posted April 23, 2003 at 11:52 PM MDTOpen Letter
SecState Colin L. Powell
Sir:
I know for a fact that you are no "ChickenHawk". You do not know, but can establish as a fact, that I trained infantry and then airborne and then remustered CommRsch RegForce. I know "decapitation" of command and control so instintively that I knew it then, without having been taught it. I never did receive instruction in, because I abandoned my career. And I abandoned my career because of something that has extended across the intervening three decades to today; we are not facing a crisis of democracy, we are facing a crisis of legitimate leadership.
"It's not the deed, it's the cover-up that kills you." Did you hear that yet another high-flying financier is facing hard time? That's the world we live in: the neo-realists think that a successfull BigLie campaign is the BestThing. Would a SageCommander ever entertain such a thought? (Yes, likely he would ... and then he would on to something more productive.)
posted April 22, 2003 at 2:15 PM MDTSlugs and maggots, the war-mongers are!! Even the Marshall of Baghdad is a vampire!
Iraq bidder's apartheid past - "Fluor Corporation, the US building firm tipped to land a massive reconstruction deal in postwar Iraq, is facing a multibillion-dollar lawsuit claiming that it exploited and brutalised black workers in apartheid-era South Africa."
[...]
Fluor denies all the allegations. Meanwhile, it has emerged that Jay Garner, the retired US general who will oversee Iraqi reconstruction, is facing legal action over his activities while president of a defence company, SY Technology (now SY Coleman). [aren't they the folks who produce the Patriot Missile System? h_b]
Lawyers acting for rival DESE Research claim Garner lent his weight to senior officials at the Space and Missile Defence Command, where he previously worked, to deny DESE a research contract on a system for attacking enemy satellites. DESE's lawyer, Howell Riggs, also claims that Garner received a 'payoff' from successors at the defence command in the form of another lucrative contract."
The Iraqis' idea of democracy may differ from that of Mr Bush [an unfortunate title: those who accord most with Bush care least about civil society; these disruptions favour the vampires] - " ... Unless General Garner and his office in Baghdad can bring water, power and a reasonable semblance of order to Iraq's cities very soon, authority may gravitate irreversibly towards those Iraqis who can command respect at a populist level. At present, this means the imams; above all, the Shia imams who declined to attend last week's US-convened talks on an interim government, thereby seizing for themselves an opposition role.
It was not meant to be like this. One favoured scenario for the war was that the Baathist regime would fall almost of its own accord, leaving a near-complete administration intact. The British advance into the south was envisaged as primarily humanitarian, with convoys and pipelines bringing food, medicine and clean water to the needy of Basra. The fighting changed all that, as did the reluctance of the local sheikh nominated by the British to assume the burden of power.
Nothing is settled yet, and it may be at least a year before an Iraqi government is in place. In the meantime, nothing can be ruled out – including the possibility that this imposed revolution brings forth a government that looks rather more like those of Iraq's neighbours than the regional beacon of democracy forecast by President Bush."
The Redistribution of Honor [weeklypander.com] " ... You can divide Americans increasingly by their attitudes
towards Europe. [Well, ain't that a comforting thought? Stars of David and pink triangles to go around?! h_b_] The academic and media elites tend to see Europe as the enlightened home of a more urbane civilization. Religious leaders relate favorably to the simplistic pacifism and inherent anti-Americanism that reigns among continental leaders. Europe's long-term economic stagnation, its widespread anti-Semitism, its inability, unlike America, to absorb different peoples and cultures, its financial support for Palestinian terror--all of this is of course roundly ignored.
For most Americans, the war revealed that the Europeans -- notably the Belgians and the French -- are reliably people without honor. But not all Europe has failed in American eyes. We honor most of all the British, showing themselves to be our true cousins, as well as those along the continental periphery, from Spain to Lithuania, who supported the cause of bringing down a hideous dictator." [emph added]
Sounds like fascism to me ... what's it sound like to you?
