Saturday, May 15, 2004
BARELY A PEEP ON THE BERG VIDEO TIMESTAMP INCONSISTENCIES - "FBI INVESTIGATING"
How much investigation is required to view the video and see for oneself? On May 11th, the story of the timeline inconsistencies was reported by the Associated Press in a larger piece, but published in only a tiny handful of US newspapers and quickly forgotten in the media shock of seeing a head being severed on tape:
------
Grisly video shows American civilian beheaded in Iraq, killers speak of revenge for Abu Ghraib abuses
ROBERT H. REID, Associated Press Writer, Tuesday, May 11, 2004
(05-11) 17:57 PDT BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) --
A video posted Tuesday on an al-Qaida-linked Web site showed the beheading of an American civilian in Iraq and said the execution was carried out to avenge abuses of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison.
In a grisly gesture, the executioners held up the man's head for the camera.
The American identified himself on the video as Nick Berg, a 26-year-old Philadelphia native. His body was found near a highway overpass in Baghdad on Saturday, the same day he was beheaded, a U.S. official said.
The video bore the title "Abu Musab al-Zarqawi shown slaughtering an American." It was unclear whether al-Zarqawi -- an associate of Osama bin Laden believed behind the wave of suicide bombings in Iraq -- was shown in the video or simply ordered the execution. Al-Zarqawi also is sought in the assassination of a U.S. diplomat in Jordan in 2002.
The Bush administration said those who beheaded Berg would be hunted down and brought to justice.
"Our thoughts and prayers are with his family," White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said. "It shows the true nature of the enemies of freedom. They have no regard for the lives of innocent men, women and children."
Berg was a small-business owner who went to Iraq independent of any organization to help rebuild communication antennas, his family said Tuesday. Friends and family said he was a "free spirit" who wanted to help others -- working in Ghana, in one example -- and that his going to Iraq fit with that ideology. They said he supported the Iraqi war and the Bush administration.
U.S. officials had feared the shocking photographs of U.S. soldiers abusing and humiliating Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad would endanger the lives of American troops and civilians.
Also, Berg's killing happened amid a climate of intense anti-Western sentiment, which flared in Iraq after last month's crackdown on Shiite extremists and the three-week Marine siege of Fallujah west of Baghdad. Anger at the United States swelled with the publication of the Abu Ghraib photographs, which continue to stir rage throughout the Arab world.
In the video, five men wearing headscarves and black ski masks stand over a bound man in an orange jumpsuit similar to prison uniforms.
"My name is Nick Berg. My father's name is Michael. My mother's name is Suzanne," the man, seated in a chair, says. "I have a brother and sister, David and Sara. I live in ... Philadelphia."
The video then cuts to Berg sitting on the floor, his hands tied behind his back, flanked by the masked men, as a statement is read in Arabic. Berg sits still during the statement, facing the camera, occasionally raising his shoulders.
After the statement, one assailant takes a large knife from under his clothing while another pulls Berg onto his side. The tape shows assailants thrusting the knife through his neck. A scream sounds before the men cut Berg's head off, repeatedly shouting "Allahu Akbar!" -- or "God is great."
They then hold the head out before the camera.
The video is of poor quality, and its time stamp seems to show an 11-hour lapse between when the assailants finish their statement and push Berg down, to when they behead him. That suggests a delay between those two portions of tape posted on the Web site.
The FBI is analyzing the Internet video, said an official speaking on condition of anonymity, adding that it was too early to draw any conclusions.
The Bergs, who live in the Philadelphia suburb of West Chester, Pa., last heard from their son April 9, the same day insurgents attacked a U.S. convoy west of the capital.
Berg attended Cornell University, Drexel University, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Oklahoma, where he got involved in rigging electronics equipment while working for the maintenance department, his father said. He helped set up equipment at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia in 2000.
While at Cornell, he traveled to Ghana to teach villagers how to make bricks out of minimal material. His father said Berg returned from Ghana with only the clothes on his back and emaciated because he gave away most of his food.
Michael Berg said his son saw his trip to Iraq as an adventure in line with his desire to help others.
"I would say he was a free spirit, very intelligent," said Nick Fillioe, a sports director at the West Chester YMCA. "He was a real smart guy. He knew a little bit about everything."
Berg's family said they were informed by the State Department on Monday that he was found dead.
When told by a reporter about the Web site, Berg's father, brother and sister grasped one another and slowly dropped to the ground in their front yard, where they wept quietly while holding each other.
"I knew he was decapitated before," Michael Berg said. "That manner is preferable to a long and torturous death. But I didn't want it to become public."
The decapitation recalled the kidnapping and videotaped beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002 in Pakistan. Four Islamic militants have been convicted of kidnapping Pearl, but seven suspects -- including those who allegedly slit his throat -- remain at large.
Last month, Iraqi militants videotaped the killing of Italian hostage Fabrizio Quattrocchi, but the Arab TV network Al-Jazeera refused to air it because it was too graphic.
In the video of Berg, the executioners said they had tried to trade him for prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
"For the mothers and wives of American soldiers, we tell you that we offered the U.S. administration to exchange this hostage for some of the detainees in Abu Ghraib and they refused," one of the men read from a statement.
"So we tell you that the dignity of the Muslim men and women in Abu Ghraib and others is not redeemed except by blood and souls. You will not receive anything from us but coffins after coffins ... slaughtered in this way."
Seven soldiers from the 372nd Military Police Company face charges in the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in a scandal that has sparked worldwide outrage. One of those soldiers faces a court-martial in Baghdad next week, the first to go to trial.
The American administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, said Tuesday that the soldiers accused of abuses would be brought to justice.
"I find the behavior of these American soldiers completely unacceptable and outrageous," Bremer told Associated Press Television News. "I share the outrage of the Iraqi people and the people of the world as to what these guys did."
April 9, when Berg last made contact with his family, also was the day that seven American contractors working for a subsidiary of Halliburton Corp. and two military men disappeared after their supply convoy was attacked on the outskirts of Baghdad.
Four of the Halliburton workers and one of the military men have since been confirmed dead. Halliburton worker Thomas Hamill escaped his captors May 2 and returned home to Mississippi on Saturday. The two other Halliburton workers and the other soldier remain missing.
Two soldiers also vanished April 9. One was later found dead and the other, Pfc. Keith M. Maupin of Batavia, Ohio, was taken captive and remains missing.
Associated Press reporter Jason Straziuso contributed to this story from West Chester, Pa.
Saturday, May 15, 2004
BERG TIMELINE
Posted on Wed, May. 12, 2004
Berg Time Line
Dec. 21. Nicholas Berg goes to Iraq to explore business opportunities.
Feb. 1. After making contact with a company that indicates there likely will be work for him, Berg leaves Iraq.
March 14. Berg returns to Iraq.
March 24. Berg tells his parents he is coming home on March 30 to be in a friend's wedding. The same day, he is detained by Iraqi police at a Mosul checkpoint. At some point during his 13-day detention, U.S. officials take custody of him.
March 30. Berg's father, Michael, goes to John F. Kennedy International Airport, but Berg is not on his scheduled flight.
March 31. In West Chester, the FBI interviews Michael and Suzanne Berg. A spokesman said the agency was "asked to interview the parents regarding Mr. Berg's purpose in Iraq."
April 5. The Bergs file suit in federal court in Philadelphia, contending that their son was being held illegally by the U.S. military in Iraq.
April 6. Nicholas Berg is released.
April 9. Berg communicates for the last time with his parents, telling them he will come home through Jordan.
Saturday. Berg's decapitated body is found near a highway in Baghdad.
Monday. State Department officials notify the Berg family of his death.
Yesterday. Berg's death is announced.Friday, May 14, 2004
PEOPLE ARE NOTICING ALL THE INCONSISTENCIES
Fishy Circumstances and Flawed Timelines Surround American's Beheading
From AxisOfLogic.com
UPDATE 12:45PM Central: This just in -- U.S. spokesman says decapitated American was never held by U.S. forces
With several news outlets reporting that Berg's family is angry from the US government over their son's violent death and revelations that "Berg was detained by Iraqi police at a checkpoint in Mosul on March 24. He was turned over to U.S. officials and detained for 13 days" (in other words, he was detained by the US military just prior to his death) -- (AP 5/11/04) we have to question what really happened and who was really behind Berg's horrific murder.
We have received several emails from listeners questioning what really happened including this one:
"me and a friend were discussing recent news events and trying to piece together the information presented to us, thought you might want to look into this further, they said in the news that nicholas berg was killed 2 weeks ago (i think), however in the video the culprits who killed him said they were "avenging iraqi prisoner abuse" but those photos weren't released until last week, so my question is how is that even a possible motive if he was killed prior to the abuse photos being released?? maybe i am misinformed but thought id ask the question to someone who would look into it."
And this one:
"Hey Alex, I know people like me who have learned not to trust our government tend to see a conspiracy under every rock. With that said... The picture the media is now showing of the guy the terrorist beheaded as revenge for what went on in the Iraqi prisons looks odd to me. If you look at the men dressed in black, they all seem well fed. Actually most look fat. That bothers me, because these guys are fighting a war and eating on the run. They are constantly on the move and should be either very fit and trim or scrawny and malnourished because of the same reasons. One thing they should not be is fat like couch potatoes. If you look at all of the photos of the prisoners who were naked who supposedly were just plucked of the street, most of them are thin. Just an observation Alex."
And this one:
"1) extremely convenient 'wag the dog' timing at the height of furor regarding U.S. torture of Iraqis
"2) CNN poll question: 'Is the Berg killing a reason for withholding any remaining Iraq prisoner abuse pictures?' Bush has been reported to be struggling with question of whether Pentagon should release additional torture photos. Given that the alleged decapitation of Berg was allegedly prompted by the first wave of torture photos, Bush could now cite 'national security' issues for witholding additional materials.
"3) Berg's last known whereabouts was in U.S. custody.
"4) Berg shown in video wearing orange jumpsuit known to be of U.S. issue (compare with pictures at Guantanamo).
"5) Berg mysteriously captured by Al-Quaeda (still wearing jumpsuit). Either he escaped from U.S. captors or U.S. let him out -- with orange suit and all -- to be immediately apprehended by Al-Quaeda (before he had a chance to change).
"6) Tape obviously spliced together and heavily edited. Goes from a) Berg sitting in chair talking about family, to b) Berg sitting on floor with hooded "militants" behind, to c) blurry camera movement, to d) almost motionless Berg on floor as head cut off.
"7) Audio clearly dubbed in.
"8) 'Arab' reader flips through pages of 'statement' and keeps ending up on the same page. Perhaps doesn't even known enough Arabic to recognize what page he's on?
"9) 'Arabs' have lily-white hands and (other exposed) skin.
"10) 'Arabs' have Western-style body posture and mannerisms.
"11) When Berg decapitated, there was almost no blood. If Berg were still alive at this point, with the cut starting at front of throat, blood would have been spraying everywhere. Berg's severed head, the floor, Berg's clothes, and even the hand of the 'Arab' who decapitated Berg had no visible blood on it.
"12) Berg's body didn't move while on the ground. Although held down, Berg would have tried to instinctively wiggle and writhe away from captor's grip.
"13) Camera angle made it impossible to see if Berg's eyes were even open.
"14) Alleged 'scream' from Berg sounded to be that of a woman and was clearly dubbed in.
"15) Berg goes to great trouble to identify himself, providing information about his family. Why? To elicit greater sympathy? Or to provide a positive ID. FBI visited Berg family in an attempt to 'verify his identity'. Guy in video looks very little like Berg photos provided by family."
I believe that Berg (or this lookalike character) was first killed (perhaps by lethal injection, poisoning, etc.), then decapitated after dead (explains lack of blood spraying everywhere). Berg was killed by Al-Quaeda (known to be a CIA - Mossad joint venture). Berg video released at height of furor over U.S. torture of Iraqis and just before Bush was to decide whether to release additional torture videos. Now torture videos will be witheld from public for reasons of national security. Now "patriots" everywhere will laud the virtues of U.S. torture of "enemies". Sensitivity level of public gets heightened in terms of what's acceptable treatment of prisoners. Juxtaposed with decapitation, piling naked men into pyramid is nothing. Such treatment will be considered more and more acceptable even in domestic situations. George W. Bush sleeps well tonight while Berg family lives in
torture. Serves Berg's father right for opposing Bush and the war of
aggression against Iraq.
Jeff Rense has compiled some important information on Berg's detainment and questioning what really happened in his article, "Why Did The US Take Custody Of Nick Berg?"
Two things are for sure:
First: Berg parents feel that their son was abandoned and betrayed by the US Government.
Second: NeoCons have already started to use Nick Berg's murder to justify torture and more war
Related Articles:
Why Did The US Take Custody Of Nick Berg?
Nick Berg's Parents Say US Abandoned Him
Pa. family angry with American government over son's brutal death
Qaeda Leader Beheads U.S. Civilian in Iraq
Awful images change perception of the war
NeoCons use Nick Berg's murder to justify torture and more war
http://infowars.com/print/iraq/berg.htm
Friday, May 14, 2004
NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD
Iraq militants claim al-Zarqawi is dead
Al Qaida-linked extremist suspected of planning attacks
The Associated Press
Updated: 6:31 a.m. ET March 04, 2004
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Jordanian extremist suspected of bloody suicide attacks in Iraq was killed some time ago in U.S. bombing and a letter outlining plans for fomenting sectarian war is a forgery, a statement allegedly from an insurgent group west of the capital said.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed in the Sulaimaniyah mountains of northern Iraq during the American bombing there, according to a statement circulated in Fallujah this week and signed by the Leadership of the Allahu Akbar Mujahedee.
------------
ASSOCIATED PRESS
6:00 p.m. May 13, 2004
WASHINGTON Terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was the masked man who beheaded an American civilian in Iraq, U.S. intelligence officials concluded Thursday, leaving other questions unresolved about Nicholas Berg's final days and his contacts with U.S. and Iraqi authorities.
----------
Pretty good for a dead man.Friday, May 14, 2004
15 ANOMALIES CONCERNING THE DEATH OF NICK BERG
Arab linguists have said the man posing as the Jordanian Zaraqawi did not speak with a Jordanian dialect. Others have suggested the man reading the written statement may not have been a native speaker of Arabic.
Zaraqawi was missing one leg and had been outfitted with an artificial leg that did not fit or function properly. He was unable to walk or stand normally with his ill-fitting limb. No man in the group showed evidence of such an infirmity.
Numerous indigenous sources have said Zaraqawi was killed by a US helicopter attack months ago when he was unable to move quickly enough to escape the targeted house. While others managed to exit the house in time to survive, he died in the collapsed building.
As any surgeon will testify, the alleged beheading was a fake. A beheading would result in a tremendous amount of spurting blood. There would have been blood everywhere had an actual beheading taken place. When the executioner holds up Berg's head immediately following what is represented as an actual decapitation of a living person, there is no significant blood flow from the neck or blood splatters showing anywhere on the executioner. Furthermore, the cut was simply too neat to have been done crudely and with such amazing speed by a man wielding a knife. Anybody who has ever carved a turkey knows there is something wrong with the supposed beheading. The suspended head looks more like Berg had been neatly beheaded by a guillotine.
The orange jumpsuit was standard US military issue to men in custody. It is unlikely Berg would have continuing wearing a US custodial uniform if he had been released by the military as they claim. The fact he was still wearing the suit is both anomalous and suggestive. One is forced to speculate as to whether there was an immediate transfer of Berg from the US military to unknown persons, thusly preventing Berg from discarding his US prison garb.
Several of the men in the film were fat by Iraqi standards. If they were Feyadeen or mujahadeen, they probably have been living underground since the first days of the occupation. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been shown on news stories as they have marched and demonstrated. One would be hard pressed to point out a single fat man among these thousands.
Some men had what can only be described as pasty-white hands. Once again, one would be hard pressed to find Arab men with pasty-white hands.
The lack of spurting blood suggests Berg was already dead at the time of the alleged decapitation. It is possible Berg's dead body was displayed with his head already partially or totally severed. In any case, he almost certainly was killed before the staged beheading. If so, it suggests the captors had no stomach for an actual beheading of a living person, and they opted to fulfill their assignment quietly and with the least amount of gore.
The scream that is heard has been interpreted as a woman's scream by many viewers. Videotape cognoscenti have further said the scream was amateurishly added to the tape.
The U.S. government translation of one statement made on the film is: "Does al Qaeda need any further excuses?" This is a falsification. The actual statement urged fellow insurgents to get off their hind ends and do something. One assumes the translator being used by the US military is a native speaker of Arabic, so this cannot be explained as an innocent flub. This suggests the US government wanted to inject an alleged al- Qaeda group into the murder of Nick Berg.
Iraqis who have seen the videotape on Arabic news broadcasts are universally saying the men in the film are not Iraqis. Are they saying this partly because the speaker does not employ an Iraqi dialect? Where does their certainty come from?
Firearms experts have stated the AK-47 carried by one man was a "Gilal." This actually is an Israeli-made weapon that improves on the famous AK- 47. Feyadeen and other insurgents almost universally use AK-47s.
The man in the videotape who is purported to be Zarqawi is wearing a gold ring. This is absolutely proscribed by Islamic law.
The US military has stated that Berg was never in US custody and that he had been in custody of the Iraqi police. The Iraqi police adamantly deny he was ever in their custody. On April 1, an e-mail from Beth A. Payne, the U.S. consular officer in Iraq, was sent to the family of Nick Berg. It stated that Ms. Payne had located Nick, and he was currently in custody of the US military. We have to conclude that either the email was bogus or the US military has been lying.
The chair that Berg was seated in during the filming was a standard issue military chair of the exact same kind as seen in a color photo taken at the Abu Ghraib Prison. The chances a terrorist cell would be using this same chair are minimal at best.
Friday, May 14, 2004
'PATRIOT' SPREADS PROPAGANDA AND MISINFORMATION - SGT. REYNOLDS IS A BIG FAT LIAR
Pro-War Propaganda from Iraqi Soldier
(Analysis and factfinding from Orwellian Times)
An email is making the rounds that sure looks like Republican propaganda:
"This is a letter from Ray Reynolds, a medic in the Iowa Army National Guard, serving in Iraq:
As I head off to Baghdad for the final weeks of my stay in Iraq, I wanted to say thanks to all of you who did not believe the media. They have done a very poor job of covering everything that has happened. I am sorry that I have not been able to visit all of you during my two week leave back home. And just so you can rest at night knowing something is happening in Iraq that is noteworthy, I thought I would pass this on to you. This is the list of things that has happened in Iraq recently:
(Please share it with your friends and compare it to the version that your paper is producing.)
* Over 400,000 kids have up-to-date immunizations.
* School attendance is up 80% from levels before the war.
* Over 1,500 schools have been renovated and rid of the weapons stored there so education can occur.
