posted May 9, 2003 at 12:58 PM MDTFrance Insists on U.N. Role in Iraq " ... [T]he United States and nations that backed it in Iraq submitted a new resolution to the U.N. Security Council that calls for lifting sanctions and putting Iraq's oil revenues under U.S.-British control to help pay for reconstruction efforts. [emph added]
The resolution would only give the United Nations a limited, largely advisory role. The plan envisions the United States and Britain running the country as "occupying powers" for at least a year and probably much longer - a vision at odds with that of several council members, notably Russia and France." [emph added]
posted May 8, 2003 at 7:52 PM MDTPeace Action "In the 1980s the Reagan Administration saw Saddam Hussein as "vital to US efforts to contain the spread of Islamic fundamentalism." In December of 1983, Donald Rumsfeld met with Hussein to discuss US support for Iraq. Throughout the 1980s, the US assisted in the development of Iraqi chemical, biological and missile system programs.
They are doing it again
The next war is already being set in motion by a policy of arming any dictator that claims to be on our side in the "war on terrorism."
Cheney's old firm handed lucrative oilfield contract [Times Online] - "Halliburton, which was headed by Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, for five years until 2000, was handed a much larger role in post-war Iraq than previously believed. Its emergency contract, which it won from the US Government without having to bid against any rivals, was initially described as for fighting fires at Iraq’s oil wells. But it emerged yesterday that the firm has also been charged with operating pumps and distributing oil, a much more direct, lucrative and politically sensitive role.
Henry Waxman, a Democrat congressman from California, raised the details of Halliburton’s contract after receiving a letter from the US Army Corps of Engineers, which awarded the contract. The Corps wrote to Mr Waxman saying the contract included extinguishing fires and the “operation of facilities and distribution of products”. [emph added]
Mr Waxman stopped short of accusing the Corps of deliberately misleading anyone when the original contract was announced, but he said: “I am concerned that the Administration’s reluctance to provide complete information about this and other Iraqi contracts has denied Congress and the public important information.”
He said that the revelations were at odds with Mr Bush’s assertion that Iraq’s oil belonged to the Iraqi people. “Only now, over five weeks after the contract was first disclosed, are members of Congress and the public learning that Halliburton may be asked to pump and distribute Iraqi oil under the contract.”
[...]
Mr Waxman also disclosed that Halliburton had done business in Iran, Iraq and Libya for years, despite US embargoes. The dealings “appear to have continued during the period 1995 and 2000, when Vice-President Cheney headed the company”, Mr Waxman wrote in a letter to Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary."
posted May 7, 2003 at 11:54 AM MDTOkay, so you haven't the spine to add 2+2 without perjuring yourself ... but you're angling to live out your days in something like comfort, right? Now, tell me you aren't insanely in denial!
Cop Photographed Class Projects [Associated Press] BARRE, Vt. -- A uniformed police officer persuaded a custodian to open a school in the middle of the night so he could photograph class projects he found objectionable as an American and as a military veteran.
The projects that Barre Town Police Officer John Mott photographed included a poster of President Bush with duct tape over his mouth and a large papier-mache combat boot with the American flag stuffed inside stepping on a doll."
[What, you might wonder, would move LEO do do such things? Read on:]
"'I wanted everybody else to see what was in that room," said Mott, who convinced a custodian to unlock the classroom door last month."
[Ah! I just knew there had to be a good reason for such disregard of fundamental rights!]
A note of something like hope.
Perhaps the worst consequence of the war-mongering we're experiencing now is it's effect on our fundamental understanding of power: whether it's the red-neck cracker screaming at the peace-nik in the street, or the smarmy right-winger squelching conversation at the water cooler, or the fundamentalist nay-sayer, the deprecation of dissent is actually the valuation of violence ... and the check against power is not violence, which destroys power, but actually another and independent power. That's the profound realization underlying the Constitution of the USofA (and why it's been so often violated by being imposed on people).
Power always derives from the people ... that's not an abstract, that's a realization into the nature of reality; democracy as an institution is an invention, a creation, but the forces it recognizes and harnesses are elemental. So, to opress or suppress the people is to destroy the root of power ... the way Bush and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Cheney are fucking around with power-structures in Iraq is intended to ham-string the population, to make sure that they are never truly free.
The Constitution is an artiface, a thingie, a construct, a tool, an artifact, something made ... and thus is the nature of law. But what makes it special as a document is that it recognizes the energies that lie surging under the surface of the people that comprise the nation. However flawed it is as a work of humans, it is a great project. And that's why the American hawks are so terribly wrong: they impose themselves by destroying power, not checking it.
But nonetheless and still, the people united can never be defeated ... simply cannot be ... just can't. The state that tries to defeat the people is a tyranny, regardless of how good the lawyers are, and how able the goons; because it is a tyranny that survives by destroying contending power, it brings about its own empoverishment and its own flacidity. However mind-fucked modern consumers are is only a measure of how soon the system will implode. "Capitalism gives rise to its own exectuioners and grave-diggers."
posted May 6, 2003 at 8:19 PM MDTI first encountered President Dwight D. Eisenhower's farewell speech in the 70s, when I was trying to rationalize having trash-canned my military career ... trying to make sense of why Canada was being drawn into the sink-hole of militarism. It chilled me then. It chills me now. Let yourself be chilled, for a moment: Military Industrial Complex [ideotrope.org] "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."
"American efforts to foist new rulers on the people of Iraq are becoming increasingly grotesque. In some cities US troops have sparked demonstrations by imposing officials from the old Saddam Hussein regime. In others they have evicted new anti-Saddam administrators who have local backing.