He's William Kristol, Not Billy Crystal, and His War's Not Fun Anymore " ... Along the way he bonded with the circle of Republican "chicken hawks" who urged uncompromising war in Iraq, unilateralism in foreign policy, and massive military buildups. His pages bristled with neo-conservative visions of empire and running acclaim for the British imperial era. After September 11, The Weekly Standard became more like the "Weekly Pander" for Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Perle, while issuing steady warnings against Colin Powell's tendency to multilateralism. [emph added]
Kristol was so convinced of the "cakewalk" thesis of a short, triumphal war in Iraq that The Weekly Standard immediately took paternal credit for the concept of "shock and awe" when the bombing began. They re-ran their previous editorials like that of September 24, 2001, that called for toppling Saddam Hussein and preparing to "scorch southern Lebanon and Revolutionary Guard dormitories and depot facilities in Tehran". According to the journal's past prophecies, "awe is the sine qua non of politics" in the Middle East where "being seen as 'wobbly' is fatal". (Jan. 19, 1998)…"America's hayba - its ability to inspire awe" - had vanished in the mid-90s, "and once hayba is lost, only a demonstration of indomitable force restores it". (May 14, 2001)…"We have to restore our awe, and the only way you acquire and retain such majesty in the Middle East is through the use of military power". (Sept. 24, 2001) In the run-up to war, Kristol promoted his views of "Baghdad and Beyond" through a new book and continual interviews on Fox News, the television outlet of his patron, Rupert Murdoch. [Murdoch funds Kristol's "Weekly Pander" _ h_b]
I will leave the psychoanalysis to others, but this memory with the reader. Once in the West Bank, in the early Eighties, I came upon a Palestinian family standing with their meager possessions in the road while Israeli soldiers methodically blew up their two-story house. Stunned by the cold-blooded military precision, I interviewed the Israelis as to their purpose. The Palestinian family didn't appear to be an "enemy", weren't being arrested for anything, but nevertheless were made homeless, displaced on the road. Apparently someone in their extended family was an alleged "enemy", and for that the home had to be destroyed. You see, said the Israeli spokesman, the only thing the Arab understands is awesome power. It is, you see, the way they are."
p.s. Kristol is chairman of *!TaDa!* Project for the New American Century
Missing U.S.-Iraq History - " ... Last September Newsweek reported that the Reagan administration in the 1980s had allowed sales to Iraq of computer databases that Saddam could use to track political opponents and shipments of "bacteria/fungi/protozoa" that could help produce anthrax and other biological weapons. [Newsweek issue dated Sept. 23, 2002]
Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va,, asked Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld about the Newsweek story at a Senate hearing on Sept. 19. "Did the United States help Iraq to acquire the building blocks of biological weapons during the Iran-Iraq war?" Byrd inquired. "Are we, in fact, now facing the possibility of reaping what we have sown."
"Certainly not to my knowledge," Rumsfeld responded. "I have no knowledge of United States companies or government being involved in assisting Iraq develop chemical, biological or nuclear weapons."
Rumsfeld calls for regime change in North Korea - "A secret Donald Rumsfeld memorandum calling for regime change in North Korea was leaked yesterday, opening a fresh foreign policy split in the Bush administration. The classified discussion paper, circulated by the defence secretary, appears to cut directly across State Department plans to disarm Kim Jong-il, the North's dictator, through threats leavened by promises that his regime is not a target for overthrow.
" ... Mr Bush has said that he "loathes" Kim Jong-il, who is believed to have killed a tenth of his population through starvation and imprisonment in vast labour camps.
Colin Powell, the secretary of state, is said to have secured the president's approval for a carrot and stick approach in a meeting last week. Mr Powell called for threats to withhold aid and investment from North Korea, while assuring the regime that it faces no threat from the United States.
Mr Rumsfeld, who was "distracted" by the war against Saddam Hussein, did not attend the meeting and may now be trying to regain some traction in the Korea debate, officials speculated."
Does anyone in the Bush administration accept any principles other than those of Enron accounting and M$ FUD?