* The port of Uhm Qasar was renovated so grain can be off-loaded from ships faster.
* The country had its first 2 billion barrel export of oil in August.
* Over 4.5 million people have clean drinking water for the first time ever in Iraq.
* The country now receives 2 times the electrical power it did before the war.
* 100% of the hospitals are open and fully staffed, compared to 35% before the war.
* Elections are taking place in every major city, and city councils are in place.
* Sewer and water lines are installed in every major city.
* Over 60,000 police are patrolling the streets.
* Over 100,000 Iraqi civil defense police are securing the country.
* Over 80,000 Iraqi soldiers are patrolling the streets side by side with US soldiers.
* Over 400,000 people have telephones for the first time ever.
* Students are taught field sanitation and hand washing techniques to prevent the spread of germs.
* An interim constitution has been signed.
* Girls are allowed to attend school.
* Textbooks that don't mention Saddam are in the schools for the first time in 30 years.
Don't believe for one second that these people do not want us there. I have met many, many people from Iraq that want us there, and in a bad way. They say they will never see the freedoms we talk about but they hope their children will. We are doing a good job in Iraq and I challenge anyone, anywhere to dispute me on these facts. So If you happen to run into John Kerry, be sure to give him my email address and send him to Denison, Iowa. This soldier will set him straight. If you are like me and very disgusted with how this period of rebuilding has been portrayed, e-mail this to a friend and let them know there are good things happening.
Ray Reynolds, SFC
Iowa Army National Guard
234th Signal Battalion"
The email sure has a lot of the earmarkings of right-wing propoganda -- ignore any information which doesn't support your position, slam the media, misinform, make unfair attacks on the opposition and asking to spread the word.
This morning (Monday) I spoke with Lt. Col. Gregory O. Hapgood, the Public Affairs Officer for the Iowa National Guard. He told me that Sgt. Ray Reynolds exists. Lt. Col. Hapgood told me that he received an email this morning from Sgt. Reynolds which confirmed Sgt. Reynolds wrote the email. While we talked about the contents of the email, I did not confirm that every word in the email I received was written by Sgt. Reynolds. Nonetheless, for the most part, the email appears to be an authenticate communication from one of our soldiers.
Contrary to the information in the email I received, Sgt. Reynolds is not a medic. He does communications work. In fact, the 234th Signal Battalion's "mission is to provide wide area communications support in a theater of operations."[*] Sgt. Reynolds' civilian job is as a police officer.
Lt. Col. Hapgood told me these were Sgt. Reynolds' sources for the information in the email:
* USAID Fact Sheet
* Influential Iraqis
* The Police Chief of Baghdad
While the email appears to provide some truthful information, it is replete with misinformation. I don't have time to check each representation in the email, but here's an overview:
* Over 400,000 kids have up-to-date immunizations
This is interesting. A lot of kids have been immunized in Iraq. In fact, last year the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) "25 million doses of vaccines to Iraq to help prevent the spread of polio, tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis, measles, and tuberculosis -- considered the main killers of children in developing countries."[*] At the time, UNICEF spokesman Gordon Weiss explained that the children of Iraq would need several stages of repeated immunizations for the immunizations to be effective:
"Iraq is in a particularly delicate stage at the moment -- postwar, with a lot of the health system having broken down and a lot of the water systems having broken down, as well. So children are more than ever this year vulnerable to water-borne diseases. Usually you don't vaccinate just once, you vaccinate a number of times in order to have the vaccinations work."[*]
Here's what the Fact Sheet says:
"USAID has partnered with UNICEF, the World Health Organization (WHO) and Abt Associates to support health program in Iraq. Since the end of the war, USAID has vaccinated three million Iraqi children under the age of five, administered tetanus vaccine to more than 700,000 pregnant women, and by April 30, 2004 the USAID mission will have provided updated vaccinations to 90 percent of pregnant women and children under five years of age."
Hmmm. UNICEF said that 3 1/2 million Iraqi children were vaccinated last year. Does this mean that the vaccination program is not being pursued as much as last year? I don't know.
I also don't know where the 400,000 number came from. Last year, Iraq had approximately 4.2 million children in Iraq under the age of five. If fewer than 10% of young Iraqi children have up-to-date immunizations out of the millions who have been on an immunization schedule and are exposed, that would seem to be a serious failure.
That being said, hundred of thousands of immunized children has got to be a good thing.
* The country had its first 2 billion barrel export of oil in August.
Nonsense. First, there's nothing in the Fact Sheet about oil. Iraq is presently exporting approximately 1.9 million barrels of oil a day, or under 60 million barrels per month. And that's going to be difficult to maintain. You probably already know that insurgent attacks have been limiting the exports.[*] In August -- the supposed 2 billion barrel month -- Iraq was expecting to export fewer than 1.2 million barrels a day, about 37 million barrels for the month.[*]
* Over 4.5 million people have clean drinking water for the first time
ever in Iraq.
Here's what the Fact Sheet says:
"Iraq has 13 major wastewater facilities. Baghdad's three facilities are currently inoperable and comprise three quarters of the nation's sewage treatment capacity. Raw waste flows directly into the Tigris River. In the rest of the country, most wastewater treatment facilities were only partly operational before the conflict, and a shortage of electricity, parts, and chemicals has exacerbated the situation and only a few wastewater treatment plants are operational. Iraq's 140 major water treatment facilities operate at about 65 percent of the pre-war level of three billion liters a day."
Water does appear to be getting to a lot more people. But, apparently, at a price. A witness from Basra last month claimed:
"The [water] plant seems to be working well . . . This plant is up and going and provides water for a huge number of people. Someone is constructing a new plant to expand so that there is drinking water. I have not met anyone here yet despite the poverty who is not buying drinking water."[*]
* The country now receives 2 times the electrical power it did before the war.
Not true. According to the Fact Sheet, on March 11, 2004, power peaked at approximately 92% of "the pre-conflict generating level". ABC reports that power generation is off since last October and is averaging somewhere around pre-conflict generation.[*]
* 100% of the hospitals are open and fully staffed, compared to 35% before the war.
Not true. The Fact Sheet provides no information about this. But, the Washington Post on March 5, 2004 reported[*]:
"Health Minister Khudair Fadhil Abbas said about 90 percent of the hospitals and clinics have been brought back to the same poor conditions as before the war but that the others will take more time to reach even that low level."
Here are the first few paragraphs from the article:
"The stout woman, covered from head to toe in a black abaya, shuffled into the crowded hospital. She went straight to the emergency room and opened her robe to reveal a tiny baby wrapped in fuzzy blankets. The boy had been born prematurely, and the family was afraid he was going to die.
Uday Abdul Ridha took a quick look and shook his head. The physician put his hands on the woman's shoulders in sympathy, but his words were blunt. "I'm sorry," he said. "We cannot help you. We don't have an incubator, and even if we did, we are short on oxygen. Please try another hospital."
Scenes like this one at the Pediatric Teaching Hospital in Baghdad's Iskan neighborhood have become common in Iraq in recent months, as the health care system has been hit by a critical shortage of basic medications and equipment. Babies die of simple infections because they can't get the proper antibiotics. Surgeries are delayed because there is no oxygen. And patients in critical condition are turned away because there isn't enough equipment."
* Elections are taking place in every major city, and city councils are in place.
False. In June, 2003, US authorities put a halt to local elections. We installed mayors and administrators of our choosing.[*]
* Over 60,000 police are patrolling the streets.
I don't know how many Iraqi police are on duty, given widespread desertions.[*] But, we know how many police are in the New York Police Department -- 39,110.[*] According to the 2000 Census, NY City had a population of more than 8 million and covered an area of 320 square miles.[*] According to 1993 estimates, the population of Iraq is about 19,435,000.[*] Iraq is about the size of California, approximately 171,000 square miles.[*]
Though New York, like any other big city, can be dangerous at times, armed insurgents aren't blowing people up daily. New York has about 1 police officer for every 205 residents. Iraq -- which does have armed insurgents blowing people up daily -- has about 1 police officer for every 324 citizens.
* Over 400,000 people have telephones for the first time ever.
Not true. The Fact Sheet says that before we invaded 1.2 million Iraqis had "subscribed to landline telephone service." As of March 9, 2004, "104,680 subscribers to the Iraqi landline phone network were reconnected." Repairs have reconnected some form of telephone service between Baghdad and 20 other cities.
* Girls are allowed to attend school.
True, but not because of the invasion. Girls were allowed to attend school during Saddam's rule. Between 1997-2000 82% as many girls attended primary school as did boys. 62% as many girls attended high school as did boys, during the same period.[*]
The email is not informative, but disinformation. It's propaganda. While he did not cite any particular rule, Lt. Col. Hapgood said that members of the force are not to take a politically partisan stance in any communications they use in which they identify themselves as members of the force. Lt. Col. Hapgood, in essence, also said that it was improper for Sgt. Reynolds to attack Senator Kerry in his email.
Thanks to Andrew Lazarus for his comment at dailyKos[*] for some fact checking leads.[*]
UPDATE: Apparently, Lt. Col. Hapgood misinformed me about Sgt. Reynolds' civilian job. He's not a cop. He's a firefighter. This is how Sgt. Reynolds responds to inquiries about his message:
"I did write it and I am in Kuwait now on my way home. I wrote it while at home because I felt that too many people were exploiting the violence in Iraq to sell papers and gain votes. Sometimes the silent majority need to be awakened to respond to the bad things in our world. I am passionate about our President's decision and support this rebuilding whole heartedly...Yes legit..I am a fire fighter in Denison, Iowa and to verify, call Mike McKinnon of the Denison Iowa fire department."
Too bad that the Sergeant's passion got ahead of his control of the facts.
-------
Friday, May 14, 2004
HEADFAKE
Check out the decapitation video timestamp timeline:
13:26 - Berg states his and his father's name. Seated in plastic patio chair in orange jumpsuit. Shot taken from a side angle.
2:18 - Seated in same chair, same jumpsuit, shot taken from the front. Berg identifies his family and where he lives.
2:40 - Berg is seated quietly on the floor in front of five masked men. All the men seem very well fed and the exposed skin rather pale for a bunch of islamic terrorists on the run. The middle guy appears to be reading from two pages of prepared text, although he is continually turning the pages over and over and over, his actions making it completely impossible for anyone to read anything from those papers. The video is too grainy to tell if the guy's mouth is moving.
2:44 - The shot angle has not changed - the middle guy is still 'reading' from his papers. Wild screaming starts on the soundtrack, but none of the masked men seem to notice it, and Berg is still sitting very quietly in front of them. He has not moved at all during these four minutes.
2:45 - the middle guy draws a knife from his jacket, pushes Berg over, and the camera suddenly zooms into such a tight closeup that the screen goes black. The timestamp abruptly changes here.
13:45 - the camera pulls back to reveal Berg utterly motionless, being manhandled by the attackers. An assailant with a black mask draws the knife across the throat, while an assailant with a white mask sits on the motionless body. The soundtrack has several people shouting "allahu akbar", but the opinion of native Iraqi speakers who have heard it is that the accents are NOT Iraqui, more likely arabic or arabic as second language.
13:46 - screaming escalates on the soundtrack yet the windpipe has quite clearly already been completely severed by the knife-weilding assailant with the Black Mask, the head being connected only by the spine. No screaming is physically possible at that point, yet it mysteriously continues, much the way it started. White Mask assailant still stitting on the motionless body, doing nothing.
13:47 - There is another in/out camera zoom and suddenly it is the White Mask assailant, not the Black Mask one, that steps away from the body, knife in hand, holding the head aloft. No blood anywhere. At this point, the timestamp and the camera angle abruptly change again.
2:41 - Berg's head held aloft by White Mask, different angle, no blood. Curious - what day is this? As previously noted, during the 2:40 through 2:44 period, Berg could be seen alive, seated quietly in front of his captors as they 'read' their statement.
13:48 - timestamp and shot abruptly change again. Now we get shot of head resting on top of the prone body, with a zoom on the body's severed neck. Everything is very clean, completely inconsistent with the forensic reality of decapitation.
This tape is, to put a very black humor spin on it, a 'headfake'.Friday, May 14, 2004
WHO'S YOUR CANDYMAN
CIA's Anti-Drug Message for Kids
By Martin A. Lee
I don't usually pay much attention to press announcements from the Central Intelligence Agency, but when an e-mail arrived with the news that the CIA had posted a Web site for children, I was curious.
"In adding these pages, the CIA joins other federal agencies in projecting an anti-drug message to America's youth," the press release disclosed. "The Web site puts drugs in the perspective of the world of intelligence gathering. Children see what roles the CIA plays in the war on drugs. ..."
I couldn't resist paying a cyber visit to the CIA's redoubtable Web offering for inquiring young minds.
On the agency's home page for kids, you can meet Bogart and six of his barking buddies in the CIA's canine corps. Or you can play "break the code" or "try a disguise" or an interactive quiz-game about geography. There's a lot of stuff to choose from.
I was immediately drawn toward a feathery, winged cartoon character on the lower left named Harry Recon. He's a CIA aerial reconnaissance pigeon who chirps, "Fly high on intelligence, not drugs ..."
So I click on little Harry and voilΰ! I'm reading a little pep talk for wanna-be spies. "In order to do our jobs, we have to be in the best mental shape and that includes being drug free."
Another mouse click and I'm "on the trail of illicit drugs" with the CIA's Crime and Narcotics Center, which never has "a slow day because the war on drugs and crime goes on around the clock and never takes a holiday." The moms and dads who work in this dedicated American intelligence unit are said to "play a key role in helping to destroy many drug and organized crime organizations."
For a quick diversion, I take a peek at the CIA's online Exhibit Center, which features a dozen or so spy artifacts, including "drop dead spikes" and an Air America baseball cap. That's when I figured I had enough.
I mean, Air America, come on. Is that supposed to be an inside joke or something?
Drug trafficking has long been a specialty of Air America, the CIA proprietary airline that transported weapons to anticommunist warlords in Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle during the Vietnam war, and often returned with consignments of opium poppies.
The role of Air America and other U.S. intelligence assets in fostering the illicit narcotics trade has been well-documented in The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade by University of Wisconsin professor Alfred W. McCoy.
New York Times foreign affairs columnist C.L. Sulzberger, no stranger to intelligence circles, was indignant when Allen Ginsberg, the beat poet, accused the CIA of trafficking in heroin. But Sulzberger later acknowledged his mistake in a letter to Ginsberg dated April 1, 1978.
"I fear I owe you an apology," he told Ginsberg. "I have been reading a succession of pieces about CIA involvement in the dope trade in Southeast Asia, and I remember when you first suggested I look into this I thought you were full of beans. Indeed you were right."
The war on drugs has always served a political agenda. During the Red Scare in the early 1950s, Sen. Joseph McCarthy blamed Red China for peddling heroin to weaken the moral fiber of the United States and the Free World.
Ironically, it appears that McCarthy himself developed a nasty little addiction to morphine while leading the anticommunist crusade. But his dope wasn't coming from Maoist China. According to Ladies Home Journal, that bastion of left-wing political correctness, McCarthy was getting his daily morphine script from Harry Anslinger, longtime head of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics.
Mea Culpas?
I searched in vain on the CIA's Web site for any mea culpa regarding the agency's support for counterinsurgency campaigns waged by various drug-smuggling "freedom fighters."
There was no mention of massive amounts of still unaccounted-for U.S. aid to Pakistani military officers and Afghan mujahadeen rebel leaders, which helped grease a major arms-for-heroin pipeline in Southwest Asia during the 1980s. Much of the dirty cash was laundered through institutions such as the scandal-ridden Bank of Credit and Commerce International, which functioned, not coincidentally, as a conduit for CIA operations in the region.
At the same time in Central America, Lt. Col. Oliver North and high-level CIA personnel aided and abetted big-time cocaine smugglers who ferried weapons to the Nicaraguan contras fighting the Sandinista government.
North and three other U.S. officials were banned for life from Costa Rica after that country's government came up with hard proof of the Reagan administration's role in secretly facilitating the flow of narcotics all this while U.S. officials were preaching about the war on drugs.
A glutton for hypocrisy, I abandoned the realm of kiddie propaganda and went straight to the CIA's home page for adults. I clicked on "frequently asked questions," where the sordid history of CIA-tolerated cocaine smuggling is summarily dismissed: "The CIA Inspector General found no evidence to substantiate charges that the CIA or its employees conspired with or assisted Contra-related organizations or individuals in drug trafficking to raise funds for the contras or for any other purpose."
In fact, the fine print of the October 1998 inspector general's report tells a very different story, as journalist Robert Parry points out in his trenchant coverage of the Contra-cocaine connection.
"CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz confirmed long-standing allegations of cocaine trafficking by Contra forces," Parry says. "Hitz identified more than 50 contras and contra-related entities implicated in the drug trade."
Parry notes that the Hitz report detailed how the Reagan administration "protected these drug operations and frustrated federal investigations which threatened to expose these crimes in the mid 1980s."
Acknowledging that the CIA "withheld evidence of contra crimes from the Justice Department, the Congress, and even the CIA's own analytical division," the inspector general emphasized that the contra war took precedence over law enforcement. [See Robert Parry's Lost History for details.]
If recent events in Latin America are any indication, conniving with drug traffickers is a difficult habit for the CIA to kick.
Consider, for example, the case of Vladimiro Montesinos, a shadowy figure rarely seen in public, who for many years was the CIA's principal point man in Peru and a lynchpin in the U.S. government's $17.7 billion war on drugs. Trained as a cadet at the School of the Americas, a notorious breeding ground for assassins, Montesinos became head of the Peruvian intelligence service, SIN, in the early 1990s.
During the decade that his leadership of Peru's spy agency won U.S. praise and support, Montesinos built a billion-dollar criminal empire based on drug trafficking, arms dealing, and judicial and political corruption, according to Peruvian parliamentary investigators.
Several recently captured cocaine barons claimed they had been paying Montesinos a monthly fee to let them operate. "The groups that reached an agreement with Montesinos's men could be sure that their competitors would be eliminated," explained Roger Rumrill, an expert on the Peruvian drug trade.
What's more, according to Peruvian prosecutors, Montesinos used drug profits to finance death squads, which were responsible for torture, extra-judicial executions, and the disappearance of 4,000 government opponents. By choosing Montesinos as its main ally in Peru, the CIA turned a blind eye to human rights abuses as well as his involvement in the drug trade.
Eventually, his CIA handlers wised up and realized that Montesinos had been taking them for a ride. They cut him loose in August 2000 after disclosures that the Peruvian spymaster had betrayed his patrons in Langley, Virginia, by selling arms to leftist guerrillas in neighboring Colombia.
Montesinos is currently a fugitive from justice, and the so-called war on drugs continues to provide a thinly veiled cover for U.S.-backed counterinsurgency in Colombia.
