; then our embarrassment is extreme! Then we are told that in this doctrine it is attempted to explain the whole of man by the mere calculation of his material interests and that no value whatever is allowed to any ideal interest. The inexperience, the incapacity and the haste of certain partisans and propagandists of this doctrine have also been a cause of these confusions. In their eagerness to explain to others what they themselves only half understand, at a time when the doctrine itself is only in its beginnings and still has need of many developments, they have believed they could apply it, such as it was, to whatever historic fact they were considering, and they have almost reduced it to tatters, exposing it thus to the easy criticism and the ridicule of people on the watch for scientific novelties, and other idle persons of the same type.
Since it has been my privilege in these first pages simply to rebut these prejudices (in a preliminary fashion) and unmask the intentions and the tendencies underlying them, it must be remembered that the meaning of this doctrine ought, before all else, to be drawn from the position which it takes and occupies with regard to the doctrines against which it is in reality opposed, and particularly with regard to the ideologies of every sort; – that the proof of its value consists exclusively in the more suitable and more appropriate explanation of the succession of human events which is derived from it; – that this doctrine does not imply a subjective preference for a certain quality or a certain sum of human interests opposed by free choice to other interests, but that it merely affirms the objective coordination and subordination of all interests in the development of all society; and this it affirms, thanks to that genetic processus which consists in going from the conditions to the conditioned, from the elements of formation to the things formed.
Let the verbalists reason as they like over the value of the word matter in so far as it implies or recalls a metaphysical conception, or in so far as it is the expression of the last hypothetical substratum of experience. We are not here in the domain of physics, chemistry or biology; we are only searching for the explicit conditions of human association in so far as it is no longer simply animal. It is not for us to support our inductions or our deductions upon the data of biology, but, on the contrary, to recognize before all else the peculiarities of human association, which form and develop through the succession and the growing perfection of the activity of man himself in given and variable conditions, and to find the relations of co-ordination and subordination of the needs which are the substratum of will and action. It is not proposed to discover an intention nor to formulate a criticism; it is merely the necessity arising from the facts that must be put in evidence.
And as men, not by free choice, but because they could not act otherwise, satisfy first certain elementary needs, which, in their turn, give rise to others in their upward development, and as for the satisfaction of their needs, whatever they may be, they invent and employ certain means and certain tools and associate themselves in certain definite fashions, the materialism of historical interpretation is nothing else than an attempt to reconstruct by thought with method the genesis and the complexity of the social life which develops through the ages. The novelty of this doctrine does not differ from that of all the other doctrines which after many excursions through the domains of the imagination have finally arrived, very painfully, at reaching the prose of reality and halting there.
II.
There is a certain affinity, apparently at least, between that formal vice of verbalism and another defect of the mind, whose origins may, however, be varied. In consideration of some of its most common and popular effects I will call it phraseology, although this word is not an exact expression of the thing and does not set forth its origin.