The Silence about September 11 - "... The 9/11 attacks are the principle reason, according to the Bush administration, which justifies the war. Can anyone tell me why those attacks happened? Has anyone in the Bush administration or the media come forth with a reasonable explanation besides 'Evildoers who hate our freedom?'" Every time I get blank stares, and always a few sets of widened eyes, as if my question caused them to suddenly realize that no such explanation has ever been put forward.
Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?"How innocent we were in 1998. How gravely we misjudged the dire ramifications of empowering the Taliban. How profoundly we underestimated the strength of the "stirred-up Moslems" we armed and trained with American tax dollars. What a price we have paid."
Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?
Brzezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?
One town's test of Iraqi democracy [csmonitor.com] - "How the 'founding fathers' of Umm Qasr went from tyranny to town council in days."
"Shortly after US and British forces pushed through this dusty port town in southern Iraq at the start of the coalition invasion, a school administrator got a crazy idea.
It was the kind of inspired thought that might have gotten him jailed, beaten, even killed a few days earlier. But now, Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party operatives were on the run, and in Umm Qasr, Najim Abed Mahdi could suddenly think the unthinkable. He and a handful of other Iraqis banded together to form their own town council."
posted April 21, 2003 at 6:27 PM MDTThis just in (2055AST on the board) Rumsfeld calls for regime change in North Korea - "A secret Donald Rumsfeld memorandum calling for regime change in North Korea was leaked yesterday, opening a fresh foreign policy split in the Bush administration."
Franks! Boots and saddles you worthless old fart! And someone wake Powell!!
Does intrinsic value ring a bell for you? Yaa?
Read this, wudya? The End Of The World As We Thought We Knew It; Ron Suskind - Writings
Environmentalists Hate Humanity!!
Environmentalists Would Make Human Life Impossible - "Earth Day approaches, and with it a grave danger faces mankind. The danger is not from acid rain, global warming, smog or the logging of rain forests, as environmentalists would have us believe. The danger to mankind is from environmentalism.
The fundamental goal of environmentalists is not clean air and clean water; rather it is the demolition of technological/industrial civilization. Their goal is not the advancement of human health, human happiness and human life; rather it is a subhuman world where "nature" is worshipped like the totem of some primitive religion."
Know what? I was laughing when I started laying out this item ... and then I thought of all the people reading this as being the sort of folks who send their pooches to hair stylists every wee, the sort who spend $75 a month on sea-silver (doubles your energy, doncha know? 65 nutrients!!) ... the American Right has become dangerously deranged.
Hey! Franks!! How do you feel about ushering in the New Fascism?
Meanwhile, the Democrats don't understand any of this -- so Bush will get the credit for condemning Trent Lott, because none of the Congressional leadership attacked him as vigorously.
The Democrats have the Bush Cartel and Grand Hypocrisy Party (GHP) sins handed to them on a hot plate -- but they're afraid of the heat and drop the platter.
Meanwhile, as the Democrats stay tongue tied out of fear of angering the mythical "Bubba" white male vote, Karl Rove understands exactly where the battle for 2004 will be fought -- and he's winning already."
Here's a format I had been anticipating for a while: D A N G F U N N Y ** P O L I T I C S ** P R E S E N T S: Karl Rove's Strategery Memos
Oh-wooops ... I keep forgetting these pathological assholes know precisely and exactly who they're talking to. "The limits to what the oppressed will suffer are the constraints of the oppressors", remember? Well the Bush Whitehouse knows that the American people are now positioned to eat shit by the bucket-full ... and that's not good for anyone at all.
You know how I keep talking about Perle hanging from the rafters by his heels? Well, Karl Rove scares me a hell of a lot more than Perle does ... from a cursory examination of anecdotal evidence, I'd say the guy is a class-A psychopath. (on the off chance that you consider Mr. Nice Guy behaviour proof positive of quality character, I have three pieces of advice: 1) give your head a shake, 2) read a book, 3) have a thought.)
Why Are These Men Laughing?; (Esquire; Jan03) - " ...President George W. Bush called John DiIulio "one of the most influential social entrepreneurs in America" when he appointed the University of Pennsylvania professor, author, historian, and domestic-affairs expert to head the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. He was the Bush administration’s big brain, controversial but deeply respected by Republicans and Democrats, academicians and policy players. The appointment was rightfully hailed: DiIulio provided gravity to national policy debates and launched the most innovative of President Bush’s campaign ideas—the faith-based initiative, which he managed until this past February, the last four months from Philadelphia.