Washington's fraudulent anti-narcotics agenda is underscored by the CIA's unwillingness to target far-right paramilitary groups responsible for anti-guerrilla attacks and civilian massacres, even though these same paramilitary groups are directly involved in cocaine production and trafficking.
If the Montesinos affair and the Colombia fiasco tell us anything, it's that U.S. intelligence officials will dutifully ignore evidence of dope smuggling when they deem it expeditious to do so.
Harry Recon, the spy pigeon, may twitter about flying high on intelligence, not on drugs, but there's no escaping the grim fact that large amounts of cocaine entering the United States are collateral damage generated by CIA activities in Latin America.
"Drugs and covert operations go together like fleas on a dog," explained David MacMichael, a former CIA analyst. Scratch the surface of the narcotics trade and once again it seems that certain drug pushers are OK by the CIA as long as they keep snorting the anticommunist line.
Thursday, May 13, 2004
BURT GUMMER IS MAH HERO
It's guys like Burt Gummer that are gonna make sure that when the world actually does go to hell in a handbasket, that the species does not perish altogether... From the Sci-Fi Channel website's character page for Burt Gummer:
Burt Gummer: "Doing what I can with what I've got."
(Played by Michael Gross)
Look up "prepared" in the dictionary that's Burt Gummer. He loves his independence and admires self-reliance above all else. For him Perfection Valley is the last, best hope for those who embody the true pioneer American spirit. His distrust of the government's intentions and his own discomfort with society at-large sent him into the desert wastelands (the home of his great-grandfather, silver-mine mogul Hiram Gummer) more than a dozen years ago. Now, divorced from his long-suffering, gun-toting wife Heather and deprived of her mitigating influence he relies on his neighbors in Perfection to keep his natural paranoia within limits.
Like all true obsessives, Burt gets so consumed by his particular project of the moment (monitoring his Graboid sensors, scanning the desert surroundings with his periscope, midnight testing of the latest modification to his night-vision goggles) that he loses sight of how humorous he is to others. When his (now-deceased) neighbor Miguel suggested it was time Burt stop worrying about Graboids appearing in Perfection by reminding him, "It's been, what? Eleven years?", Burt simply responded, "No reason to lower your guard."
Burt has a penchant for spouting that memorable line of dialogue that crystallizes the moment:
"Broke into the wrong goddamn rec room, didn't you?!"
"I feel I was denied critical, need-to-know information."
"And that's why we're at the top of the food chain!"
He is not actually a nut. He is, however, a gun nut. "You have nothing to fear but fear itself and running out of ammo," he has said. He can talk endlessly, and with first-hand experience, about any firearm from a CO2 paintball rifle to a .50 caliber anti-aircraft naval deck gun (a very effective tool for Shrieker eradication.) A hard-and-fast adherent to rules and regulations (his own, not the government's), Burt will never point a firearm at any human. Never. He's fanatical about gun safety.
After selflessly sacrificing his hilltop bunker home during the "AssBlaster incursion" a couple years ago, Burt has doggedly soldiered-on in his houseless basement (now covered with a Quonset hut, scrounged piece-by-piece from a nearby abandoned government facility.) It contains his indoor shooting range, safe room, emergency escape tunnel and (in)famous gun wall. He has replenished only about 20 percent of his weapons. Painted gun silhouettes on the wall indicate the ones he hasn't yet replaced.
The bunker is Burt's command center, from which he monitors the Valley on his laptop, via his infrared satellite downlink; checks for Graboid movement via seismo readings from his network of strategically placed geophones; and watches lonely hours of war documentaries on television. ("If you ask me, Patton, not Eisenhower, should've been President," he grouses.)
He lives by his survivalist motto: "Doing what I can with what I've got." Often, it's Burt's uncanny talent for turning the most unlikely things into effective weapons that gets his neighbors out of a tough spot.
Underneath his gruff bluster, Burt really is a sensitive guy. Perhaps one day soon he will be ready to take faltering steps in answer to the call of his lonely heart. A secret he'd never want uncovered is his regular presence in survivalist chat rooms in search of someone who could give him what only his beloved ex-wife Heather could: patient support and an ability to load an HK-91 like nobody's business.
Jodi Chang takes Burt in stride and is even fond of him. Tyler Reed rolls with Burt's eccentricities. Rosalita Sanchez simply finds his overkill and paranoia odd. And ex-hippy Nancy Sterngood butts heads with Burt on almost every issue; she pokes holes in his arguments and tries to make him see reason. But for Burt there's always been "a little too much Summer of Love in that woman."Thursday, May 13, 2004
BIGGER, BETTER, FASTER, STRONGER... SORT OF....
U.S. Missile Shield Won't Work: Scientist Group
By Jim Wolf
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The multibillion-dollar U.S. ballistic missile shield due to start operating by Sept. 30 appears incapable of shooting down any incoming warheads, an independent scientists' group said on Thursday.
A technical analysis found "no basis for believing the system will have any capability to defend against a real attack," the Union of Concerned Scientists said in a 76-page report titled Technical Realities.
The Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency rejected the report.
"It will provide a defense against incoming missiles for the first time in this country's history," said Richard Lehner, an agency spokesman.
The Pentagon's initial deployment involves 10 interceptor missiles in silos in Alaska and California. It is designed to protect all 50 U.S. states against a limited strike from North Korean missiles that could be tipped with nuclear, chemical or biological warheads.
Boeing Co. is assembling the shield, which would use the interceptors to launch "kill vehicles" meant to pulverize targets in the mid-course of their flight paths, outside the Earth's atmosphere. Using infrared sensors, the vehicles would search the chill of space for the warheads. So far, the interceptors have scored hits five times in eight highly controlled tests.
The Missile Defense Agency "appears to be picking numbers out of thin air," the report said of past Pentagon assertions of a high probability of shooting down targets.
"There is no data to justify such an assumption," added the scientists' group, which is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Its findings dovetailed with an audit last month by Congress's General Accounting Office that said the system's effectiveness would be "largely unproven" when the initial capability goes on alert.
DANGEROUS POLICY IMPLICATIONS
Even unsophisticated countermeasures that could be mounted by countries such as North Korea remain an unsolved problem for midcourse defenses against long-range missiles, the scientists' report said.
Balloon decoys could be given the same infrared signature as a warhead by painting their surfaces, it said. The project could also be confused by sealing the warhead in a large balloon so the kill vehicle could not determine its exact location or tethering several balloons to it.
Overstating the defensive capabilities of the ground-based defense is dangerous, the group said.
"If the president is told that the system could reliably defend against a North Korean ballistic missile attack, he might be willing to accept more risks when making policy and military decisions," the report said.
"All indications are that it would not work," added Lisbeth Gronlund, a physicist who is a co-author of the report and co-director of the group's global security program.
"And the administration's statements that it will be highly effective are irresponsible nonsense," she added in a telephone interview.
Overall, the Pentagon estimates it will need $53 billion in the next five years to develop, field and upgrade a multilayered shield also involving systems based at sea, aboard modified Boeing 747 aircraft and in space.
Thursday, May 13, 2004
HOW CAN AMERICA GET OUT OF IRAQ?
As the situation in Iraq goes from bad to worse, Noam Chomsky, Jonathan Schell, Howard Zinn, William Polk, Sherle R Schwenninger, Phyllis Bennis, Mansour Farhang, Stephen F Cohen, John Brady Kiesling, Anne-Marie Slaughter and Ray Close outline possible exit strategies for the US
(This article was first published in The Nation Copyright © 2004 The Nation)
Jonathan Schell : Let the Iraqis build their own future
In the debate over the Iraq war, a new fragment of conventional wisdom has fixed itself in the minds of mainstream politicians and commentators: whether or not it was right to go to war, we are told on all sides, the US must now succeed in achieving its aims.
In the words of John Kerry, "Americans differ about whether and how we should have gone to war, but it would be unthinkable now for us to retreat in disarray and leave behind a society deep in strife and dominated by radicals."
Or, as Senator Richard Lugar has said, "We are in Iraq and so we're going to have to bring stability." Or, as Senator Joseph Biden, among so many others, has said, as if to put an end to all discussion, "Failure is not an option."
The argument is an irritating one for those of us who opposed the war, suggesting, as it does, that we must now sign up for the project ("stay the course") because the very mistake we warned against was made.
But the problems are more serious than annoyance. Of course, no one wants to see anarchy or repression in Iraq or any other country. But what can it mean to say that failure is not an option? Has the decision to go to war exhausted our powers of thought and will? Must we surrender now to fate?
"Failure" is, in truth, never an "option". The exercise of an option is a voluntary act; but failure is forced upon you by events. It is what happens when your options run out. To rule out failure is not a policy but a wish - and a wish, indeed, for omnipotence.
Yet no one, not even the world's sole superpower, is omnipotent. To imagine otherwise is to set yourself up for a fall even bigger than the failure you imagine you are ruling out.
And so decisions must still be made. It's true that we opponents of the war cannot simply say (as we might like to do), "Please roll history back to March of 2003 and make your disastrous war unhappen."
It's also true that when the US overthrew the Iraqi government it took on new responsibilities. The strongest argument for staying in Iraq is that the US, having taken over the country, owes its people a better future. But acknowledgement of such a responsibility is only the beginning, not the end, of an argument.
To meet a responsibility to someone, you must have something on offer that they want. Certainly, the people of Iraq want electricity, running water and other material assistance. The US should supply it.
Perhaps - it's hard to find out - they also want democracy. But democracy cannot be shipped to Iraq on a tanker. It is a home-grown construct that must flow from the will of the people involved. The expression of that will is, in fact, what democracy is.
But today the US seeks to impose a government on Iraq in the teeth of an increasingly powerful popular opposition. The result of this policy can be seen in the shameful attacks from the air on the cordoned-off city of Falluja, which have caused hundreds of casualties.
The more the US tries to force what it insists on calling democracy on Iraq, the more the people of Iraq will hate the US and even, perhaps, the name of democracy. There is no definition of an obligation that includes attacking the supposed beneficiaries' cities with F-16s and AC-130 gunships.
President Bush said recently of the Iraqis, "It's going to take a while for them to understand what freedom is all about." Hachim Hassani, a representative of the Iraqi Islamic party, a leading Sunni Muslim group on the so-called governing council, might have been answering him when he commented to the Los Angeles Times, "The Iraqi people now equate democracy with bloodshed."
Under these circumstances, staying the course cannot benefit Iraq. On the contrary, each additional day that American troops continue to fight in Iraq can only compound the eventual price of the original mistake. More lives, American and Iraqi, will be lost; the society will be disorganised and pulverised; and any chances for a better future will be reduced, not fostered.
There are still many things the US can do for the people of Iraq. Continued economic assistance is one. Another is to help international organisations assist (but only to whatever degree is wanted by the local people) in the transition to a new political order.
But all combat operations should cease immediately, and then, on a fixed and announced timetable, the American forces should withdraw from the country. In short, the US, working with others, should give Iraqis their best chance to succeed in their own efforts to create their own future.
According to the most recent Times/CBS poll, the public, by a margin of 48% to 46%, has decided, with no encouragement from either of the two major-party presidential candidates or from most media commentators, that the war was a mistake.
46% have decided that the American troops should be withdrawn. They are right. The United States should never have invaded Iraq. Now it should leave.
· Jonathan Schell is a Harold Willens Peace Fellow at the Nation Institute, and the author of The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People (Metropolitan).
Noam Chomsky: Transfer real sovereignty
Occupying armies have responsibilities, not rights. Their primary responsibility is to withdraw as quickly and expeditiously as possible, in a manner determined by the occupied population.
It follows that the orders issued by Proconsul Bremer are illegitimate and should be rescinded, including those designed to place the economy effectively in the hands of western (mostly US) banks and multinational companies, and the 15% flat tax which, apart from its injustice, bars the way to desperately needed social spending and reconstruction.
Without economic sovereignty, prospects for healthy development are slight, and political independence verges on formality.
It also follows that Washington should end the machinations to ensure its long-term military presence and control of Iraqi security forces in defiance of the will of Iraqis, who call for Iraqis to control security, according to western-run polls.
These record only minuscule support for the occupying military forces and their civil counterparts (the CPA) or the US-appointed governing council.
With a decision, however reluctant, to transfer authentic sovereignty to Iraqis - not just the traditional facade for Great Power domination - there will be no justification for the huge diplomatic mission, apparently the world's largest, announced by the occupiers.
Such steps entail abandonment of plans to establish the first secure military bases in a client state at the heart of the world's major energy reserves - a powerful lever of world control, as has been understood for 60 years, a means to subordinate the region more fully to US interests and the prime motive for the invasion, according to western polls in Baghdad.
Some of those polled agreed with articulate western opinion that the goal was to establish democracy (1%) or to help Iraqis (5%).
A large majority of Americans believe that the UN, not the US, should take the lead in working with Iraqis to transfer authentic sovereignty as well as in economic reconstruction and maintaining civic order.
That is a sensible stand, if Iraqis agree, as seems likely, though the general assembly, less directly controlled by the invaders, is preferable to the security council as the responsible transitional authority.
Reconstruction should be in the hands of Iraqis, not delayed as a means of controlling them, as Washington has indicated.
Reparations - not just aid - should be provided by those responsible for devastating Iraqi civilian society by cruel sanctions and military actions, and - together with other criminal states - for supporting Saddam Hussein through his worst atrocities and beyond. That is the minimum that honesty requires.
· Noam Chomsky's most recent books are: A New Generation Draws the Line; New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind; 9-11; Understanding Power; On Nature and Language; The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?; Chomsky on Democracy and Education; Middle East Illusions; and Hegemony or Survival.
Howard Zinn: Let the UN broker power
Any "practical" approach to the situation in Iraq, any prescription for what to do now, must start with the understanding that the present US military occupation is morally unacceptable.
Amnesty International, a year after the invasion, reported: "Scores of unarmed people have been killed due to excessive or unnecessary use of lethal force by coalition forces during public demonstrations, at checkpoints and in house raids.
"Thousands of people have been detained [estimates range from 8,500 to 15,000, often under harsh conditions] and subjected to prolonged and often unacknowledged detention. Many have been tortured or ill treated, and some have died in custody."
The prospect, if the occupation continues, whether by the US or by an international force (as John Kerry seems to be proposing) is of continued suffering and death for both Iraqis and Americans.
The history of military occupations of third world countries is that they bring neither democracy nor security. The laments that "we mustn't cut and run", "we must stay the course", our "reputation" will be imperilled etc are exactly what we heard when, at the start of the Vietnam escalation, some of us called for immediate withdrawal. The result of staying the course was 58,000 Americans and several million Vietnamese dead.
The only rational argument for continuing on the present course is that things will be worse if we leave. In Vietnam, they promised a bloodbath if we left. That did not happen.
It was said that if we did not drop the bomb on Hiroshima, we would have to invade Japan and huge casualties would follow. We know now, and knew then, that this was not true.
The truth is, no one knows what will happen if the US withdraws. We face a choice between the certainty of mayhem if we stay and the uncertainty of what will follow if we leave.
What would be a reasonably good scenario to accompany our departure? The UN should arrange, as US forces leave, for an international group of peacekeepers and negotiators from the Arab countries to bring together Shia, Sunnis and Kurds and work out a solution for self governance that would give all three groups a share in political power.
Simultaneously, the UN should arrange for shipments of food and medicine, from the United States and other countries, as well as a corps of engineers to begin the reconstruction of the country.
The one thing to be avoided is for the US, which destroyed Iraq and caused perhaps 1 million deaths through two invasions and 10 years of sanctions, to play any leading role in the future of that country. In that case, terrorism would surely flourish.
It is for the US to withdraw from Iraq. It is for the international community, particularly the Arab world, to try to reconstruct a nation at peace. That gives the Iraqi people a chance. Continued US occupation gives them no chance.
· Howard Zinn is the author of Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal and A People's History of the United States.
William R Polk: UN trusteeship is the best answer
Lakhdar Brahimi's proposals are interesting, perhaps even hopeful, but they pose almost as many problems as they address.
The Shia are worried that he is attempting to undercut their claims on power and, after the siege of Falluja, the Sunnis will probably worry that he is, inadvertently or not, acting as a cover for American attempts to hang on to control. They have reason to worry.
The world press has reported that very little real authority will be handed over to the Iraqis or the UN. If the UN is to be of any value in pacifying Iraq, it cannot simply be used by the US as a fig leaf. It must show Iraqis that it is truly independent, and so a worthwhile step forward for them.
For all that, some form of UN trusteeship appears to be the best answer now available. It seems to me that the best form of trusteeship is minimal, not much more than attempting to keep order. Anything more will certainly raise fears in Iraq that outsiders - the United States or the UN - really intend to stay.
That will create the only unity there now is in Iraq - hostility to foreigners.
· William R Polk was responsible for planning Middle Eastern policy at the State Department between 1961 and 1965 and then became a University of Chicago professor of history. His books include The United States and the Arab World and The Elusive Peace.
Sherle R Schwenninger: Be bold
The most commonly proposed Democratic alternative to the administration's policy in Iraq - turning over political authority to the UN and getting more countries to provide more troops and money - is well intentioned but lacks seriousness, for two reasons.
First, it is not realistic to expect the UN to assume such responsibility without more resources, without assurances from the US about security and without some control over the conduct of US military strategy.
Likewise, it is not realistic to expect countries such as Egypt, France, Germany, Russia, India and Pakistan, which opposed the war, to now commit substantial troops to Iraq in the middle of a major insurgency, especially without a larger shift in US policy.
For both domestic and international reasons, these countries do not want to be seen as instruments of what they consider to be a misguided US policy toward the Middle East in general.
Second, the Democratic alternative does not go far enough to change the political dynamic from one of occupation (albeit a more legitimate one) to one of Iraqi sovereignty.
After all, the UN itself has been a target of the insurgents, and there now seems to be a general mistrust and impatience with any foreign control over Iraq's future. Any proposal to stabilise Iraq must restore a sense of ownership to the Iraqi people as well as real power.
For these reasons, we need to think in bolder terms about what we can offer to the international community and to the Iraqi people in order to gain their active support for a plan that would transfer authority to the UN and to an Iraqi interim government.
There would need to be three elements to this grand bargain. The first would be the promise of substantial resources to the UN, not only for this Iraqi state-building effort but also for comparable efforts in the future, including resources that would increase the capacity of the UN to provide more of its own security in the future for such missions.
Unless the US can demonstrate to the other major stakeholders in the UN that its attitude toward the organisation has changed, it is unlikely to elicit more than a token response.
The second element of the grand bargain must be the internationalisation of other elements of its Middle East policy that affect the political dynamic inside Iraq. It makes no sense whatsoever for other countries to commit money and security forces to Iraq as long as the US continues to condone Israeli policy toward the Palestinians and pursues a hostile policy toward Iran and Syria.