For long centuries men have written on history, have explained it, have illustrated it. The most varied interests, from the interests more immediately practical to the interests purely esthetic, have moved different writers to conceive and to execute this type of composition. These different types have always taken birth in different countries long after the origins of civilization, of the development of the state and of the passage from the primitive communist society to the society which rests upon class differences and class antagonisms. The historians, even if they have been as artless as Herodotus, were always born and formed in a society having nothing ingenuous in it, but very complicated and complex, and at a time when the reasons for this complication and complexity were unknown and their origins forgotten. This complexity, with all the contrasts which it bears within itself and which it reveals later and makes burst forth in its various vicissitudes, stood forth before the narrators as something mysterious and calling for an explanation, and if the historian wished to give some sequence and a certain connection to the things narrated, he was obliged to add certain general views to the simple narration. From the jealousy of the gods of Father Herodotus to the environment of M. Taine, an infinite number of concepts serving as means of explanation and as complements to the things related have been imposed upon the narrators by the natural voices of their immediate thought. Class tendencies, religious ideas, popular prejudices, influences or imitations of a current philosophy, excursions of imagination and a desire to give an artistic appearance to facts known only in a fragmentary fashion, all these causes and other analogous causes have contributed to form the substratum of the more or less artless theory of events which is implicitly at the bottom of the narration, or which serves at least to flavor and adorn it. Whether men speak of chance or of destiny, whether they appeal to the providential direction of human events or adhere to the word and concept of chance, the only divinity left in the rigid and often coarse conception of Machiavelli, or whether they speak, as is frequent enough at the present time, of the logic of events, all these conceptions were and are effects and results of ingenuous thought, of immediate thought, of thought which cannot justify to itself its course, and its products, either by the paths of criticism or by the methods of experience. To fill up with conventional causes (e. g., chance) or with a statement of theoretical plausibility (e.g., the inevitable course of events which sometimes is confused in the mind with the notion of progress the gaps of our knowledge as to the fashion in which things have been actually produced by their own necessity without care for our free win and our consent, that is the motive and the result of this popular philosophy, latent or explicit, in the chroniclers, which by reason of its superficial character dissolves as soon as scientific criticism appears.
In all these concepts and all these imaginings which in the light of criticism appear as simple provisional devices and effects of an unripe thought, but which often seem to "cultured people" the non plus ultra of intelligence – in all these a great part of the human processus is revealed and reflected; and, consequently. We should not consider them as gratuitous inventions nor as products of a momentary illusion. They are a part and a moment in the development of what we call the human mind. If later it is observed that these concepts and these imaginings are mingled and confounded in the accepted opinions of cultured people, or of those who pass for such, they make up an immense mass of prejudices and they constitute an impediment which ignorance opposes to the clear and complete vision of the real things. These prejudices turn up again as etymological derivations in the language of professional politicians, of so-called publicists and journalists of every kind, and offer the support of rhetoric to self-styled public opinion.
To oppose and then to replace this mirage of uncritical conceptions, these idols of the imagination, these effects of literary artifice, this conventionalism by the real subjects, or the forces which are positively acting – that is to say, men in their various and diversified social relations – this is the revolutionary enterprise and the scientific aim of the new doctrine which renders objective and I might say naturalizes the explanation of the historical processus.
A certain definite nation, that is to say, not a certain mass of individuals, but a plexus of men organized in such and such a fashion by natural relations of consanguinity, or following such or such an artificial or customary order of relationship and affinity, or by reason of permanent proximity; – this nation, on a certain circumscribed and limited territory, having such and such fertility, productive in such and such a manner acquired through certain definite forms by continuous labor; – this nation, thus distributed over this territory and thus divided and articulated by the effect of a definite division of labor which is scarcely beginning to give birth to or which has already developed and ripened such and such a division of classes, or which has already disintegrated or transformed a whole series of classes; – this nation which possesses such and such instruments from the flint stone to the electric light and from the bow and arrow to the repeating rifle, which produces according to a certain fashion and shares its products conformably to its way of producing; – this nation, which by all these relations constitutes a society in which either by habits of mutual accommodation or by explicit conventions, or by acts of violence suffered and endured, has already given birth, or is on the point of giving birth to legal-political relations which result in the formation of the state; – this nation, which by the organization of the state, which is only a means for fixing, defending and perpetuating inequalities, by reason of the antagonisms which it bears within itself, renders continuously unstable the organization itself, whence result the political movements and revolutions, and therefore the reasons for progress and retrogression; – there is the sum of what is at the bottom of all history. And there is the victory of realistic prose over all the fantastic and ideological combinations.
Certainly it requires some resignation to see things as they are, passing beyond the phantoms which for centuries have prevented right vision. But this revelation of realistic doctrine was not and is not designed to be the rebellion of the material man against the ideal man. It has been and is, on the contrary, the discovery of the principles and the motives which are real and which belong to all human development, including all that we call the ideal in positive conditions, determined by facts which carry in themselves the reasons and the law and the rhythm of their own development.