"There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus," says DiIulio. "What you’ve got is everything—and I mean everything—being run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."
In a seven-page letter sent a few weeks after our first conversation, DiIulio, who still considers himself a passionate supporter of the president, offers a detailed account and critique of the time he spent in the Bush White House.
"I heard many, many staff discussions but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions," he writes. "There were no actual policy white papers on domestic issues. There were, truth be told, only a couple of people in the West Wing who worried at all about policy substance and analysis, and they were even more overworked than the stereotypical nonstop, twenty-hour-a-day White House staff."
New role for mosques in Iraq [bbc.co.uk]
CBS News | THIS STORY HAS BEEN DELETED | March 26, 2003 19:33:58
posted April 20, 2003 at 7:13 PM MDTMy god, internet culture really is universal! Our favorite spokesperson from Baghdad has gotten himself a personal internet journal!
Mohammed Saeed al Sahaf's Journal
After the War, New Stature for Rumsfeld
Dig: Pentagon Expects Long-Term Access to Four Key Bases in Iraq
Perhaps most Americans are so feckless that they value honesty not at all (google: Microsoft + FUD) ... are we all to hope that the rest of the world is similarly servile? Helluva thing to bet our kids' futures on!
Iraqis Say Lynch Raid Faced No Resistance Hassan and other doctors said they were on duty that evening, when "we heard a big thumping nearby the hospital. And the sound of helicopters -- not just one. Then someone from the hospital, a colleague, said soldiers were entering the hospital from the back door."
"We agreed to stay in one room, not to intervene," Hassan said. The soldiers broke down several doors in the hospital before locating Lynch ..."
They had to break down a buncha doors looking for the young lady? Odd ... they knew where she was. And Lynch apparently sustained injuries when her vehicle overturned ... dang, first you make a wrong turn inro enemy territory, then hit the ditch. Yikes!
But life for some involves no heroic rescues: ""I was shot by the Americans," said Akeel Kadhim, 20, a student whose left leg was amputated. "I was running to another wounded person, trying to save him. . . . We are innocent. We were not fighting. We were not resisting. I tried to save an innocent person. Why did they shoot me?" In the next bed, Hassan Aoda, 28, said he was riding on a bus with 28 other Iraqis when a U.S. armored vehicle opened fire on them at a road crossing on March 25. "I don't know why they shot at us," he said, lying on his back and nursing a fractured left shoulder and arm. "I'm an innocent person. I wasn't fighting the Americans."
As BadAttitude puts it: "The Pentagon figured, correctly, that their best play under the circumstances was to shut up. If they sat on the truth, the press could be counted on to print the legend."
The TimesOnline version reveals the cowboy nature of the "liberators": "Four doctors and two patients, one of whom was paralysed and on an intravenous drip, were bound and handcuffed as American soldiers rampaged through the wards, searching for departed members of the Saddam regime. An ambulance driver who tried to carry Private Lynch to the American forces close to the city was shot at by US troops the day before their mission.
... The Iraqi intelligence officers told the hospital that Private Lynch would soon be transferred to Baghdad, a prospect that terrified her. After her condition stabilised, they ordered Dr Harith to transfer Jessica to another hospital.
Instead he told the ambulance driver to deliver her to one of the American outposts that had already been established on the ouskirts of the city. "But when he reached their checkpoint, the Americans fired at him," he said. "[I guess the troops wanted to wait til there were cameras or reporters around.]
(Kinda reminds me of the hopped-up junky flying the fighter who dropped a bomb on our troops in Afghanistan [4 dead; 8 wounded]. Word is that his superiors have said they noticed. Geez, ain't that skeery?!)
All I had to do was take a little walk down the red carpet and right now I'd be as comfortable as any bleeding-heart liberal ... with a decent car in the parkade, a fast internet connection, an appropriate box on my desk, and a closet full of skeletons ... but nooooooooo, I had to opt for integrity. What a turkey I've been.