At a minimum, this means a shift in American policy toward non-belligerence toward Iran and Syria; a commitment to a clear timetable for a Palestinian state; and a commitment to a true no-weapons-of-mass-destruction zone in the Middle East, which means a commitment to confront Israel over its possession of nuclear weapons.
The third and final element would need to be a quick turnover of true sovereignty to the Iraqi people, however ill prepared they may now seem for this task.
As a minimum, any interim government must have control over its own security forces and economy. To demonstrate that Iraqis own their own economy, we might consider the idea proposed by Steven Clemons of the New America Foundation, which would give every Iraqi an ownership stake in the country's oil wealth.
If, for example, on June 30 every Iraqi received $300 as a distribution of future profits from the nation's oil wealth, it might change dramatically the political dynamics within Iraq, ensuring a more peaceful transition to full statehood.
But unless we are willing to think more boldly along these lines, the wiser course may be for the US to withdraw its troops and disengage more generally from the region.
This would allow the Iraqi people to sort out their future with the understanding that there may be a long period of instability, but at least the US would not be a contributing factor to that instability and no longer a target of Arab anger and frustration.
· Sherle R Schwenninger is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute at the New School University.
Phyllis Bennis: Admit you were wrong and help the UN
One year after President Bush's announcement of the end of "major combat operations" in Iraq, Washington's drive to empire faces new and serious challenges.
One year to the day after US military forces famously pulled down the statue of Saddam Hussein, the front page of the Washington Post featured a photograph of a US soldier pulling down another potent symbol - a poster of Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr - from a pillar in the same Baghdad square.
The US-led occupation of Iraq is failing, and ending the Bush administration's disaster can only begin with ending that occupation - not with a nominal "transfer of power" that leaves 130,000 US troops still occupying Iraq but with an actual end to the occupation.
Unlike in Vietnam, the constant barrage of "we're-building-democracy-in-Iraq" rhetoric may have made it impossible for Bush to "declare victory and get out".
Instead, ending the occupation will likely mean admitting that the war was wrong, that "staying the course" is only making things worse and that hundreds of young American and coalition soldiers, as well as thousands of Iraqi civilians, are paying an unacceptable price.
The end of the US occupation will not alone, however, mean the end to Iraq's crisis. Devastated after years of crippling economic sanctions, internal repression and US assaults that destroyed its governing capacity, Iraq will require significant international help.
But only after full US withdrawal can serious thought be given to how the global community might - indeed must - support Iraq's post-occupation efforts to reclaim its sovereignty.
The withdrawal and the dissolution of the US-imposed "governing council" will make possible the entry into Iraq of an international team led by the UN and backed by the key regional alliances - the Arab League and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference - to provide protection and support.
Accountable to whatever Iraqi authority emerges after the occupation ends, that team should be made up primarily of technocratic experts - in elections, in development, in economic planning, etc. Its component of military self-defence and security should be secondary.
Most Iraqi military resistance is aimed directly at the occupation. An international assistance mission that does not control Iraqi territory, does not impose laws on Iraq, does not hand Iraqi assets over to corporate profiteers and does not claim Iraq's oil as its own will almost certainly be welcomed by a majority of the Iraqi people.
UN credibility will be severely diminished if, with or without a new security council resolution, the organisation sends personnel, funds or other assistance to Iraq to bolster, legitimise or "internationalise" the US occupation.
Only after the US occupation ends will UN involvement in Iraq reflect its international legitimacy.
· Phyllis Bennis is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and the author of Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today's UN.
Mansour Farhang: Normalise relations with Iran
Iran and the US both have competing ambitions and common concerns in Iraq. Tehran favours popular sovereignty, political equality and majority rule in Iraq - the exact opposite of its own governing system. This emanates from the fact that the Shia of Iraq, the Iranian theocrats' co-religionists, constitute 60% of Iraq's population.
The Bush administration, in contrast, advocates democracy in abstraction but fears majority rule in practice.
What favours Iran in this competition is the fact that only the Shia clerics possess the capacity for mass mobilisation in Iraq.
During the terror of Saddam Hussein, more than 200,000 Iraqi Shia took refuge in Iran. Today, most Iraqi Shia are grateful to Iranians and perceive them as allies.
Washington is aware of this sentiment and wants Iran to use its influence to contain the radical anti-occupation elements in the Shia communities.
Iran's fears are another story. The Iranian authorities, like most people in the region, are convinced that Ariel Sharon and his neoconservative allies in Washington want to ignite a civil war between the Shia and Sunnis of Iraq, with the Kurds remaining on the sidelines.
Such a war would likely engulf almost the entire region. Iran would back the Shia, while Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the Arab states of the Persian Gulf would aid the Sunnis.
Al-Qaida and the pro-Saddam Ba'athists, like the Likud government in Israel, view such a conflict as an advantage for their competing objectives.
Iran's reigning mullahs are convinced that the US has nothing to gain and much to lose from such a conflict, but they believe the Bush administration can be manipulated to pave the way for it.
The key to preventing this calamity is for the US and Iran to start negotiating their differences and support a UN initiative to establish a federal system consisting of autonomous entities for the Shia, the Kurds and the Sunnis.
Iran's theocrats have used their confrontation with the US to create crises for the purpose of justifying cruel treatment of their democratic opponents.
Normalisation of US-Iran relations can contribute to both the goal of peace in Iraq and the cause of democracy in Iran.
· Mansour Farhang is professor of politics at Bennington College
Stephen F Cohen: Act honourably
For the sake of American lives, values and real security, as well as peace and stability in the increasingly explosive Middle East, the US must find a way to withdraw its military forces from Iraq as soon as possible; and do so with some vestige of, yes, honour - not for the bogus reason of international "credibility" but to prevent a malignant who-lost-Iraq politics in our own country.
The only near-term and honourable way out is by linking a firm US commitment to a phased military withdrawal to an Iraqi popular election for a representative national assembly that would itself - not the occupation authorities or its appointees - choose an interim government, adopt a constitution for the country and then schedule elections for the new permanent institutions of government.
For Iraqis, only such a directly elected assembly can have legitimacy and thus the "sovereignty" that the Bush administration is desperately trying to manufacture and "transfer".
Do not mistake this approach for the administration's afterthought of "building democracy in Iraq", which would mean resolving all that tormented country's internal conflicts, and for which America utterly lacks both the power and wisdom even to attempt.
Rather, it means giving the Iraqis an opportunity to do it themselves. (Whether or not they can is their destiny, not ours.)
Considering the devastating consequences of an unnecessary American war, providing such a democratic opportunity is both the least and most we can now do. And having done so, the US can declare, paraphrasing sage but ignored advice given during the Vietnam war, "Mission accomplished. We're going home."
For this democratic exit to work, the US must, as the otherwise vacuous refrain goes, "stay the course", but a course based on four promises that must be kept.
American-led occupation authorities will permit free and fair elections to the national assembly, within the next six to nine months, under the auspices of the UN or another international body. They will accept the electoral outcome, even if it is an anti-American majority. Meanwhile, the US will prepare Iraqi security forces but begin its military withdrawal once the interim government is functioning. And Washington will continue to provide funds for the reconstruction of Iraq, as long as the new Iraqi authorities generally abide by their democratic origins.
We must flatly dismiss American proponents of a permanent US garrison in Iraq - for the sake of oil, Israel, some "anti-totalitarian" crusade or empire.
But there still may be three objections to this relatively quick and honourable exit strategy. One is that the American occupation should not end until there is stability in Iraq because the consequences will be chaos and violence.
But this admonition ignores the historical lessons of occupations elsewhere and of the current situation in Iraq. There can be no stability until foreign occupation ends, as is clear from the chaos and violence unfolding today.
The second objection is that anti-American "extremists" will disrupt the election for the national assembly. But if such Iraqis really want America gone, they will support an electoral process that leads to a US withdrawal.
The third objection may be heartfelt: we did not go to war, and lose lives, to risk the advent of another anti-American regime in Baghdad. Yes, the Bush administration went to war to eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, and when there were none, it said the war was really about democracy.
Now, this afterthought, whatever the political (or economic) outcome, is the only way out and our last chance to be remembered as liberators. The alternative is indefinite, colonial-style rule; growing and increasingly violent Iraqi resistance; an ever more brutal and self-corrupting American occupation; and, eventually, an even more anti-American regime that will come to power by means other than the ballot box.
· Stephen F Cohen is a professor of Russian studies and history at New York University. His latest book is Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia.
John Brady Kiesling: Swallow your pride
President Bush promised the Iraqi people and the international community that our military victory would make Iraq a peaceful, democratic state, a model for its neighbours and a bastion against terrorism.
If this was our war aim, our victory did not achieve it. The resistance movement has pinned down our soldiers and contractors as enemy occupiers.
If our troops pull out, there will be civil war among a dozen rival factions. If our troops stay, in redoubled numbers to suppress the violence, their hulking presence will doom each future Iraqi government to illegitimacy and failure. So let us consider the alternatives to victory.
In the end, a fractured Iraq can be held together only by a man wrapped, like George Washington or Ho Chi Minh, in the legitimacy that derives from successful armed struggle.
We should note the ease with which a scruffy young cleric united Sunnis and Shia against the US presence. A victorious Secretary Rumsfeld could not impose Ahmad Chalabi. However, a retreating US military can designate Iraq's liberator.
We must select the competent Iraqi patriot to whom we yield ground while bleeding his competitors. There will be casualties and disorder, no matter how brilliantly we orchestrate our withdrawal. But the overwhelming majority of Iraqis will rally around any man who claims to drive us out, and elections would validate his relatively bloodless victory.
The man on a white horse can bring the UN back as invited guests rather than as our despised surrogates. His police will enforce the law when ours cannot. His debts will be forgiven when ours would not.
America must swallow its resentment and keep a measure of control by doling out the money to keep the Iraqi state functional. $10bn (£5.6bn) a year will buy more counter-terrorism cooperation than a military occupation that costs five times as much. And we will let the Iraqis do the work.
The most virtuous Halliburton employee is 10 times more expensive than the most corrupt Iraqi. Democracy and human rights may take a generation, but our defeat will convince a resentful and fatalistic Middle East that change is possible.
The Kurds, admittedly, will resist any weakness in their US ally. Our parting gift to them will be the southern border for an autonomous Kurdish entity. The price will be US cooperation with Turkey to extort a semblance of respect for the Iraqi central government and the rights of Arab and Turkmen minorities.
We were defeated once, in Vietnam, and the dominoes did not fall. We remained the leader of the free world, sadder but wiser.
The ignorance and megalomania that brought us into Iraq are far more dangerous to US security and prosperity than would be the symbolic military defeat that gets us out.
· John Brady Kiesling is a career diplomat who served in US embassies in Tel Aviv, Casablanca, Athens and Yerevan. In February 2003, he resigned from the Foreign Service in protest against the Bush administration's foreign policy
Anne-Marie Slaughter: Show you are serious about democracy and human rights
The US faces two critical issues in Iraq. First is the necessity of genuinely engaging the international community in stabilising the security situation, supporting the new Iraqi government after June 30 and rebuilding the country's infrastructure and economy.
Crucially, this does not mean simply brokering a face-saving resolution and handing off to the UN only to blame the UN later when Iraq slides into chaos or worse.
On the contrary, it means clearly defining a UN mandate, to be supported by Nato and other regional organisations, and then committing the human and material resources necessary to carry out that mandate. Handing off to the UN without such support is an abdication of responsibility and an admission of failure.
Second is accepting that a genuine democracy in Iraq will bring a genuine majority to power. The way to protect minorities in a democratic Iraq is through federalism provisions and explicit guarantees of minority rights. In principle, even a Shia theocracy can abide by such guarantees.
The US has proclaimed the principles of democracy and self determination and must now abide by whatever results are consistent with the protection of basic international human rights.
· Anne-Marie Slaughter is the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.
Ray Close: Change the regime in Washington
The first thing we have to adjust to is the reality that nationalism is the most significant force in Iraq today. It is replacing the genuine feelings of gratitude that many Iraqis had toward the US immediately following their liberation.
We have always had a set of objectives based on neocon ideology, not Iraqi hopes, which are unattainable because they offend the spirit of Iraqi nationalism.
One, we want long-term strategic military bases. Two, we count on retaining significant influence over Iraqi oil policy. Three, we favour unrestricted foreign investment in a country that has a history of intense hostility toward alien ownership of the country's economic enterprises and natural resources. Four, we expect Iraq to support America's role in the Middle East peace process even when it would mean aligning Iraqi policy with that of George W Bush and Ariel Sharon.
Failure to achieve those four objectives will appear to both Republicans and Democrats to be a failure of Bush's overall Iraq policy. But the administration has already boxed itself in to the point where there is no way it can modify those objectives to meet reality.
There has to be regime change in Washington. It's the only way to solve the Iraq problem.
· Ray Close is a former CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia. He served for 27 years as an "Arabist" for the agency.
Thursday, May 13, 2004
KAREN HUGHES LOVES KOOL-AID
One minute from abnormal
A Texas reporter explores Karen Hughes' cultlike devotion to George W. Bush.
By James C. Moore, Salon.com
May 13, 2004 | No one saw Karen Hughes' transcendent moment with George W. Bush. Possibly, she had already crossed over from being his communications consultant to being his confidant. None of us on the outside had any way of knowing until a brief, late-night phone call. While he was governor of Texas, Hughes was the interface between Bush and journalists. But she was already working her relationship with Bush, making every effort to evolve it into something beyond the daily grind with reporters.
Early in the presidential campaign, Bush and his entourage were in New York for a speech and bus tour. A reporter for a major daily newspaper, who arrived late because of airline delays, was without a schedule and logistical information for the subsequent day's events.
"I guess I got in about 11 p.m.," he said. "I called Karen in her room, sort of worried that I might be waking her up. I was very polite. I said, 'Karen, I was wondering if you could give me the schedule, etc. for reporters for tomorrow.'"
"I don't do press," Hughes said.
"And then she hung up on me," the reporter said. "All I could think was she must be big stuff now. She could have at least been polite. She didn't even bother to tell me who I was supposed to call."
Actually, Hughes had become unsettlingly close to her boss long before journalism or outsiders began to take note. In fact, her worst critics have accused the presidential counselor of living almost vicariously through Bush. His goals and political ideology have been so inculcated into Hughes' consciousness that she may no longer be able discern between her own thinking and the president's. This undoubtedly is an odd characterization to make of two of the world's most powerful adults. There is, however, no shortage of evidence to prompt the speculation.
The first time I noticed an indication of a radio frequency bouncing between the brains of Bush and Hughes was during Gov. Bush's initial State of the State speech in Texas. Still a simple press hack, Hughes did not take to the riser in the Texas House of Representatives, instead standing off to the side, behind the shiny brass railing rimming the chamber's floor.
"Look at Karen," I said, nudging a colleague.
"Oh, my God. You've got to be kidding me."
As Gov. Bush read the text of his speech from a teleprompter, his communications director was silently mouthing the words along with him. The synchronized delivery suggested a parent sitting in the audience of an elementary school pageant while mouthing forgotten lines as her child stood dumbstruck onstage.
"Do you suppose she has any idea how odd that looks?" my friend asked.
"If she does, I don't think she cares. She seems to just want her guy to do well."
In the ensuing years of Bush's political development, Hughes was spotted many times as she pursed her lips and moved her jaws to each word her employer was stammering in the front of the room. After a while, those of us in the traveling press corps became so accustomed to her mannerisms that we were no longer amazed.
Hughes, of course, was more than just the candidate's remote-control device. Her portfolio included creating the messages and sound bites -- turning the phrases Bush was later very likely to overturn when he tried to articulate them in public. Hughes' great skill as a political advisor is that she is both intuitive and analytical. While her relentlessness with message delivery is all over the airwaves and in the newspapers, people often overlook Hughes' talents in message development. In the South Carolina primary campaign against presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, as Bush strategist Karl Rove deployed what Sen. Max Cleland called a "slime and defend" strategy, it was Hughes who gave the Bush team an effective communications template.
"McCain clearly kicked our butts in New Hampshire," a Bush campaign source told me. "His message of reform immediately took off. And then Karen said, 'Hey, we're the reformers here. We're reformers with results.' That's what we ended up having on all of the signs all over South Carolina: 'A Reformer With Results.' We just stole McCain's message, refined it, and it worked. That was all Karen."
I have worked around Hughes from the time she was an energetic reporter at KXAS-TV in Dallas/Fort Worth, and even if I had been watching her with nothing more than peripheral vision, I cannot avoid concluding that there is something almost pathological about her almost born-again devotion to Bush. She was a solid TV political correspondent with serviceable prose and production skills. But as a counselor and communicator for the president, she is driven in a manner that never manifested itself in her journalism. Whatever reality she, Rove and Bush choose to manufacture, Hughes believes in it more than the reality of any and all contradictory external information. And God help any journalist or analyst whose interpretation or reportage of facts varies with her version of events.
Bush's only courageous political act of his career provides a case study of Hughes and message discipline. During his first year as governor of Texas, Bush elected to deal with a property-tax crisis for homeowners by spreading the tax burden across the broader business community. His idea, which Rove did not like, was to ask the business community to pay more to fund public education. Bush tried to raise taxes on aviation fuel, lawyers, architects and countless other professional endeavors. Predictably, corporate lobbyists and CEOs handed the neophyte governor his political head over the proposal.
"I'll never try anything like that again unless people are standing on the Capitol lawn by the thousands," Bush told me at the time.
Rove had a better idea, and Hughes knew she could sell it to voters and lobbyists. The governor pushed a piece of legislation to increase the homestead exemption for Texas homeowners, reducing the taxable assessed valuation for every homeowner who filed for the exemption. This was a political shell game, a foreshadowing of how the Bush administration would run the federal government. Hughes and Rove knew that the funds lost from the $3 billion tax cut resulting from the increased exemption had to be replaced by local school districts. Public education could not live without the money, and Texas school districts had to raise taxes to make up for the loss. But Bush, conveniently, did not get the blame.
In Nashua, N.H., this artful dodge almost fell to pieces. As reporters on Bush's presidential campaign were gathering for a news conference, Steve Forbes' supporters were handing out pamphlets listing all of the businesses Bush had tried to increase taxes on before he settled on the homestead exemption as a political accomplishment. Frank Bruni of the New York Times approached me with the list.
"Is this true?" he asked.
I scanned the proposed taxes. "Yeah, looks accurate to me."
Bruni's eyes swept the room searching for Hughes and found her leaning against a rear wall as Bush spoke. I drifted over close enough to hear their conversation.
"Karen," Bruni asked, "did the governor really try to raise taxes on all of these businesses?"
Hughes looked at the Forbes materials.
"Frank, Governor Bush is responsible for the largest single tax cut in Texas history at 3 billion dollars."