آلو
Not long after Republicans harrassed tens of thousands of Americans with automated phone messages in November's election, news comes that the robo call, that staple of American democracy, is being deployed in Iraq. And it's literally terrorizing city residents.
Nir Rosen of the new blog Iraqslogger reports, calling it a "mysterious psychological operations campaign," that Baghdad residents have reported "receiving phone calls that the caller ID shows to be originating from outside Iraq." What follows is a "recorded message from an anonymous man speaking formal Arabic" who goes on to condemn the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia headed by the powerful cleric Muqtada al Sadr that's been a continual thorn in the U.S.'s side.
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Round Up
JIM PAPIAN: Yes. On Tuesday morning, 13,000 workers kissed their spouses goodbye. They fixed the lunches for their kids. They took transportation into their meatpacking plants, where they had been working, and they began doing their job. Shortly after that, in the early dawn, in many of those plants, ICE agents surrounded the plants, stormed into the plant, locked the gate, blocked the plant, dressed in riot gear and with military weapons in some of these plants, jumped on tables, began segregating and herding people, terrorizing, you know, 13,000 folks -- terrorizing and criminalizing, essentially, 13,000 people who had gone in to do their work that day.(more)
Subsequent to that, they began interviewing and detaining people and then eventually shipping them out to distant cities into other states. Now, why did they do this? Well, they went into federal court, and they got a warrant. They said that there had been some identity theft. People were in effect stealing Social Security numbers from other people and then using those in terms of their I-9 regulation to gain employment.
So, what the ICE agents did was say, you know, ‘We’ve got 170 folks that we suspect of identity theft, but what we’re really going to do is we’re going to terrorize 13,000 people. We’re going to separate parents from children.” Children were left in schools that day, no one there to pick them up. If you see the headlines from around the country, you’ll see from the Des Moines Register, it says “A breast-feeding mother missing in raid.” A Utah headline, “Families ripped apart, communities are ripped apart,” you know, to essentially go in and interview 170 people.
Now, I mean, these plants have HR departments. You know, there is a process for identifying folks for bringing them in for interviews, if that’s necessary, and for the ICE agents to make their determinations. But what the government chose to do in this case was to engage in an act that really can’t be described other than terrorizing an entire work force. So I think that’s -- in a nutshell, I think that sums up what happened on that day.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And how many people were actually detained as suspected of being in the country illegally?
JIM PAPIAN: Well, I think that 62 people, I think, were detained for identity theft violations. And I believe somewhere around 1,200 were detained for being here without proper status.
AMY GOODMAN: Mariano Espinoza, you’re in the St. Paul studio, executive director of Minnesota Immigration Freedom Network. Talk about what’s happened in your community?
MARIANO ESPINOZA: Good morning to all. Well, it’s a sad day today for the immigrant community here, and it’s a human tragedy. American children are left without their parents, their brothers and their sisters, and we are just trying to figure out how to help the community right now. I just want to make sure that it’s clear: we need to stop this.
America is using the excuse of being a nation of laws to criminalize those workers. None of the 230-plus workers being detained right now are charged with identity theft. So this is just an excuse to terrorize our community, to divide our families. And why do we need to have this situation right now on the 12th of December, a very, very important date for our communities in Latin America? And why do we have to do this to children before Christmas, before the end of the year, where every year we celebrate our families? We need to stop this. This is not right, and this is a shame for this country.
JUAN GONZALEZ: I’d like to bring in Sylvia Martinez from Latinos Unidos in Colorado. Some of the reports that I heard yesterday said that there were numerous cases of children of some of these workers in the plants who ended up -- school officials at the end of school had no one to pick them up, and many children in some parts of the country spent hours and hours after school, as officials tried to figure out what family members could be located to pick them up. Could you talk about that or the impact in Colorado, as well?