They have mishandled religious leaders as well as politicians. In the Shia suburbs of Baghdad, they arrested a powerful cleric, Mohammed Fartousi al-Sadr, who had criticised the US presence. In Falluja, an overwhelmingly Sunni town, they detained two popular imams. All three men were released within days, but local people saw the detentions as a warning that Iraqis should submit to the US will.
[...]
The massacre in Falluja was symptomatic. The town was quiet for two weeks after Iraqi troops and local Ba'ath party leaders fled. The imams halted the looting and got much of the stolen property returned. A new mayor arranged for schools to re-open and persuaded police to return to work. Then the Americans arrived, arrested imams, put up roadblocks and occupied a school - all without prior discussion with local leaders."
Another regime change in Iraq [Asia Times] - "The war between the Pentagon and the State Department appears to be raging as furiously as ever with reports that the latter may have mounted something of a coup d'etat against the neo-conservative hawks around Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld by having former diplomat L Paul Bremer as Washington's new viceroy in Baghdad.
[...]
Rumsfeld had handpicked retired general Jay Garner to oversee the occupation and report to Centcom commander, General Tommy Franks. Garner, who spent the early part of the war in Kuwait, has been in Baghdad for more than a week. The defense secretary had also selected his own chief of staff, Lawrence di Rita - whose wife is on the staff of the pro-INC Committee for the Liberation of Iraq - to also play a prominent role, as he did in a meeting of 300 Iraqi leaders convened by Garner in Baghdad this week.
posted May 5, 2003 at 3:05 PM MDTIf the people of the USofA are disgusted by Enron's accounting hi-jinks, do they feel themselves represented by the Bush administration's crony capitalism in Iraq? A peculiar way to dedicate the lives of sons and daughters ...
Empowering Iraq [tompaine.com] - "Jack Kemp, director of the conservative think tank Empower America, has emerged as a key player in the debate over how best to rebuild Iraq. Kemp, who was Bob Dole's running mate in his unsuccessful bid for president in 1996, recently outlined a plan that promises to become a finalist in the competing ideas about Iraq's future.
The big winners in the Rumsfeld/Garner rebuilding plan are private U.S. companies like Halliburton, Bechtel, Dyncorps, Research Triangle Institute and SAIC, which have been hired to do everything from putting out oil fires, to rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure, to grooming a select group of 150 Iraqi exiles for the U.S.-run "transitional authority" that will be the shell of a new Iraqi government. For the most part, they have received secret, no-bid, cost-plus contracts. Is that what democracy looks like?
Former Shell Oil executive Philip Carroll is set to chair an advisory committee that will determine the future of the Iraqi oil industry, in consultation with the Pentagon. Not exactly Iraq for the Iraqis, one might say. Most of the companies involved in rebuilding Iraq have close ties to the Bush administration, and are likely to funnel some of the money they make on rebuilding Iraq into the Bush 2004 campaign coffers.
"The politicisation of relief complicates the provision of aid, and may yet scupper the effective reconstruction of Iraq. At its worst, using humanitarian aid as a political or military tool to woo the 'hearts and minds' of the Iraqi population risks prolonging suffering, entrenching unilateralism, and reducing the willingness of states to contribute towards the rebuilding of Iraq".
posted May 4, 2003 at 8:57 PM MDT*Duhh* ... blog works again, for a while, in a test.
What once was a usable archive listing ... you'll notice that the entirety of the Iraqi invasion period is missing. Entirely deniable, of course. I mean, fuck, who has the time to track such chicken-shit stuff down, right? *buncha fucking lamers!*
N.B.: I now have to fire up IE to edit my blog ... nice going, google! Keep that chicken-vulture flying high!
Stupidity of heroic proportions
The US stole the richest real estate on the face of the earth ... get it?
The consequences of google's buy-out on blogger.com have come clear: they have blocked NS4.X users ... nice move, ya buncha fucks.
I'm happy this happened on my birthday; all these years I've laboured under the feeling that, by going deep and trusting to fundamental dynamnics I had mis-read the play. Now I know it's so: American yuppies and their kids are a buncha fucks.
Worthless twits ... wankers. "What does it profit a man if he wins the world but loses his soul?
Fucking wankers.
Dig: new.blogger greeted me with my first name, but blogger.com refused me, and my blog marklet has stopped working.
Way to go, Evan! Got yer new sports car yet?
Buncha fucking wankers. *"Geeeee, I wonder why they hate us so?!"
Stunned fucks.
Didja realize yer fucked?
No, hey, no, c'mere, hey ... no no
I mean, objectively ... no judgement ... ya realize yer fucked? I mean, since yer fucked, it's the sorta question a friend should ask, right?
Israel bans peace activists [Globe and Mail] (the sort of item "smart" yuppies ignore.)
*Hey pssssst yuppy, you know what I think of you after 30 years in the trenches? Can you guess? Yes!? ... guess again, yuppy ... guess again, and again, and again ... cuz yer fucked. You've lost it. See: that's why I didn't eat shit, You did. So you've still got a Beemer (or just the debt) ... and you've got shit for brains. And I've got you as a cohort. Poor me ... you're pret'fuckin'near worthless, yuppy ... the whole world knows it, 'cept you ... and nobody takes your word for anything. Ya worthless fuck. Ya piece'o' shit. Ya spineless crud.
Given the choice of fascistic vigour and the likes of you, no wonder so many are swinging right.
Ya friggin' spineless prigs ...