"I know," Bruni said. "I've heard that a lot. But did he try to increase taxes on these companies before he cut them with the homestead exemption?"
"As I said, Frank, Governor Bush made history with the largest tax cut ever recorded in Texas."
Bruni, frustrated, looked in my direction briefly.
"OK, I'll ask you again: Did Governor Bush try to raise taxes on the companies listed on this document?"
Unflagging, Hughes stuck with her message, almost verbatim, and Bruni shrugged his shoulders and walked off. He had been worn out by the message discipline of the High Prophet, the nickname Bush had given her as a derivative of her married name of Karen Parfitt Hughes.
She was as capable at preemptive political attacks on opponents and journalists as she was with tactical defense. I found this out in 1994 as a panelist on a debate broadcast statewide between Bush and his gubernatorial opponent, Ann Richards. Having come of age during the Vietnam War, I thought I would ask Bush how he managed to get into the Texas Air National Guard when most waiting lists were years long. Only seconds after the red tally lights had gone out on the cameras, Hughes was looming in front of me, acting as if I owed her an explanation for my question.
"What was that all about, Jim? I don't see what that has to do with being governor. That was just an absurd question. Why'd you ask such a thing?"
"His behavior during that time is relevant, Karen. It's about character. You know that."
"No, I don't. He's not asking to run the federal government. He wants to be governor of Texas. He's not going to declare war on Mexico."
Initially, I thought she was trying to playfully badger me. But her face was dark and her mouth and eyes had hardened at the edges.
"Look, Karen, I lost friends in Vietnam. I had a right and an obligation to ask him about what he did back then."
When I turned and left the stage, she followed me, insistently repeating her assertions. Political reporters told me the next day that Hughes had spent some time at the hotel bar that night ridiculing my choice of questions to Bush. Nothing has changed since then about Hughes and her devotion to the president -- except for the degree of her obsessive connection to him.
No one in Austin had any illusion that Hughes might grow more independent with her much-publicized return home two years ago. In fact, that decision is often viewed cynically by Democrats, some of whom accuse her of making a marketing rather than a personal decision. By walking away from an office in the White House, Hughes became an "Oprah" topic: Possibly History's Most Powerful Female Not Married to a President Abandons Post for Sake of Family. She didn't really walk away, though. Her husband and son changed their mailing addresses by returning to Austin, but Hughes has been incessantly in Washington or on the road promoting her expansive love note to her president, "Ten Minutes From Normal." Bush reportedly speaks with her every day, at least once, no matter where Hughes is traveling. In Texas, one lobbyist who had worked closely with the governor and his "governess" suggested that Bush appears to need Hughes' approval. That represents a meaningless endorsement, since she clearly thinks he can do no wrong.
Inevitably, either discomfort or romance arises from this kind of codependency. While Bush was running for president and the miles and days clicked off on the campaign trail, the candidate and his word worker were inseparable. Hughes appeared in almost every photo of the candidate. On each flight to the next venue, she sat next to him, leaning in to talk, confide and counsel. This kind of intimacy might lead lesser adults into precarious territory. Bush and Hughes, however, were oblivious to the growing perception among the traveling press entourage that they were more than just friends and political confederates. When someone finally advised them of how their kinship might be misinterpreted, the campaign responded with an odd maneuver. Hughes brought her son onto the campaign jet and home-schooled him out on the hustings.
"It's a once-in-a-lifetime experience for him," she told reporters. "He wants to go everywhere I go."
The press corps suspected, though, that Hughes' son's arrival on the plane was a direct message to us and the wider world that there was no hanky-panky between her and the boss man. The fact that this development coincided with an increased profile in the campaign by Laura Bush was probably a part of the same communications strategy.
Despite her former career as a journalist, Hughes has cultivated an absurd, counterintuitive notion that she can either control or strongly influence what is reported. Of course, she ought to know better, but this does not preclude her from persistently trying to write stories for reporters. She relaxed -- momentarily -- when conservative writer and commentator Tucker Carlson came to Austin to interview Bush. The piece Carlson filed for the now defunct Talk magazine was not what she had anticipated from someone whose politics were expected to be like Bush's.
Carlson, a floppy-haired antagonist of progressives, wasn't supposed to be hard on Karen's man. In fact, in an interview with Salon last year, the CNN host said his wife was worried that his story might appear to be "sucking up." Bush, knowing Carlson's political predisposition, lifted the shades hiding his true beliefs and offered a clearer view of himself to the reporter. Carlson's story described how Bush swore freely and mocked condemned death-row inmate Karla Faye Tucker. He told Salon that he was astonished by how Hughes responded to his article in Talk.
"It was very, very hostile," Carlson said. "The reaction was: You betrayed us. Well, I was never there as a partisan to begin with. Then I heard that [on the campaign bus], Karen Hughes accused me of lying. And so I called Karen and asked her why she was saying this, and she had this almost Orwellian rap that she laid on me about how things she'd heard -- that I watched her hear -- she in fact had never heard, and she'd never heard Bush use profanity ever. It was insane. I've obviously been lied to a lot by campaign operatives, but the striking thing about the way she lied was she knew I knew she was lying, and she did it anyway. There is no word in English that captures that. It almost crosses over from bravado into mental illness."
When cornered, Hughes dissembles. But she is rarely cornered. Nonetheless, she seems to have lost her ability to distinguish between the real world and the red, white and blue movie playing on a loop in her head; it's a drama where "W" is the hero and crowds are cheering him as a savior while the national anthem plays as the soundtrack. This is considerably more than a political skill. It's more of a serious psychological tic. Even when confronted with a videotape or a transcript contradicting her recall, Hughes still finds denial a viable political tool.
During an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN, Hughes appeared to compare pro-choice supporters to terrorists, then later denied precisely what she had said.
"And President Bush has worked to say, let's be reasonable, let's work to value life, let's try to reduce the number of abortions, let's increase adoptions," she told Blitzer. "And I think those are the kind of policies that the American people can support, particularly at a time when we're facing an enemy, and really the fundamental difference between us and the terror network we fight is that we value every life. It's the founding conviction of our country, that we're endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, the right to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Unfortunately our enemies in the terror network, as we're seeing repeatedly in the headlines these days, don't value any life, not even the innocent and not even their own."
Rarely good with a follow-up, Blitzer let this rank assertion slip past unchallenged. The Washington Post, however, held Hughes' nose to her own words. Regardless, she still was unable to see how she had used the war on terrorism in an analogy that practically put pro-choice supporters in an al-Qaida training camp saying evening prayers with Osama bin Laden.
"That is a gross distortion and I would never make such a comparison," Hughes told the Post.
She did, however -- and tens of thousands of people have signed an online petition demanding that she issue an apology. Unfortunately, she is no more forthcoming with requests for forgiveness than the president is.
It is a difficult judgment to make, calling someone a liar when they truly believe what they are saying. Hughes, though, has often said things that are not true. Turning a series of Bush's stump speeches into a book, Hughes wrote in Bush's "A Charge to Keep: My Journey to the White House" that he "continued flying with his National Guard unit for many years." Bush and Hughes both knew that was not true, and documents the White House released in March proved the opposite. Bush probably privately acknowledges this distortion, but Hughes likely believes the version she fabricated is unfailingly accurate. Although the former Texas governor was known to launch an occasional F-bomb around male reporters, not surprisingly, her romanticized version of Bush is a man who doesn't even curse.
As the war on terrorism has spiraled into chaos, Hughes has begun testifying about her religion in public forums, such as in a recent speech in Austin. It's impossible to tell if she is seeking solace in her faith or trying to convince Americans that God is on our side. Unfortunately, the U.S. soldiers who are theoretically being guided by the Bush administration's Christian God are no less dead than the Iraqi insurgents and al-Qaida terrorists who believe Allah is directing them to destroy the American infidels. Neither Jesus nor Muhammad ever spoke to the concept of killing to achieve political ends, though. One assumes, in her private moments, that Hughes and the president seek forgiveness from their Creator. But they inhabit a remote, unexplored location.
In the carefully rendered world where Hughes lives, the weapons of mass destruction are not missing; they have only to be discovered. Terrorists hate freedom and liberty and equality, instead of hating Americans. A man who won a Silver Star for shedding blood for his country needs to explain himself, while a young lieutenant who skipped out on an officer's commission and a coveted pilot's slot has "served honorably." On Planet Hughes, life is returning to normal in Iraq, the horrors are diminishing and the casualties of Americans and Iraqis are not that significant. It's a happy place where presidents never make mistakes and there is never anything to be sorry about. One can almost see her in the back of the room, her mouth rounded with expression and secretly moving in unison with the president as he speaks the words "Donald Rumsfeld is a superb secretary of defense."
After all of the troops have come home, a powerful cleric is ruling Iraq with a theocratic government and Bush has been retired to his ranch by an angry electorate, the president's closest friend will be undaunted. Years from now, when historians begin to insist that Iraq was the greatest geopolitical mistake ever made by an American president, she will be there disputing their interpretations.
Karen Hughes will always believe.
Thursday, May 13, 2004
IT'S OFFICIAL: DUMMIES LOVE GEORGE W. BUSH BESTESEST
A study shows that nincompoops love Dubya. States where the IQ average was higher voted for Gore in 2000, states where the population was mentally challenged voted overwhelmingly for one of their own.
State Average IQ for the year 2000:
(Legend: Ranking/State Name/Average IQ/Voted For)
1 Connecticut 113 Gore
2 Massachusetts 111 Gore
3 New Jersey 111 Gore
4 New York 109 Gore
5 Rhode Island 107 Gore
6 Hawaii 106 Gore
7 Maryland 105 Gore
8 New Hampshire 105 Bush
9 Illinois 104 Gore
10 Delaware 103 Gore
11 Minnesota 102 Gore
12 Vermont 102 Gore
13 Washington 102 Gore
14 California 101 Gore
15 Pennsylvania 101 Gore
16 Maine 100 Gore
17 Virginia 100 Bush
18 Wisconsin 100 Gore
19 Colorado 99 Bush
20 Iowa 99 Gore
21 Michigan 99 Gore
22 Nevada 99 Bush
23 Ohio 99 Bush
24 Oregon 99 Gore
25 Alaska 98 Bush
26 Florida 98 Bush
27 Missouri 98 Bush
28 Kansas 96 Bush
29 Nebraska 95 Bush
30 Arizona 94 Bush
31 Indiana 94 Bush
32 Tennessee 94 Bush
33 North Carolina 93 Bush
34 West Virginia 93 Bush
35 Arkansas 92 Bush
36 Georgia 92 Bush
37 Kentucky 92 Bush
38 New Mexico 92 Gore
39 North Dakota 92 Bush
40 Texas 92 Bush
41 Alabama 90 Bush
42 Louisiana 90 Bush
43 Montana 90 Bush
44 Oklahoma 90 Bush
45 South Dakota 90 Bush
46 South Carolina 89 Bush
47 Wyoming 89 Bush
48 Idaho 87 Bush
49 Utah 87 Bush
50 Mississippi 85 BushThursday, May 13, 2004
WHERE IS ALL THE BLOOD?
Now that we're over the shock, we've taken a good look at the Berg decapitation video. Being forensics buffs, we noticed a huge inconsistency that leads us to believe that the footage is faked, and the decapitation occurred post-mortem: NO BLOOD.
Watch the uncensored video and notice that as the action starts (the last 15% of the video), things get jumbled up and the view is obscured, and during this jumbling up, the timestamp abruptly changes to eleven hours later. When the view clears, the decapitation begins, but - Berg is not struggling at all, in fact he seems very stiff, the screams do not match the action, and most damning of all, there is no blood spray anywhere.
Certainly not the kind of bloodfest that would come from a living victim struggling for his life. Which he doesn't seem to be doing. At all. How strange. The way the attackers handle Berg's body is a lot like those B sci-fi movies where the hero has to grab the stuffed alien tentacle and wrap it around himself while screaming 'help! help!'. The theatrics here would be amusing if the situation were not so grim.
A man having his head separated from his body is going to gush out huge amounts of blood from the severed arteries as his heart pumps wildly in the death throes. Any first year medical student can tell you that. Hell, anyone who watches CSI every week can tell you that. Everything is nice and neat here, just a few slow drips, exactly what you would expect from a body that was already long dead before decapitation, with rigor passing but still present.
Berg was indeed decapitated but - it was done post-mortem. This video is a crudely edited fakeout, designed to shock everyone into forgetting all about the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal.
You have to think - quo bono?
BushCo and the Pentagon certainly do. Isn't that a lucky coinky-dink?
Thursday, May 13, 2004
WATCH AS HUMANS COMMIT GLOBAL SUICIDE!
Inuit 'Poisoned from Afar' Due to Climate Change
By Amran Abocar
TORONTO (Reuters) - The Inuit living in the Arctic region are being "poisoned from afar" as climate change takes its toll on the area and threatens their existence, the head of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference (news - web sites) said on Wednesday.
Sheila Watt-Cloutier, chairwoman of the group that represents about 155,000 Inuit in the Arctic regions of Canada, Russia, Greenland and the United States, said Inuit were paying dearly for the actions of people elsewhere.
"The Inuit have now become the net recipients of toxins coming from afar and we carry heavy body burdens in our blood core and the nursing milk of our mothers," Watt-Cloutier told an environmental conference. "Not of our doing, we are being poisoned from afar."
Inuit say that rising temperatures are undermining traditional lifestyles based around hunting for animals like seal, whale, walrus and polar bear.
"For us, the environment is our supermarket," Watt-Cloutier said. "We are out there every single day and every day we can't help but wonder what surprises lie as a result of the things that are happening."
More thawing permafrost -- the normally perpetually frozen layer of earth -- heavier snowfalls and seas with longer ice-free seasons are some visible effects of climate change in the area, she said.
In addition, the region now hosts new species such as barnyard owls, and hunters are drowning by falling through thinning ice. U.N. studies say the Arctic Ocean may be largely ice-free in summer by 2100.
An assessment to be delivered to foreign ministers of the eight-member Arctic Council -- Canada, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Iceland, Norway, Russia, and the United States -- next November points to a bleak future for the Arctic region.
Watt-Cloutier said the report predicts the depletion of summer sea ice will push some marine mammals, including polar bears and walrus, into extinction by the middle or end of this century.
"So you can well imagine if the polar bear is extinct in 50, 60, 70 years, where we will be as Inuit," she said. "This assessment projects the end of the Inuit as a hunting culture."
Because they are small in numbers, Watt-Cloutier said the Inuit need to partner with other regions threatened by global warming, such as the low-lying Pacific Island nations, to put themselves on the political map.
The Inuit group is also petitioning the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, part of the Organization of American States, for a declaration that the destruction of their way of life because of human-caused climate change is a violation of their rights.
Meantime, Watt-Cloutier said, the rest of the world should pay closer attention to the experience of the Inuit in the Arctic. U.N. climate models say that global warming is felt first in polar regions.