SYLVIA MARTINEZ: It’s a huge impact on children, absolutely, and on families as a whole. There were definitely children -- there are definitely children without parents. A lot of these families were comprised of a single-parent households, and so, yes, there are children -- what happened is after school they ended up -- these children who did not have a mother or a father, or a mother and father to go to, they ended up with neighbors, with uncles, with aunts, that sort of situation. We’re thinking -- trying to calculate specifically -- it’s pretty difficult because there are still a lot of people not willing to come forward for fear that Social Services might get involved and take these children and, you know, pull them apart, not willing to come forward. But we have an estimate of about 100 children that are without parents right now, that are with neighbors and friends.
AMY GOODMAN: Kim Salinas, you’re an immigration rights attorney. You spent the day in the detention centers in Greeley, Colorado. Can you describe who you found there, what you were telling people?
KIM SALINAS: Sure. And, Amy, I just wanted to kind of pick up on what the first speaker said about this being an act of terrorism. And, in fact, it is. The choice of one of the holiest days in Mexico is no accident. And not only were the 1,300 people that were arrested terrorized, but the entire community has been terrorized, and that continues in that people still don’t know where their family members are. ICE is not giving out any information about these people. Locally, we have, we estimate, 300 people missing. We don’t have any lists about exactly who those people are. We have no idea where those people are. We’ve been told that there are between four or five different facilities, including county jails, a federal facility and the immigration jail.
We went yesterday to the immigration detention facility. It was a pro bono project that works on the detention facility to try to give some know-your-rights presentations to the detainees and kind of give them an evaluation of their case. And we saw 12 people. We spent the entire afternoon there. We were only allowed to see 12 people. While we were there, the director of the pro bono project heard that there were some buses out back. She went out to investigate. People were being given their own deportations to sign on those buses, and we protested and said, “Hey, here we are, a bunch of bilingual attorneys here to give free legal advice. Let us advise these people before you have them sign their own deportation.” And we were denied that opportunity to go back and advise these people of their rights.
They have set up a -- well, they have a toll-free number that they say families can call to find out where their family members are, but in fact the only thing they’ll tell you on that toll-free number is the name of the person and the state they’re arrested in. They give absolutely no information about where these people are.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Kim Salinas, I heard ICE Commissioner Julie Myers say last night that the Swift Company had been very cooperative in the entire process on this. Have you had any contact with the management of Swift, and had any sense that the company knew this was happening?
KIM SALINAS: I haven’t had any contact with the Swift Company, but the whole identity theft sort of cover gives a really easy out to Swift. I mean, Swift can then just say, ‘Well, gee whiz, we were duped by these bad people who were stealing the identity of US citizens. And we were really just trying to comply with the laws.” And it definitely gives Swift an out. And obviously they’re not really looking for people who are committing identity theft, because they’re not going after people who are making and selling false identifications. They were after terrorizing the Latino and the immigrant community.
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Dr. Francis A. Boyle and the Anthrax Attacks
The now long-forgotten anthrax attacks on Senators Daschle and Leahy were a vitally-important early battle in the soon-to-be-global War on Terror. Dr. Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois has now, quite bravely, stated the obvious; so wait for David Corn, Alexander Cockburn and the denizens of Lenin's Tomb to call him a 'conspiracy nut' - or else, more likely, to ignore him very carefully. Such is the "antiwar" "left" in December 2006.
Sherwood Ross
Middle East Times
December 11, 2006
WASHINGTON -- The terrorists who perpetrated the 2001 anthrax attack on Congress likely were US government scientists at the army's Ft. Detrick, MD., bioterrorism lab having access to "moonsuits" that enabled them to safely process and manufacture super-weapons-grade anthrax, an eminent authority on the subject says.
Although only a "handful" of scientists had the ability to perpetrate the crime, the culprit among them may never be identified as the FBI ordered the destruction of the anthrax culture collection at Ames, IA., from which the Ft. Detrick lab got its pathogens, the authority said.