TIME Magazine | Davos 2003
TEN - the Technology Empowerment Network
Hawai'i and the Rosy Dawn of US Imperialism - "110 years ago, U.S. Marines, acting at the invitation of wealthy haole (white) sugar planters, invaded the Kingdom of Hawai'i and overthrew Queen Lili'uokalani, eighth monarch in the line of King Kamehameha I. A day, to coin a phrase, that lives in infamy. Five years later, Hawai'i was formally annexed by the U.S.; it became a U.S. "territory" in 1900, and the fiftieth state in 1959."
The Bush Vision and the Culture
of Power - " ... For those too young to recall or those with short memories, the four above mentioned characters conspired to circumvent congressional defunding of the Contras, the group President Reagan had chosen in the early 1980s to depose the government of Nicaragua. These four and their cohorts hatched a plot to sell weapons to Iran (also prohibited) so that they could funnel the proceeds to their beloved Contras ands then cover it up.
In his testimony to Congress, the scrappy Abrams made witness history when he declared: "I never said I had no idea about most of the things you said I had no idea about." The now 54 year old Abrams also explained in his autobiography that he had to inform his young children about the headline announcing his indictment, so he told them he had to lie to Congress to protect the national interest.
The then Deputy Assistant Secretary of State to Central America pleaded guilty to withholding information from Congress and received two years probation and 100 hours community work. Now, the 54 year old Abrams as the new White House man on the Middle East, having learned that one can get away with felonious behavior if you maintain close links to the Bush family, will attempt to redraw the roadmap of the Middle East. Secretary of State Colin Powell drafted a plan for designing a peaceful solution and eventually a Palestinian state. The vision, by deduction, amounts to a rubber stamp for Israeli repression and expansion."
Another Century of War? - "A foreign policy that is both immoral and unsuccessful is not simply stupid, it is increasingly dangerous to those who practice or favor it. That is the predicament that the United States now confronts.
Communism no longer exists, American military power has never been greater, but the U.S. has never been so insecure and its people more vulnerable. After fifty years of interventions in the affairs of dozens of nations on every continent, interventions that varied from training police and armies to supplying them with lethal equipment and advisers to teach them how to use it, after two major wars involving its own manpower for years, America's sustained, intense, and costly efforts have only culminated in greater risks to itself. There is more instability and violence in the world than ever, and now it has finally reached its own shores--and its political leaders have declared it will continue. By any criterion, above all the security of its own citizens, the U.S.' international policies, whether military or political, have produced consummate failures. It is neither realistic nor ethical. It is a shambles of confusions and contradictions, pious, superficial morality combined with cynical adventurism, all of which has undermined, not strengthened, the safety of the American people and left a world more dangerous than ever."
Safer, but how safe? [economist.com] - "A lot of time and money is going into protecting New York. More is needed." [emph added hfx_ben]
"A rebel against the gods, punished by Zeus, poor Atlas had to bear the burden of carrying the heavens on his shoulders. New Yorkers will sympathise. “Operation Atlas”, the Big Apple's security plan, is a heavy load, costing the cash-strapped city $13m a week. And people are wondering whether it will be wise for the city to lower its guard as the Iraq war ends."
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | 'Our voices are lost in the tide of intolerance sweeping America' - " ... A relative tells me that a history teacher tells his 11-year-old son, my nephew, that Susan Sarandon is endangering the troops by her opposition to the war. Another relative tells me of a school board decision to cancel a civics event that was proposing to have a moment of silence for those who have died in the war, because the students were including dead Iraqi civilians in their silent prayer. A teacher in another nephew's school is fired for wearing a T-shirt with a peace sign on it. A friend of the family tells of listening to the radio down South as the talk show host calls for the murder of a prominent anti-war activist. Death threats have appeared on other prominent anti-war activists' doorsteps for their views. Relatives of ours have received threatening emails and phone calls."
Read this, would you?
Final Proof that War is About the Failure of the Human Spirit