"Metaphorically speaking, the Inuit are the mercury in the barometer, we are the early-warning system," Watt-Cloutier said. "Because we are on the land every single day, we witness the most minute of changes, so the world has a vested interest in keeping the Inuit on the land."Wednesday, May 12, 2004
TOM BIHN ROX
Wednesday, May 12, 2004
RUSH LIMBAUGH IS A BIG FAT RACIST, SEXIST, CLASSIST, ISOLATIONIST WARMONGERING NAZI PIG DRUGGIE
Limbaugh Makes Sexist Comments:
1) Some of these babes, I'm telling you, like the sexual harassment crowd. They're out there protesting what they actually wish would happen to them sometimes. [4/26/04]
2) Will it be the Democratic insiders' dream of Kerry and John Edwards? Or maybe the media's dream team of Kerry and John McCain. Or will it be the femi-Nazi dream team of Kerry and Hillary. [4/5/04]
3) Some funny comments from the femi-Nazis at the pro-abortion rally in Washington yesterday. Not many. It didn't take long for us to put together our montage, but we'll let you hear it when we come back. [4/26/04]
4) Oh, if you missed the "morning update" today, the femi-Nazis have really stepped into it. Karen Hughes just said some of the -- well, the most innocent, true, great stuff. And the femi-Nazis have assumed she was comparing them to the terrorists, which she wasn't. But now they've linked themselves with the terrorists. [4/29/04]
5) [W]e got the femi-Nazi uprising over comments made by Karen Hughes. [4/29/04]
6) Today's morning update, for those of you who missed it, let me share it with you. Angry Democrats and radical femi-Nazis are demanding an apology from Karen Hughes, presidential adviser, over some remarks that she made on CNN. Now, since very few people watch CNN any more, let me tell you what she said. While the femi-Nazis' pro-abortion march was taking place in Washington on Sunday, Karen Hughes, on CNN, was asked how the issue of abortion would play in the elections. [4/29/04]
7) So, to Eleanor Squeal [sic-"Smeal"] and the Pro-Choice crowd, the femi-Nazis who marched in such rage and anger on Sunday, we're so sorry. [4/29/04]
8) What is Eleanor Squeal [sic-"Smeal"] doing? Shut up. [4/29/04]
9) On Hannity & Colmes last week, Sean Hannity asked Patricia Ireland, who I guess was most recently with the Young Women's Christian Association, ahem, about placards reported in the crowd among the pagan ladies. [4/29/04]
10) The purpose -- Al Gore wants this channel to create a liberal version of the FOX News channel. We've already got CNN. We got CNN Headline News. We've got, for all intents and purposes, PMS-NBC. [4/5/04]
11) Well, Rich Lowry has a column today, National Review Online, and Time magazine has just discovered that stay-at-home moms are women who have made legitimate choices to stay home and raise their young children -- a cover story. Time magazine has headlined the case for staying home, and the magazine, according to Lowry, reports without sneering or condescension, the trend toward more new mothers leaving the workforce. Yes, it's a trend. It started years ago when the feminist movement decided that their best friends were going to be German shepherds. You know. So that's -- well, it's true. You go to the right airports and you can see it. [3/19/04]
12) Several liberal Democrats, most of whom did not support Kerry during the primaries, asked his national chair babe, former Governor Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, who was appearing at a House Democrat caucus meeting, why the Party's presumptive presidential nominee has not responded more forcefully to Republican broadsides on his patriotism and his service in Vietnam. [4/29/04]
13) All right, there's a story here from The Washington Post, Lois Romano, who've I've -- I've dealt with Lois Romano, but she was pretty good. Pretty good reporterette. [4/9/04]
14) That was Star Jones, resident member of The View, recently engaged -- from what I'm told, amazingly so -- and she's joking about sending a weapon of mass destruction at Bush. And here these babes are all upset that they're going to miss American Idol tonight. Well, tough toenails! Going to miss -- ? You liberals have been out there demanding and clamoring to see Bush put himself through this, and now he's doing it, and you're all bent out of shape that he's going to force you to miss American Idol? What is your IQ, about that of a pencil eraser? [4/13/04]
15) Oh, gosh, that hurts, my friends. It reminds me of my first wife. Ah! Gee! It is just painful to hear this, and then she [Hillary Clinton] starts yelling everywhere -- Dawn, you can smile. She's in there shaking her head. She's -- she's here in a den of sexists, folks, and she puts up such a game front. Chauvinists, I should say. We're not sexists, we're chauvinists -- we're male chauvinist pigs, and we're happy to be because we think that's what men were destined to be. We think that's what women want. [4/15/04]
16) Then here comes this Joe Wilson clown whose wife was the CIA babe that Novak ostensibly was responsible for spreading information of her identity. [4/5/04]
17) Now if Hilary does become Kerry's VP, will she have to change her positions to be on the same page with Kerry or will Kerry have to change his? (laughter) Don't forget that testicle lock box, folks. (laughter) Just as we haven't talked about it in awhile does not mean (laughter) that it's -- that it's been buried. [4/15/04]
18) If I were Bob Woodward, I would be on a lookout for Mrs. Clinton and her testicle lockbox, because she has just been snookered, like every other Liberal, by believing what Woodward says is in his book in these interviews, as opposed to what's actually in these books, or this book, because it's exactly what she claims she needs in an administration. [4/21/04]
Limbaugh Makes Racially Charged Comments:
19) And then what if -- there are all kinds of little Communist regimes in -- what if [Fidel] Castro shows up and says I endorse Kerry? The Black Caucus would like that, but Kerry wouldn't. [3/19/04]
20) Look. It's one thing to say you like it. It's OK. But to try to pass this off as something that you've intellectually examined and have assigned value you to -- ah, sorry, Senator [Kerry]. And I'm not going to believe this business that you don't like heavy metal. I mean, I think heavy metal's probably your anthem. You know, from the Vietnam era and all that. But here, again, don't stand up for white music. Associate yourself with rap. [4/5/04]
21) The -- the gang culture has given us rap, elements of rap, or rap has influenced -- whichever. They are intertwined. [4/7/04]
22) OPEC announced a cancellation of its 10 percent cutback in production so -- and there's some little strife going on in Venezuela with that wacko, Cesar Chavez, down there. Hugo. Hugo, Cesar -- whatever. A Chavez is a Chavez. We've always had problems with them. So the bottom line is that I don't think supplies are going to be interrupted. [3/26/04]
23) We are reviewing the testimony, the grilling, the interrogation of noted criminal Dr. Condoleezza Rice who appeared before the law today, the 9/11 Commission attempting to assign blame and seeking to affix it to the Bush administration via beating up on the girl. Only in Washington when the girl is a Republican and a black can you beat up on her. Couldn't do this if she were representing a Democrat administration regardless of her color, but especially given that she's black. This couldn't even have happened had she been in a Democrat administration. Nobody would have had the guts to say that she needs to testify beyond what she said behind closed doors. But since she's a Republican, since she has the audacity to be a black woman Republican, why, it's OK to beat up on the girl. And they tried to beat up on the girl today, folks, and she hit them below the belt. [4/8/04]
Limbaugh Finds Common Cause Between Democrats and Terrorists:
24) I'm going to tell you is what's good for Al Qaeda is good for the Democratic Party in this country today. That's how you boil this down. And it doesn't have to be Al Qaeda. What's good for terrorists is good for John Kerry. All you got to do is check the way they react. [3/15/04]
25) So the only real question is, if Al Qaeda's active and capable, what are they going to do? Because we know what they want: they want Kerry, they want the Democrats in power. They'd love that -- I mean, based simply on what they're saying and how they're reacting to what happened in Spain. I'm not guessing. [3/15/04]
Media Matters for America notes: According to Reuters, an apparent Al Qaeda letter that surfaced in March stated that the group supports Bush's reelection: "The statement said it supported President Bush in his reelection campaign, and would prefer him to win in November rather than the Democratic candidate John Kerry, as it was not possible to find a leader 'more foolish than you (Bush), who deals with matters by force rather than with wisdom.' ... [The letter added,] 'Kerry will kill our nation while it sleeps because he and the Democrats have the cunning to embellish blasphemy and present it to the Arab and Muslim nation as civilization. ... Because of this we desire you (Bush) to be elected.'" [Reuters, 3/17/04]
26) They [Democrats] celebrate privately this attack in Spain. [3/16/04]
27) I mean, if you wonder -- if you want the terrorists running the show, then you will elect John Kerry, who is a bed brother with this guy who just won election in Spain. [3/18/04]
28) I'm telling you, we're in the midst of a huge liberal crackup. They are so motivated by the quest for power. They are so motivated by rage and hatred, that they are not in power. And they focus that on Bush. That they have aligned themselves unwittingly -- I'm going to grant them that -- with those who intend harm on this country. [3/24/04]
29) You don't hear the Democrats being critical of terrorists. In fact, you hear the Democrats saying, "We've got to find a way to get along with them." [4/5/04]
30) Senator [Ted] Kennedy, a simple question. Does it please you to learn who your friends are? Does it excite you, Senator Kennedy, to learn that the militant, firebrand, murderer of American civilians and military personnel is on your side, Senator Kennedy? Does it encourage you? Does it invigorate you? Does it inspire you, Senator Kennedy, to know that a murdering Al Qaeda-related terrorist has taken up your argument for use against his enemy? How does that make you feel, Senator Kennedy? Does it embarrass you? Because it should. Or does it probably excite you and think you're making headway now. You've got the enemy aligned with you. [4/8/04]
31)It's never that people are evil, or bad, because remember the elitist Liberals of today are skeptical of the difference between good and evil. This is why people like liberal Democrats in the country will look at what's happening in Madrid and what's happening in Baghdad today and they'll see George Bush as a greater threat than the people setting off the bombs. And these are the people that want to oust Bush. The people who remain skeptical of the fact that there is any difference between right and wrong, or good and evil. [3/17/04]
32) Let me ask you a question. Who do you think the terrorists enjoy watching more on TV? Aljazeera or the commission coverage in the United States? I say it's a toss-up. I say the terrorists are having trouble making up their minds which is better for them -- the press coverage of the commission hearings in this country or Aljazeera, their own network in the Middle East. [3/29/04]
Limbaugh Suggests Democrats Hate America and Like Dictators:
33) [Speaking about Democrats] I don't know who they are, I don't know what they believe, but I can't relate. I can't possibly understand somebody who hates this country, who was born and raised here. I don't understand how you hate this Constitution. I don't understand how you hate freedom. I don't understand how you hate free markets, but that's who elites are, because freedom and free markets challenge their power. It's the only thing I can come up with. I know it's much more insidious and hideous than that, but I still can't relate to it. [3/16/04]
34) The Democrats believe that the presence of the US military is what makes the world dangerous. The Democrats, liberal Democrats in this country, believe, and have for a long time, that the U.S. military is the focus of evil, is the primary agent provocateur for all of this. That if we weren't the way we are, the terrorists wouldn't hate us. And if we weren't as big as we are, if we weren't as powerful as we are, if we weren't as decadent -- whatever. Well, they won't say "decadent," because they support that. [3/18/04]
35) [Daschle parody]: Hi and welcome back to the Tom Daschle Show... The country is suffering, and, ah -- and we're happy about that here at the Tom Daschle Show because it's -- while it's bad for the country, it's great for our party, and that's what's important. [4/5/04]
36) We are not going to commit the same mistakes [in Iraq that we made in Vietnam]. There's not a person in Washington, DC, alive that has anything to do with this who is going to see to it that those same mistakes are made again. This is wishful thinking on the part of the Democrats. And once again they undercut the morale of the military. [4/6/04]
37) Well, Senator Kennedy, it's different people running the show now with a different objective than existed in Vietnam. And what he's engaging in here [in suggesting an Iraq-Vietnam parallel], folks, is wishful thinking. [4/6/04]
38) Senator Kennedy has just told us what he hopes happens. He wants a quagmire. [4/6/04]
39) We've got elements of one of the two major political parties in this country doing things, saying things, taking steps that are designed to demoralize. And if they're not designed to demoralize, they are certainly resulting in either one of two things: the demoralization of our troops who hear them, or they're providing motivation and inspiration for the enemy, all in the silly selfish quest for their own political power. [4/7/04]
40) This is why, folks, you cannot, we cannot entrust liberals with the defense of this country. They will not do it. They will not defend the American military. They will cut and run every time. They will not defend freedom. They will not defend this country. [4/7/04]
41) The Liberals put their party and their quest for power above national interests. They wouldn't join with Reagan during the Cold War. Defended the Soviets. Tried to make Gorbachev the hero of the world. Iraqi freedom, George W. Bush. Then we had the situation down with the Contras in Nicaragua. Democrats did everything they could to support the Contras and their client state, the Soviet Union. We've got Iraqi Freedom. [4/13/04]
42) These people have become the mainstream thought -- thinkers, generators of the Democratic Party. It's who they are. They hate this country. They hate the military of this country. [4/15/04]
43) Castro's the kind of guy that Kerry would probably lionize, to tell you the truth. [3/15/04]
Limbaugh Ridicules Kerry's Marriage:
44) He's [Kerry] been a senator with no name on legislation, his own name not on legislation. I mean, he's been there, but he's basically a skirt-chaser, folks. He's a gigolo. He has not been somebody that a lot of people have taken seriously. [3/16/04]
45) [On James Carville of CNN defending Kerry]: "So he's out defending a gigolo." [3/16/04]
46) Kerry is cheap. Most gigolos are. I mean -- I think it -- I think it goes with the, with the definition. [4/7/04]
47) The fact that he's [Kerry] a gigolo is just funny to me. You know, that fact that he -- he has no passion, and the fact that he's a dullard and a dry ball, those are funny things to me. [4/8/04]
48) Are you really -- you're not -- the intern story, whatever that is -- that affair story -- that's not over. I'll guarantee you." [3/16/04]
49) Speaking of that, I saw a picture on the attack Internet today of Kerry kissing Teresa Heinz last night after the Illinois primary, and I'm not -- folks? This woman does not look like she wants to be kissed at the moment she's being kissed. Her arms are down at her side and her lips -- I mean, it looks like -- it just doesn't -- I say, in full attack mode here, it just doesn't look affectionate, but it could have been that he surprised her. He probably never kisses her and it gave and it gets -- I'm just kidding. But you should see the picture. It just looks like -- let's put it this way, folks, when you dream of kissing a woman, this is not what it looks like. [3/17/04]
50) [W]hat do you consider a fair wage? John Kerry considers a fair wage a wife with 500 million. So, he had to find a company that had one. Well, there aren't too many of these companies that have little heiresses running around that are single, have 500 million that some guy can marry into. [3/23/04]
51) Because see, Al Gore's daddy was a senator and Al Gore's daddy worked his way up from wealth and power to wealth and power. I mean, he got more of it than anybody ever dreamed of for having as little to go on. I mean, he's one of those old boys. You know how that worked back then. Then John Kerry's daddy is his wives. (laughter) I mean, he's a gigolo. Everybody knows this. There's nobody in our party really has much respect for this guy and you can see it last night, but I can't say that. I mean, you got sugar daddy wife back then. You got sugar daddy wife now. He worked his way up from a blue blood to a platinum American Express card, and it doesn't have his name on it. [3/26/04]
52) We have a new, little Kerry song here, my friends. Paul Shanklin [Rush Limbaugh show's "man of many voices"] had to put his testicles in a lock box in order to sing this song. [4/20/04]
53) John Kerry does not look young, and he does not look like the future. John Kerry looks like Lurch from The Addams Family and that's a family that got up out of caskets every day to go about their business. [3/25/04]
54) Now you've heard Kerry talk about the fact that when people have criticized his legislation, his voting record, "Well, you don't know how these things work. You've never been there. You're just a little peon. You've never married rich women like I have. You don't know what you're talking about. You don't drink brandy from snifters. You use Styrofoam cups. I'm a real man and I know what I'm talking about. And I'm just telling you, you can't hit me on my record, because you're challenging my patriotism, and I served in Vietnam, so shut the f*** up," that's your John Kerry response. [3/29/04]
Limbaugh Says Environmentalists are "Nuts":
55) [Speaking about environmentalists] These people are nuts, folks. They're absolute wackos. They're total wackos. And yet they represent quite a bit of thinking in the Left of this country. They are not -- I mean to us, they're fringe, but the -- the Left fringe is more and more defining them as their mainstream. ? Well, that's part of it. I -- you know, there's -- there's no question there's commerce competition here. I have no question, because she does run this co-op, but make no mistake that these are a bunch of people that look at capitalism as an enemy of the people. And are trying to influence thinking in that, in that. I mean, that's what the modern environ -- environmental movement is about, folks. [4/7/04]
Limbaugh: Howard Dean "Very Sick"; McAuliffe a "Punk":
56) In the meantime, ladies and gentlemen, Howard Dean, truly, a very sick man, said yesterday, President Bush's decision to send troops to Iraq appears to have contributed to the bombing deaths of 201 people in Spain. [3/17/04]
57) You know, Howard Dean is a -- I mean, it was already demonstrated that he was a sick man. This is why we were hoping he would get the nomination. [3/17/04]
58) They came out and did their speeches in time for the punk, Terry McAuliffe, to come out, who, by the way, Page Six today, the gossip page column of the New York Post, Page Six, says that if Kerry wins that the punk will become the ambassador to the court of St. James. That's Great Britain for those of you in Rio Linda. [4/6/04]
59) We have here, ladies and gentlemen, this is the Punk, Terry McAuliffe, he was on The Today Show today. ? So the Punk wormed his way onto The Today Show today. [4/16/04]
60) Then Terry McAuliffe, the punk, came out, and he introduced a video and it was a John Kerry campaign video that started off with Vietnam footage, and testimony before the Congress, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and his appearance on Dick Cavett with some other veteran... Then after the video was over, here came the punk back. The punk walked back out there, McAuliffe, and introduced Kerry. [3/26/04]
Limbaugh Attacks Welfare Recipients
61) Can you imagine some poor welfare recipient in Arizona, doesn't know what's up. Doesn't know why the check's not as big. Doesn't know why the food stamps don't stick to whatever he tries to mail. [4/8/04]
Limbaugh Makes Xenophobic Remarks
62) We had an attack in Weird-zakistan or whatever -- one of these Zakstan places. Uzbekistan, yes, whatever it is. They're all Weird-zakistan to me, but -- How many Zakistans are there over there? Seems like a new one pops up every day. You can't keep track of them. I'm a geography expert and I've never heard of some of these. I don't expect Ron Wyden (sp?) to know where it is, but I would think I would. Now I've heard of Uzbekistan, but there was one the other day that I -- that I -- Kazakistan, Kazikstan, oh, I've heard of those. But it looked like Weird-zakistan to me. Anyway, I'm getting sidetracked. [3/30/04]
63) Why is the United States of America almost always alone in carrying this burden? We are almost always alone, Senator Kerry, because Europe is fat and lazy, spoiled by our bailing them out. [4/9/04]
64) A French journalist has been kidnapped in Iraq, but I don't believe it. I think the guy surrendered. [4/13/04]
65) As I said yesterday, truce is an old Arabic word. Goes way, way back in Islamic-Arabic culture, and it means, "We will get you later." [4/16/04]
66) The UN preaches hate, preaches anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism. [3/26/04]
67) [Referring to new Spain's new Prime Minister] Hey, locoweed. [3/17/04]
Limbaugh Says Peace is "Not Healthy," Trashes September 11 Families:
68) I'm almost going to come out in favor of war every 10 years so that we always have a group of people in this country that know what it's like. It's not healthy to go without a war for all these many years, because you get people that are born and grow up, and don't know what one is, and then the war happens, you start firing ammunition, and they think the world is coming to an end. When the truth is we're kicking ass over there. [4/9/04]
Note: It's worth keeping in mind that, while Limbaugh wants to have a "group of people in this country" who know what war is like, he didn't want to be in that group himself: Limbaugh didn't serve in Vietnam and told Jeff Greenfield in 1992, "I did not want to go." [link: snopes.com]
69) Some of these families [of 9/11 victims] I think are auditioning for co-host of The Today Show. [4/9/04]
70) We had a typically snooty, silly little Liberal on the phone who wanted to take potshots at me for daring, daring to say that some of the 9/11 family members are close to becoming or have become Democrat operatives. [4/9/04]
Limbaugh Suggests the Clintons are Murderous, Again:
71) That's why I'm telling you, whoever briefed Janet Reno, start searching Fort Marcy Park [in suburban Northern Virginia where Clinton deputy White House counsel Vince Foster's body was found after he committed suicide], folks. [4/13/04]
72) They [the Clintons] know that -- they're pretty confident Kerry is going to lose and if Kerry wins there's always Fort Marcy Park. So they're rolling the dice on this. [4/15/04]
Limbaugh Makes Weird, Sexually Charged Comments:
73) Little news here about all of our children. "Princeton University faculty have approved a plan Monday to combat rising grades by limiting the number of A's that it awards to undergraduates. The faculty voted 156 to 84 to implement the plan, making Princeton the first college or university to formally curb grade inflation by rationing A's, said the dean of the college, Nancy Weiss Malkiel, who proposed the plan." And I'm not sure that's how she pronounces her name. "Under the guidelines, which go into effect in the fall for Princeton's 4,600 undergraduates, faculty are expected to restrict the number of As to 35 percent in undergraduate courses." Sounds to me like this is just a -- a -- sort of a -- a secret ways to reduce the number of affairs between professors and students. [4/28/04]
74) Duke University has now decided that students, college students at Duke, 8:00 classes are too early. They're going to eliminate 8:00 classes because the students are showing up dead tired. Now what this means to me is that more professors are having affairs with students. And there's a reason for the fatigue. [4/19/04]
75) Republicans did not make a big issue of [Richard] Clarke being granted executive privilege or having it claimed by Clinton in '99, because they understood that there's a legitimate constitutional issue here. But somehow all the reporting on this issue has missed this, because these new breed of White House reporters came from covering the Lewinsky scandal, and all these cable networks, or from Court TV, or some such thing, and they basically are, you know, just -- just entertainment gossip columnists that have been assigned the White House beat.
This is not the old days where Tom Brokaw had to be on The Today Show for 44 years before he got the White House beat, and then after that he gets the anchor job or whatever the pattern was. I mean, they didn't pluck these guys out because they turn on little 18- to 24-year-old girls that they hope to be watching. They're just going for lookers these days, let's be honest, everybody knows this.
And that's now happened to the network news as well. You can't find an ugly person on TV. Well, subjective, everybody might find somebody ugly, but it's hard to find ugly people on the news anymore. The news used to be full of them. You know, journalism was a haven for the ugly. Politics, you know, as they say show biz for the ugly, and the news is part of politics.