This action makes it impossible "to pin-point precisely where, when, and from whom these bio-agents had originated," said Dr. Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois at Champaign.
Boyle, who drafted the US Biological Weapons Convention of 1989 enacted by Congress, said destruction of the Ames anthrax "appears to be a cover-up orchestrated by the FBI."
If impartial scientists could have performed genetic reconstruction of the anthrax found in letters mailed to Senators Daschle (D-S.D.) and Patrick Leahy, (D -Vt.), "the trail of genetic evidence would have led directly back to a secret but officially-sponsored US government biowarfare program that was illegal and criminal" in violation of biological weapons conventions and US laws, Boyle said.
"I believe the FBI knows exactly who was behind these terrorist anthrax attacks upon the United States Congress in the Fall of 2001, and that the culprits were US government-related scientists involved in a criminal US government biowarfare program," Boyle said.
The anthrax attacks killed five people, including two postal workers, injured 17 others, and shut down the operations of the US Congress.
Boyle, a leading American authority on international law, said after the attacks he contacted senior FBI official Marion "Spike" Bowman, who handles counter-terrorism issues, and provided him with the names of the scientists working with anthrax. Boyle told Bowman the Ft. Detrick scientists were not to be trusted.
In addition to then destroying the anthrax, the FBI "retained every independent life-scientist it could locate as part of its fictitious investigation, and then swore them all to secrecy so that they cannot publicly comment on the investigation or give their expert opinion," Boyle said.
Boyle pointed out that Bowman is the same FBI agent "who played a pivotal role in suppressing evidence which in turn prevented the issuance of a search warrant for the computer of Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged 20th Al Qaeda hijacker on 11 September 2001, which might otherwise have led to foreknowledge and therefore prevention of those terrorist attacks in the first place."
A self-confessed Al Qaeda operative, Moussaoui was detained on immigration three weeks before 9/11 when a Minnesota flight school reported he was acting suspiciously.
Boyle asked if Bowman received an FBI award in December 2002, for "exceptional performance" because of his capacity "to forestall investigations, because of where they may lead?" He went on to inquire, "Could the real culprits behind the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, and the immediately following terrorist anthrax attacks upon Congress ultimately prove to be the same people?"
Because of its "bogus investigation," Boyle said, "the greatest political crime in the history of the United States of America since its founding on 4 July, 1776 - the anthrax attacks on Congress, which served not only to deliver a terrorist threat on its members, but actually to close it down for a period - may remain officially
unresolved forever."
"Could it truly be coincidental," he continued, "that two of the primary intended victims of the terrorist anthrax attacks - Senators Daschle and Leahy - were holding up the speedy passage of the pre-planned USA Patriot Act ... an act which provided the federal government with unprecedented powers in relation to US citizens and institutions?"
Leahy is incoming Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and may have a personal interest in holding hearings to learn who tried to kill him. He recently said President George W. Bush should be "terrified" that he will be the new Chair.
Boyle's views are contained in his book Biowarfare and Terrorism, published by Clarity Press, Inc., of Atlanta, GA. His previously published titles include, Foundations of World Order, The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence, and Destroying World Order. Dr. Boyle holds a Doctor of Law Magna Cum Laude and a Ph.D. in political science, both from Harvard.
In a foreword to the book, Dr. Jonathan King, Professor of Molecular Biology at M.I.T. and a founder of the Council for Responsible Genetics, said the government's "growing bioterror programs [described by Professor Boyle] represent a significant emerging danger to our own population."
A harsh critic of Pentagon biowarfare activities, Boyle pointed out in inflation-adjusted dollars the US spends more on them today than it did on the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb in World War II. He has accused the Bush administration of diverting the bio-tech industry "towards biowarfare purposes" and of making corrupting payoffs to Academia to turn university scientists to the pursuit of biowarfare work.
Sherwood Ross is an American journalist who writes on military and political topics. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com
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