I mean, you go back and look at -- do I have to mention any names? Let's just face it, Walter Cronkite's not going to have anybody undressing in front of the TV saying, "Oh, please, only me, Walter." Isn't gonna happen. Eric Sevareid, same thing, Brinkley, Huntley, all these guys. No, they were respected journalists. [3/30/04]
76) All of this August 6th PDB, why the White House declassified it on a Saturday? And why they did it on a Saturday to bury it during the news cycle on the day before Easter and on and on. And everybody says, "Look at this, it's out." And Bill Schneider, I saw Bill Schneider on CNN, he can barely contain himself. My folks, he was orgasming on the air. [4/13/04]
77) And we have people, all three sexes listen to this program. [4/5/04]
Wednesday, May 12, 2004
MEXICANS FLUSH OUT SWARM OF UFOs
Looks like we gots us a gen-u-ine sighting this time, backed up by the normally incredibly tightassed Mexican government has actually (finally, a month later) admitted the footage is the real deal. Below are the Associated Press and Reuters presspieces.
(Click here to see the video shot by the Mexican Air Force jets)
Mexican Air Force pilots film, chase UFOs through sky
MEXICO CITY (AP) Mexican Air Force pilots filmed 11 unidentified flying objects in the skies over southern Campeche state, a Defense Department spokesman confirmed Tuesday.
A videotape made widely available to the news media on Tuesday shows the bright objects, some sharp points of light and others like large headlights, moving rapidly in what appears to be a late-evening sky.
The lights were filmed on March 5 by pilots using infrared equipment. They appeared to be flying at an altitude of about 3,500 meters (11,480 feet), and allegedly surrounded the Air Force jet as it conducted routine anti-drug trafficking vigilance in Campeche. Only three of the objects showed up on the plane's radar.
"Was I afraid? Yes. A little afraid because we were facing something that had never happened before," said radar operator Lt. German Marin in a taped interview made public Tuesday.
"I couldn't say what it was ... but I think they're completely real," added Lt. Mario Adrian Vazquez, the infrared equipment operator. Vazquez insisted that there was no way to alter the recorded images.
The plane's captain, Maj. Magdaleno Castanon, said the military jets chased the lights "and I believe they could feel we were pursuing them."
When the jets stopped following the objects, they disappeared, he said.
A Defense Department spokesman confirmed Tuesday that the videotape was filmed by members of the Mexican Air Force. The spokesman declined to comment further and spoke on customary condition of anonymity.
The video was first aired on national television Monday night then again at a news conference Tuesday by Jaime Maussan, a Mexican investigator who has dedicated the past 10 years to studying UFOs.
"This is historic news," Maussan told reporters. "Hundreds of videos (of UFOs) exist, but none had the backing of the armed forces of any country. ... The armed forces don't perpetuate frauds."
Maussan said Secretary of Defense Gen. Ricardo Vega Garcia gave him the video on April 22.
Video Creates a UFO Stir
Wed May 12,11:07 AM ET
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - The Mexican Air Force has released footage of what a UFO expert said were 11 invisible unidentified flying objects picked up by an infrared camera as they whizzed around a surveillance plane.
A long-time believer in flying saucers, journalist Jaime Maussan told a news conference on Tuesday the objects were real and seemed "intelligent" after they at one point changed direction and surrounded the plane chasing them.
"They were invisible to the eye but they were there, there is no doubt about it. They had mass, they had energy and they were moving about," he said, after showing a 15-minute video he said the Defense Ministry gave him permission to publicize.
The ministry confirmed to Reuters it had provided the video, filmed by the Air Force on March 5 over the eastern coastal state of Campeche.
"We are not alone! This is so weird," one of the pilots can be heard yelling, after the plane's crew switched on an infrared camera to track the objects, first picked up by radar.
The film, recorded by a plane looking for drugs trafficking near the Gulf of Mexico, shows 11 objects as blobs of light that hover in formation or dart about, sometimes disappearing into cloud.
Mexico's most popular nightly news broadcast showed the video on Monday night.
Interviewed by Mausson on another section of the video, the pilots said they grew nervous when the objects, still invisible, turned back during a chase and surrounded the plane.
"There was a moment when ... the screens showed they were behind us, to the left and in front of us. It was at that point that I felt a bit tense," said Maj. Magdaleno Castanon.
Mexico has a long history of fanciful UFO sightings, most of which are dismissed by scientists as space debris, missiles, weather balloons, natural weather phenomena or hoaxes.Wednesday, May 12, 2004
PERVERSIONS
Retaliations for US military abuse. Monsters on all sides. This fool went into a warzone and got his head cut off. We're only shocked because the killers posted the snuff video online.
Wednesday, May 12, 2004
THAT DAMNED LIBERAL SCHOOL SYSTEM
Southern Baptist Urges Homeschooling
By JOHN GEROME
Associated Press Writer
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) -- A prominent Southern Baptist is asking the national convention to consider a resolution recommending parents remove their children from what he calls "godless" and "anti-Christian" public schools.
The resolution, co-authored by T.C. Pinckney, publisher of a Baptist newsletter in Alexandria, Va., urges parents to homeschool their children or send them to Christian schools.
"God gives the responsibility for education of children to the parents, not to the government," Pinckney said in an interview Thursday. "And parents should be taking responsibility, primarily through homeschooling."
His proposal has been submitted to the convention's 10-member Resolutions Committee, which will decide whether to present it for a vote when the convention meets June 15-16 in Indianapolis.
John Revell, a spokesman for the Southern Baptist Convention, declined to comment on the resolution or its chances of passage. But he noted that many resolutions submitted to the Resolutions Committee are not presented to the convention for a vote.
Richard Land, head of the Southern Baptists' public policy arm, did not immediately return calls seeking comment.
The proposal, which was also written by Texas attorney Bruce Shortt, says the public school system claims to be neutral, but it is actually opposed to Christianity and provides an education that is "godless."
"Just as it would be foolish for the warrior to give his arrows to his enemies, it is foolish for Christians to give their children to be trained in schools run by the enemies of God," the resolution states.
The resolution also says public schools are "adopting curricula and policies teaching that the homosexual lifestyle is acceptable."
Pinckney, a retired Air Force pilot and former second vice president of the Southern Baptist Convention, said public schools are "harmful not just spiritually and worldview-wise, but terrible academically. The U.S. has been going down on the roster of nations around the world in academic achievement of its students for 20 or 30 years now."
If Baptist parents were to comply with the resolution, the public school system probably would collapse, said Pinckney, who publishes "The Baptist Banner."
"I think that would be one of the finest things that can happen for the United States," he said.
With 16.3 million members, the Southern Baptist Convention is the nation's second-largest denomination. But resolutions approved by the convention are nonbinding, and all member churches are autonomous in their ministries.
In some years, the Resolutions Committee receives more than 30 proposals, and it typically presents only eight to 10, Revell said. Last year, the committee presented eight resolutions, and the convention approved all eight.
A resolution that fails to make it out of the committee can be brought up for a convention vote if two-thirds of the "messengers," or qualified members, agree to consider it.
The convention already has passed resolutions supporting homeschooling (1997) and Christian education (1999).
But the Pinckney-Shortt resolution goes much further by making it a Christian duty to abandon public schools, said Robert Parham, executive director of the Baptist Center for Ethics, an independent organization that provides ethics resources and services to Baptists.
Parham called the resolution inflammatory and a violation of the Ten Commandments.
"There's a clear commandment that says 'Thou shall not bear false witness,' and this resolution bears false witness about school teachers and schools when it says they have an agenda other than education and that agenda is godless," he said.Tuesday, May 11, 2004
"ENEMY OF THE STATE" WEIGHS IN
Some excellent observations by a thoughtful blogger (Monday, April 26, 2004).
War and the Fog of News
By DuctapaFatwa
Between cover bans and closed military zones, and embeds and spin and business considerations, how can anyone claim to know what is happening halfway around the world?
It is one of the great ironies of the age that in an era of 24 hour satellite TV news, and the internet that empowers anybody with a computer and a modem to talk in real time to anybody else with those things, assuming they can scrape together enough of a common language to do so, in a world where we should be over-informed, ultra-informed, if a duck shits in Zanzibar we should, in theory know within minutes on whose petunia it shat, and with which rude phrases it was shooed from the garden, those of us who have an interest in news seem to spend an unreasonable amount of time gathering it, and debating whether it is true.
War has never made newsgathering easy, and the adversarial relationship between government and press is legendary. It is especially frustrating for people in the US who have been repeatedly told since infancy that America has a "free press," unlike thoe other nefarious nations where the government tells the newspaper what to write, to discover that their own press has, while their back was turned, morphed into something more closely resembling Pravda in Soviet days than the model of independent journalism cum dependable global town crier that forms an integral part of the fabled American sense of entitlement.
The press in the US is first and foremost, a business, a profit-making enterprise controlled by a dwindling number of expanding mega-corporations, whose mission is less about informing and more about making money. Since the government has undergone a similar transformation, the relationship between state and press has become less adversarial and more incestuous, giving rise to incidents such as Condi Rice's famous "request" to the press that they not show Osama bin Laden speeches in their entirety, lest any secret coded messages embedded in the English translation of same might be communicated to "sleeper cells" of Arabic speakers who are watching Al Jazeera anyway.
A more recent state vs. press startle involves the prohibition on showing the return to US soil of flag-draped coffins of American war dead.
Some months ago, Israel banned video or photos "identifiable" of the faces of Israeli gunmen, after discovering that a rights group was documenting atrocities for the purposes of seeking legal redress via international courts.
Banning the media from "zones" shortly before "operations" involving the slaughter of civilians, as well as from "interrogation and detention facilities" has become as standard for the US and Israel as it has long been for North Korea.
How then, is a news junkie to get his/her fix? And how to tell if the stuff is any good?
Some Suggestions
Read it all. Read government press releases, papers from everywhere, raw wires, independent media, blogs.
Comparing the raw wires alone to what you see on CNN can be very informative.
Use common sense. If the US says 1 soldier died, and the guy from the little paper in Pashtunistan says 50 died, assume that about 25 soldiers died.
Take advantage of the internet. One of the greatest and most under-utilized advantages of the net is that if CNN says it is raining in Paris, you can go to #paris and ask "Are y'all wet?" Granted, 3 people will say no, 2 will say they are drowning, 1 will tell you that Frenchmen are never wet, but be patient and you will find 9 or 10 who will tell you that either they are carrying umbrellas, or that they are not.
Learn to distinguish between deliberate bias and perspective. For example, if Malaysia invaded the US, would Canadian TV be more likely to show cute Malaysian toddlers lisping about daddy going off to kill the bad guys, or footage of destroyed homes in a suburb of Chicago and wounded American children in the emergency room.
Some Americans especially seem to find this a challenge. A good first step is to realize that while to you, Iraqis, for example, may be an exotic strange breed of creature, seen only on TV, to people in the region, Iraqis are regular folks, people they know through marriage, business, sporting events.
Some do not realize that when they speak of news from other places being "biased," what they really mean is that quoting a Syrian source without immediately following it with the White House approved line on the nation, individual and/or the situation is something they are so unaccustomed to that they are unable to process the basic information contained in the quote!
The typical complaint about Al Jazeera is that they report on civilian casualties and humanize the victims, not unlike the way US channels personalize Israeli victims of suicide bombings.
To western eyes, humanizing Arabs seems so strange that they perceive it as "anti-American." In reality, it is empirical evidence of the effectiveness of decades of indoctrination with the belief that Arabs, nor for that matter, other groups from the Majority World, are not human.
A flood in India can kill 3000 people and if mentioned at all, it is a throwaway line before the commercial break, in the "world news briefs," but if one American is among the dead, you can count on at least one network having a camera crew out in front of the home of the deceased, interviewing old school chums. To an extent this is natural. Stories that hit close to home will logically be of greater interest than events that occur in far-flung lands. But just as it is important to recognize that, it is equally important to recognize when it is taken to such an extreme that it becomes an unconscious self-parody.
In matters of war, especially wars involving the US, as most do, directly or indirectly, the parody becomes even more exaggerated, with gandaclature that would make Orwell blush: a gang of gunmen, armed to the teeth kicking in doors, backed up by aerial bombardment of a residential neighborhood is a "peacekeeping operation." Crimes against humanity are "pacification." A Berlin-wall type prison enclosement is a "peace fence." Mercenaries are "civilian contractors," people defending their homes and homeland from a foreign aggressor are "insurgents," "rebels," "militants," or "terrorists." Children of seven or eight are "youths."
If the US seizes its own citizens or those of another country, for any reason, the victims are "detainees," to be held without charges or rights, forever if the US so pleases, but any US combatants captured by Iraqis are "hostages."
This ruse, on its face transparent to the point of absurdity, seems harmless enough, until you notice that the same terminology is used, automatically, unconsciously, by people who OPPOSE the policies and actions described, effectively turning their most eloquent arguments into a concession of defeat, a homage to the superior power of those who have successfully infiltrated their very thoughts.
Words are powerful things, and though news may appear to consist of words, until you have removed the words, you cannot know what happened.
DuctapeFatwaTuesday, May 11, 2004
BUSHCO HYPOCRISY KNOWS NO BOUNDS
The international media has long been reporting what a load of hooey continues to pour out of the White House. Now we're all up in arms about what 'a few isolated people' did to their prisoners, when in truth our armies are systemic in their arrogance.
One rule for them
Five PoWs are mistreated in Iraq and the US cries foul. What about Guantanamo Bay?
George Monbiot, UK Guardian, Tuesday March 25, 2003
Suddenly, the government of the United States has discovered the virtues of international law. It may be waging an illegal war against a sovereign state; it may be seeking to destroy every treaty which impedes its attempts to run the world, but when five of its captured soldiers were paraded in front of the Iraqi television cameras on Sunday, Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, immediately complained that "it is against the Geneva convention to show photographs of prisoners of war in a manner that is humiliating for them".
He is, of course, quite right. Article 13 of the third convention, concerning the treatment of prisoners, insists that they "must at all times be protected... against insults and public curiosity". This may number among the less heinous of the possible infringements of the laws of war, but the conventions, ratified by Iraq in 1956, are non-negotiable. If you break them, you should expect to be prosecuted for war crimes.
This being so, Rumsfeld had better watch his back. For this enthusiastic convert to the cause of legal warfare is, as head of the defence department, responsible for a series of crimes sufficient, were he ever to be tried, to put him away for the rest of his natural life.
His prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, in Cuba, where 641 men (nine of whom are British citizens) are held, breaches no fewer than 15 articles of the third convention. The US government broke the first of these (article 13) as soon as the prisoners arrived, by displaying them, just as the Iraqis have done, on television. In this case, however, they were not encouraged to address the cameras. They were kneeling on the ground, hands tied behind their backs, wearing blacked-out goggles and earphones. In breach of article 18, they had been stripped of their own clothes and deprived of their possessions. They were then interned in a penitentiary (against article 22), where they were denied proper mess facilities (26), canteens (28), religious premises (34), opportunities for physical exercise (38), access to the text of the convention (41), freedom to write to their families (70 and 71) and parcels of food and books (72).
They were not "released and repatriated without delay after the cessation of active hostilities" (118), because, the US authorities say, their interrogation might, one day, reveal interesting information about al-Qaida. Article 17 rules that captives are obliged to give only their name, rank, number and date of birth. No "coercion may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever". In the hope of breaking them, however, the authorities have confined them to solitary cells and subjected them to what is now known as "torture lite": sleep deprivation and constant exposure to bright light. Unsurprisingly, several of the prisoners have sought to kill themselves, by smashing their heads against the walls or trying to slash their wrists with plastic cutlery.
The US government claims that these men are not subject to the Geneva conventions, as they are not "prisoners of war", but "unlawful combatants". The same claim could be made, with rather more justice, by the Iraqis holding the US soldiers who illegally invaded their country. But this redefinition is itself a breach of article 4 of the third convention, under which people detained as suspected members of a militia (the Taliban) or a volunteer corps (al-Qaida) must be regarded as prisoners of war.
Even if there is doubt about how such people should be classified, article 5 insists that they "shall enjoy the protection of the present convention until such time as their status has been determined by a competent tribunal". But when, earlier this month, lawyers representing 16 of them demanded a court hearing, the US court of appeals ruled that as Guantanamo Bay is not sovereign US territory, the men have no constitutional rights. Many of these prisoners appear to have been working in Afghanistan as teachers, engineers or aid workers. If the US government either tried or released them, its embarrassing lack of evidence would be brought to light.
You would hesitate to describe these prisoners as lucky, unless you knew what had happened to some of the other men captured by the Americans and their allies in Afghanistan. On November 21 2001, around 8,000 Taliban soldiers and Pashtun civilians surrendered at Konduz to the Northern Alliance commander, General Abdul Rashid Dostum. Many of them have never been seen again.
As Jamie Doran's film Afghan Massacre: Convoy of Death records, some hundreds, possibly thousands, of them were loaded into container lorries at Qala-i-Zeini, near the town of Mazar-i-Sharif, on November 26 and 27. The doors were sealed and the lorries were left to stand in the sun for several days. At length, they departed for Sheberghan prison, 80 miles away. The prisoners, many of whom were dying of thirst and asphyxiation, started banging on the sides of the trucks. Dostum's men stopped the convoy and machine-gunned the containers. When they arrived at Sheberghan, most of the captives were dead.
The US special forces running the prison watched the bodies being unloaded. They instructed Dostum's men to "get rid of them before satellite pictures can be taken". Doran interviewed a Northern Alliance soldier guarding the prison. "I was a witness when an American soldier broke one prisoner's neck. The Americans did whatever they wanted. We had no power to stop them." Another soldier alleged: "They took the prisoners outside and beat them up, and then returned them to the prison. But sometimes they were never returned, and they disappeared."
Many of the survivors were loaded back in the containers with the corpses, then driven to a place in the desert called Dasht-i-Leili. In the presence of up to 40 US special forces, the living and the dead were dumped into ditches. Anyone who moved was shot. The German newspaper Die Zeit investigated the claims and concluded that: "No one doubted that the Americans had taken part. Even at higher levels there are no doubts on this issue." The US group Physicians for Human Rights visited the places identified by Doran's witnesses and found they "all... contained human remains consistent with their designation as possible grave sites".
It should not be necessary to point out that hospitality of this kind also contravenes the third Geneva convention, which prohibits "violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture", as well as extra-judicial execution. Donald Rumsfeld's department, assisted by a pliant media, has done all it can to suppress Jamie Doran's film, while General Dostum has begun to assassinate his witnesses.
It is not hard, therefore, to see why the US government fought first to prevent the establishment of the international criminal court, and then to ensure that its own citizens are not subject to its jurisdiction. The five soldiers dragged in front of the cameras yesterday should thank their lucky stars that they are prisoners not of the American forces fighting for civilisation, but of the "barbaric and inhuman" Iraqis.Tuesday, May 11, 2004
GOVERNMENTS PAY FOR WARS WITH INFLATION
Iraq war is a dagger at heart of U.S. economy
BY JAMES K. GALBRAITH
(James K. Galbraith teaches at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas in Austin and is chair of Economists Allied for Arms Reduction. This is from the Los Angeles Times.)
However badly the war is going in Iraq, on the home front it is still a good thing for President George W. Bush - so far.
A year ago, the push to Baghdad doubled the economic growth rate and got a recovery started. Now, the literally untold billions in military payrolls and equipment purchases that keep the war going also help to propel our economy along.
This is normal. All wars bring cheerful economic news at first.
They stimulate production. They raise capacity utilization, which helps business cover costs and improve earnings. This is good for the stock market. Wars create jobs and also usually draw young men and women away from the labor force, cutting unemployment. (So far, this war has been fought by a handful of overstretched professional soldiers, so the job effects have been small. That could change, especially if the draft is resurrected, as some would like.) But the good news doesn't last.
Soon enough, profiteers see their chances. Bottlenecks happen.
Prices go up. Long before unemployment disappears, wars generate inflation. Indeed, inflation - and the depreciation of private wealth and public debt that it brings - is the ages-old way in which governments pay for war.
Wars upset the trade balance. They gobble imports. And they tend to pull critical resources - scientific talent and key materials - away from exports. Our trade deficit is already staggering. As the economy grows, it will get worse. Under wartime conditions, it will get worse still.
Wars aggravate the national external debt. Already we borrow half a trillion dollars yearly from abroad. How long will Japan and China keep sending us goods and piling up uncashed IOUs in return? No one knows.
And what do we get for our blood and treasure? Security is priceless, of course - if, in fact, you get it. But in material terms, do we get, for instance, cheaper oil from our Saudi ally? Certainly not at the moment. In his new book, Bob Woodward does tell us that Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, has arranged a few months of relief for his friend, George W. Bush, this coming fall. But don't expect that largess to outlast the election.
The United States had one good economic experience with war. World War II conquered the Depression, reindustrialized the country and built the middle class. But that was special. The United States fought Word War II with full mobilization, super-high taxes, super-low interest rates, big deficits, price controls and rationing. Iraq isn't going to be like World War II.
Economically, the Iraq war is more like Vietnam: insidiously underestimated, sold to the public and Congress on false premises, improperly budgeted and inadequately taxed. During the Vietnam years, there was also economic growth at first. But then came creeping inflation, followed by worldwide commodity shocks, the oil crisis of 1973, international monetary disorder and a decade of economic troubles.
Could it happen again? Yes, it could.
Did Team Bush think through the economics of a long and costly war? There is no evidence it did. It counted on the war being quick, cheap and self-financing. If it thought about the long-range economics, there seems to have been only one goal: control of oil.
Spain's Philip II believed that control of the gold of Peru and silver of Mexico would guarantee his nation's predominance in Europe.
Elizabeth I and Sir Francis Drake disagreed. Louis XIV and Napoleon I trusted in conquest to enrich France. Their ministers - Colbert and Talleyrand - knew better. Winston Churchill vowed not to preside over the end of the British Empire. But his successors gave it up when they couldn't afford it anymore. Luckily, the United States was there to take over, and we had the support of the free world. But that was then.
By going into Iraq with few allies, we've assumed the entire economic cost. The home-front damage is small now, but it will build over time. And it will take time and effort to repair. The future American economy will especially need a new energy direction, emphasizing conservation and renewable energy, and concerted investment in the world's next generation of technologies - both to reduce our oil dependence and to help balance our trade deficits.
Let's hope Sen. John F. Kerry makes this point on his manufacturing tour this week.
And let's hope that Americans understand. Real security begins at home.Tuesday, May 11, 2004
RICAS Y FAMOSAS: A LACK OF SENSE AND SENSITIVITY
Photographer captures Mexico's elite living it up in luxury
By PATRICIA C. JOHNSON, Houston Chronicle
Wealth creates its own rules. Extreme wealth creates extreme rule-breaking.
Good taste and modesty are the first casualties.
It's evident in Vogue, Architectural Digest and television programs gorged with images of aggressive ostentation by the rich and famous around the world.
It's also on display at the Blaffer Gallery in Ricas y Famosas (Rich and Famous), an exhibit of revelatory portraits of Mexico's richest women, an elite to whom decorum and compassion seem as foreign as intergalactic travel.
Mexican photographer Daniela Rossell, whose own family is privileged, spent seven years photographing that inner circle. Her subjects appear in all their finery, flaunting their wealth. Some are -- were -- the photographer's friends; others are relatives.
Each of Rossell's sitters chose her setting. Most selected a room in their homes. Huge crystal chandeliers, colonial furniture, hunting trophies, damask and silk, ormolu, all the trappings of a royal court, clot the world in which they are pampered stars.
Each also chose her outfit and pose. These women -- teenagers, 20-somethings, surgically uplifted middle-agers -- see themselves as Hollywood stars, sex goddesses and fashion magazine princesses. They sit, recline, stand and straddle. They languish or flirt, with expressions of insouciance, ennui and coquetry, in bedrooms, living rooms and poolside. If they weren't so obscenely over the top in a land of grating poverty, they would be funny -- like Liberace, or Elvis at Graceland.
"Any resemblance with real events is not coincidental," Rossell writes in the three-sentence introduction to a book of her photographs.
Former President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz's granddaughter appears in a tennis outfit, one foot resting on the head of a stuffed lion, revealing the shorts beneath the skirt. Her yellow, off-one-shoulder T-shirt is emblazoned in red: "Peep Show! $1."
The only male (other than servants) is Emilio Salinas, son of Mexico's former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who reputedly plundered national coffers and now lives in self-imposed exile in Ireland.
Salinas, dressed in black, stands framed by the robust branches of a monumental oak, his arms crossed as he looks down his nose.
The large-scale, saturated C-print photographs caused outrage and consternation when exhibited in Madrid, Toronto and Mexico City. Some writers have used them to bolster demands for social and economic reform in Mexico. In an article for Reforma newspaper last year, historian Lorenzo Meyer wrote that Mexicans should welcome the book "the way an oncologist recognizes the usefulness of a clear image of cancer, even though it is repugnant."
On the other hand, those portrayed feel betrayed and have called Rossell a traitor to her class.
A disingenuous Rossell, who lives in Mexico City, claims surprise at the reactions. She also explains that she had her subjects sign releases.
The exhibit is rife with irony. Religious icons and emblems of faith, such as crucifixes and retablos, compete with gilded baroque furniture and giant taxidermy specimens. A voluptuous woman sits at the edge of a bed, legs like Sharon Stone's in her famous pose, surrounded by stuffed toys and dolls. A young girl, age 10 or so, wears fishnet hose and reclines in a niche like a baby Odalisque, next to an abstract revolutionary figure painted by David Alfaro Siqueiros. Four bridesmaids, evidently bored and tired, cram communion hosts in their pouting mouths.
"Bizarre" is the only word for a picture of two scantily clad women playing chess in a boudoir. The entire thing is in shades of bougainvillea; the furniture -- headboard, chairs, chess table, board and pieces -- are all creations of Pedro Friedeberg, renowned for furniture and decorative objects. Visual overload doesn't begin to describe the hallucinatory quality of the scene.
The exhibit and the more inclusive catalog are like an acid trip through a world of incredible wealth and seeming lack of sense -- and sensitivity.
Ricas y Famosas
Where: Blaffer Gallery, University of Houston, entrance 16 off Cullen Blvd.; 713-743-9530.
When: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays, 1-5 p.m. Saturdays-Sundays. Through June 11.Tuesday, May 11, 2004
THIS IS THE WORST INSULT, TO FEEL LIKE A WOMAN
"They made us stand in a way that I am ashamed to describe. They came to look at us as we stood there. They knew this would humiliate us," he said, adding that he was not sodomized.
"They were trying to humiliate us, break our pride. We are men. It's OK if they beat me. Beatings don't hurt us, it's just a blow. But no one would want their manhood to be shattered," he said.
"They wanted us to feel as though we were women, the way women feel and this is the worst insult, to feel like a woman," al-Shweiri said.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,118790,00.html
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Kill every last one of these misogynist vermin. Men who have this corrosively dangerous fundamental mindset about women must be removed for the good of society.
Monday, May 10, 2004
VEE VERE CHUST FOLLOWING ORDERS!
Red Cross Report Describes Abuse in Iraq
By ALEXANDER G. HIGGINS, Associated Press Writer
GENEVA - A Red Cross report disclosed Monday said coalition intelligence officers estimated that 70-90 percent of Iraqi detainees were arrested by mistake and said Red Cross observers witnessed U.S. officers mistreating Abu Ghraib prisoners by keeping them naked in total darkness in empty cells.
The report by the International Committee of the Red Cross supports its allegations that abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers was broad and "not individual acts" contrary to President Bush's contention that the mistreatment "was the wrongdoing of a few."
"ICRC delegates directly witnessed and documented a variety of methods used to secure the cooperation of the persons deprived of their liberty with their interrogators," according to the confidential report.
The delegates saw in October how detainees at Abu Ghraib were kept "completely naked in totally empty concrete cells and in total darkness," the report said.
"Upon witnessing such cases, the ICRC interrupted its visits and requested an explanation from the authorities," the report said. "The military intelligence officer in charge of the interrogation explained that this practice was 'part of the process.'"
This apparently meant that detainees were progressively given clothing, bedding, lighting and other items in exchange for cooperation, it said.
It said it found evidence supporting prisoners' allegations of other forms of abuse during arrest, initial detention and interrogation.
Among the evidence were burns, bruises and other injuries consistent with the abuse that prisoners alleged, it said.
The 24-page document, confirmed by the ICRC as authentic after it was published Monday by the Wall Street Journal, said the abuses were primarily during the interrogation stage by military intelligence.
Once the detainees were moved to regular prison facilities, the abuses typically stopped, it said.
The report cites abuses some "tantamount to torture" including brutality, hooding, humiliation and threats of "imminent execution."
"These methods of physical and psychological coercion were used by the military intelligence in a systematic way to gain confessions and extract information and other forms of cooperation from person who had been arrested in connection with suspected security offenses or deemed to have an 'intelligence value.'"
The agency said arrests allegedly tended to follow a pattern.
"Arresting authorities entered houses usually after dark, breaking down doors, waking up residents roughly, yelling orders, forcing family members into one room under military guard while searching the rest of the house and further breaking doors, cabinets and other property," the report said.
"Sometimes they arrested all adult males present in a house, including elderly, handicapped or sick people," it said. "Treatment often included pushing people around, insulting, taking aim with rifles, punching and kicking and striking with rifles."
It said some coalition military intelligence officers estimated "between 70 percent and 90 percent of the persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake. They also attributed the brutality of some arrests to the lack of proper supervision of battle group units."
Pierre Kraehenbuehl, ICRC director of operations, said Friday the report had been given to U.S. officials in February, but it only summarized what the agency had been telling U.S. officials in detail between March and November 2003 "either in direct face-to-face conversations or in written interventions."
Kraehenbuehl said the abuse of prisoners represented more than isolated acts, and that the problems were not limited to Abu Ghraib.
"We were dealing here with a broad pattern, not individual acts. There was a pattern and a system," he said, declining to give further details.
The report described how male prisoners were forced to parade around in women's underwear.
It said that information obtained "suggested the use of ill-treatment against persons deprived of their liberty went beyond exceptional cases and might be considered a practice tolerated by" coalition forces.
Kraehenbuehl said the ICRC regretted the publication and said it would have preferred sticking to its policy of confidential discussions with coalition authorities because the United States had been making progress toward meeting its demands.
ICRC chief spokeswoman Antonella Notari declined to discuss the full report.Sunday, May 09, 2004
"MINORITY REPORT" SOCIETY ALREADY SHAPING UP IN BRITAIN
Long lashes thwart ID scan trial
Long eyelashes and watery eyes could thwart iris scanning technology used for the government's ID card trial.
BBC News, United Kingdom - An MP who volunteered to take part in the trial at the UK Passport Service headquarters in London complained the scanning was uncomfortable.
Home Affairs Select Committee member Bob Russell, who suffers from an eye complaint, said his eyes watered and staff were unable to scan his iris.
A project spokesman said the aim of the pilot was to iron out such problems.
The government is seeking 10,000 volunteers for the trial of the cards that include iris patterns and fingerprints.
"The pundits tell us that we should expect 7% across the board to fail with iris recognition, mainly due to positioning in front of the camera," project director Roland Sables told MPs.
"Others are due to eye malformations, watery eyes and long eyelashes in a small percentage."
Hard contact lenses could also prove problematic, said Mr Sables.
So far in the trial, about 4% of iris scans have been unsuccessful, he added.
Mr Russell expressed concern about the scanning after his experience.
"I think this is going to cause serious problems for people who suffer with bright lights and people with epilepsy.
"I think it will be necessary at every machine to have at least one member of staff who is a qualified first aider to a high level.
Cement fingers
"I can see people keeling over with epileptic fits."
People with faint fingerprints would also be unable to register on the system, as would manual labourers, particularly those who work with cement or shuffle paper regularly, Mr Sables told the MPs.
Biometric details, which may also include a facial recognition scan, are due to be included in passports from 2007.
By 2013, 80% of the population are expected to have a biometric passport or driving licence, at which point the government will decide whether to make the ID cards compulsory.
The pilot scheme is due to begin in Newcastle on Friday, followed by Leicester and Glasgow later this month.
Next month a mobile registration unit will begin visiting towns and cities including Belfast, Peterborough, Macclesfield, Liverpool, Harrogate, Middlesbrough, Sheffield, Birmingham, Torbay, Torquay and Bournemouth.Sunday, May 09, 2004
MOM'S WAR
'Our Mothers' War': The Just-as-Great Generation
By LAURA SHAPIRO, New York Times
Stop the presses: the greatest generation had women in it. America's collective memory has largely failed them; but as Emily Yellin points out in her important new book, ''Our Mothers' War,'' some 350,000 women served in the military during World War II. Most were restricted by law to the home front, but thousands went overseas in the Women's Army Corps and in the Army and Navy nurse corps. Another 7,000 worked overseas for the Red Cross. More than a thousand women joined the WASP (Women's Airforce Service Pilots), where they ferried combat planes around the country, flew bombers and pursuit planes, and became test pilots whose flights ascertained whether a repair crew had done its work successfully -- or not. And of course, more than six million women took jobs in factories, shipyards and aircraft plants, built bombs and made ammunition.
Historians disagree about whether the upheavals of wartime had any lasting effect on American women; after all, most of them had returned to their usual domestic roles by 1946 and were busy starting the baby boom. But Yellin zeroes in on primary sources -- letters, memoirs and interviews that describe the war years as women actually experienced them. These firsthand reports make it impossible to believe that women simply reverted to their old self-expectations after the war, as if they'd never mastered a drill press or flown a B-26 Marauder or loaded 40-gallon milk cans onto trucks because they had to run the delivery operation while the men were away. ''I began to see those four years of the war as a kind of inadvertent revolution in America,'' Yellin writes, ''a time when . . . women all over this country from every walk of life learned they could accomplish things they had never been allowed or asked to try before.''
Polly Crow, for example. After her husband was sent overseas in 1944, she went looking for a job and found one at the Jefferson Boat and Machine Company in Anderson, Ind. She signed on for the night shift, 4 to midnight, six days a week. ''Darlin', you are now the husband of a career woman,'' she wrote her soldier. ''Just call me your little Ship Yard Babe!'' But there was nothing little or babelike about the change in Crow's life. Even before sitting down to write to her husband, she had taken her wages to the bank and opened her first checking account. ''It's a grand and glorious feeling to write a check all your own and not have to ask for one,'' she told him, and 60 years later the pride she took in her newfound independence still rings out from the page: her starting wage was 70 cents an hour, but she'd get a raise after two months, she wrote, ''if I'm any good and I know I will be.''
What makes Yellin's book especially valuable is that she doesn't stop with heartening stories like this. Instead, she keeps right on going, beyond the courage and patriotism and straight into the shameful, officially sanctioned horrors of the war years. She describes the racism that slammed doors on black women trying to get factory jobs or join women's military units; she documents witch hunts against lesbians in the military; and she writes about the women accused of ''morals violations'' who were rounded up, divested of their constitutional rights and jailed, lest they infect soldiers with venereal diseases. There are plenty of warm anecdotes about how moved and grateful soldiers were when they met nurses and Red Cross workers on the battlefield; there are also bloodcurdling tales of male hostility to Wacs and fliers. After two female pilots were killed in crashes attributed to unexplained ''equipment failure,'' officials found that someone had put sugar in the engine of the second plane. The investigation was quickly shut down, and the findings were kept quiet.
Even women working for the enemy ran into the peculiarities of American sexism. In a fascinating chapter on female spies and propagandists on both sides, Yellin writes about Mildred Gillars, who moved to Germany when she fell in love with a Nazi. Known to American troops as Axis Sally, she broadcast anti-American, anti-Semitic radio programs, and sometimes visited P.O.W. camps pretending to be a Red Cross worker. There she invited prisoners to tape messages for their families, then spliced in her own vitriolic remarks. After the war she was brought back to the United States and tried on 10 counts of treason -- with ample evidence, for the government had recordings of many of her hate-filled broadcasts, as well as testimony from former P.O.W.'s. Yet she was convicted on only one count: she had acted in an anti-American radio play about D-Day, portraying a Midwestern mom. For this, which was apparently deemed the ultimate betrayal, she got 10 to 30 years.
Yellin, a journalist based in Memphis, has done first-rate research and reporting; but too often she pulls back just at the point where her powerful material demands critical analysis. In view of the long association between war and sexual violence, for instance, the stark symbolism of ''nose art'' -- those heavily sexualized paintings of women splayed across the noses of many fighting planes -- calls for a far more thoughtful response than the benign reportage it receives here. Similarly, while she describes the hounding and internment of Japanese-Americans in unflinching detail, she sums up the policy as ''at the very least . . . an unfortunate oversight.'' She uses the same word, ''oversight,'' as a possible explanation for segregation in the war years and for barring military women from many of the Stage Door Canteens set up in the United States to entertain soldiers. Oversight? No, racism and misogyny, operating full force during the nation's otherwise finest hours.
What she does include, eloquently, is a tribute to her late mother, whose wartime letters inspired the book. A Red Cross worker in Saipan and a spirited, committed feminist, Carol Lynn Yellin and her millions of sisters left a legacy that deserves to be honored as vigorously as they themselves tackled the war years. ''All of our history has been written by men, for men and about men,'' Carol Lynn told a church group in 1971. The history of her own 1940's is long overdue for a rewrite, and ''Our Mothers' War'' is a fine first step.
Laura Shapiro's most recent book is ''Something From the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950's America.''