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June 2005 Articles
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DV Articles
November 2003
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Listening to President Bush address the nation on Iraq, one could be forgiven for thinking that Bush is a man without conscience, with little regard for the intelligence of the nation he purports to lead. Clinging to the vestiges of a myth long since dispelled, Bush invoked the attacks of September 11 no fewer than six times in this speech, determined to link Iraq to a crime it did not commit. Bush repeatedly exploited the nation's grief and sorrow regarding 9/11 in a callous and cynical effort to convince someone, anyone, that by invading Iraq we handed down a just punishment for a wrong we had suffered....(full article)
In his
address marking the first anniversary of the U.S. pretending to hand over
sovereignty in Iraq, George Bush continued to justify the U.S. military
presence there by urging Americans to not "forget the lessons of September
11." Bush continues to preach that "the terrorists who attacked us and the
terrorists we face murder in the name of a totalitarian ideology that
hates freedom, rejects tolerance and despises all dissent," and that they
can only be stopped by transforming their societies into pro-Western style
democracies. (Note: Bush said "terrorists", not "insurgents". In fact he
didn't use the word "insurgent" in his entire speech. Typical of this
presidency, the facts don't bear this out....(full
article)
Honey, They Shrunk My Iraq War Speech
Under
the roof of the White House, George Bush has assembled what appears to be
the most lethargic unimaginative group of speech meisters ever to gain
government employment. The amount of redundancy in his smoke and mirrors
show at Fort Bragg was astounding. Virtually every sentence in the speech
was plagiarized from previous Bush pep talks, and whole paragraphs were
plagiarized from other parts of the same speech. Are we paying these guys?
I want a refund. If this is government work, privatize speech writing or
outsource it to China. I can understand why Bush wanted to emphasize
certain points given the growing unpopularity of his war of choice. But
first, Mr. President, you need to keep the audience awake. After a
complete review of the president’s speech, I managed to shrink it to a
seven-minute pep talk:....(full article)
“Up in Smoke”: Bush Flops in Prime Time The Bush prime-time fiasco was the biggest presidential pratfall in the history of the office. Bush was expected to lay out a new vision that would soothe the jittery nerves of the country but, instead, ladled out the same tired bromides he’s used for the last five years. Even his worshipful audience of servicemen and women slumped into stunned silence as the Commander in Chief exhumed the pitiable rhetoric of the Vietnam era. The reverberations of Westmoreland’s “light in the tunnel” speech resonated through the Fort Bragg auditorium as Bush blathered on about “no timetable” and “staying the course.” The oratory offered no explanation for why the nation continues to slip beneath the Iraqi quicksand.....(full article)
In the early 1970s, when George W. Bush was shirking his National Guard duties in Alabama, state Republican Party insiders tagged him with the moniker, “The Texas Soufflé,” due to his habitual arrogance, ceaseless indulgence in braggadocio, and preening sense of privilege and entitlement. At present, after nearly half a decade of Bush’s soufflé presidency and the rise of what could be termed soufflé economics, soufflé energy policies, and soufflé jingoism, I think those Alabama party hacks were being charitable in their characterization of Bush, because the composition of any given soufflé is too subtle and far too much care must be taken in its preparation to be an apt analogy for his obtuse, crude persona....(full article)
President Bush will address the nation about Iraq tonight. This is the first time he will be speaking to the country on the U.S. occupation of Iraq since the Downing Street Memos have been released. As ten senators pointed out in a letter on Friday, June 24: “at a time the White House was promising Congress and the American people that war would be their last resort, they believed military action against Iraq was ‘inevitable.’” Thus, the President was telling the public he was seeking a peaceful resolution when in fact he was planning an invasion. He told Americans there were unmanned Iraqi aircraft that could drop bombs over our cities. His own intelligence agencies told him this was inaccurate. He tied Saddam to Al Qaeda and Bin Laden -- there was no evidence of that. Indeed, the two -- one secular, one fundamentalist -- were mortal foes. He talked about Saddam being able to launch a strike on the United States in 45 minutes -- there was no evidence Iraq was capable of such an attack. He talked about the potential of a mushroom cloud over the United States -- a nuclear attack by Saddam -- when there was no evidence that a weakened, surrounded and embargoed Saddam had any nuclear capability. When he was going to the U.N. it was not to seek peace but to try and make an illegal invasion legal by tricking Saddam into a misstep. For month after month, it now seems evident President Bush and his minions misled the nation, repeating the fabrications and manipulations about weapons of mass destruction over and over and over in a drum beat to war....(full article)
There were reports last Friday that representatives of the US Occupation Forces in Iraq were engaged in secret talks with leaders of the Iraqi resistance. For a brief two-day period, there was reason to hope that there might be a genuine opportunity to begin negotiations for a political settlement to the 27-month conflict. When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made his scheduled appearances on the Sunday morning talk shows he confirmed that the alleged meetings had taken place saying, “Well, the first thing I would say about the meetings is they go on all the time.” Later, he would reinforce this suggestion on Meet the Press when he was asked whether there had been “two meetings between Iraqi and U.S. officials and some members of the insurgency.” Rumsfeld responded, “I think there have probably been many more than that.” It was all lies....(full article)
In a speech at the White House commemorating the one-year anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, President Bush said, “All of us can now agree that the fall of the Iraqi dictator has removed a source of violence, aggression and instability in the Middle East.” Yet most Iraqis will now argue that the removal of Saddam Hussein from power merely replaced one form of tyranny with another....(full article)
When Dick Cheney’s optimistic assessment of the war in Iraq was greeted with derision, he responded by suggesting that his critics needed to consult a dictionary on the meaning of the word “throes.” Throes: 1. Pangs, spasms. 2. A hard or painful struggle. The vice president's problem is that his critics were not responding to the meaning of the word “throes” but to the adjective preceding it. Last: Final, having no successor; after all others in time or order. No one disputes that there will be violent upheaval in the days and weeks ahead. A day without eruptions of violence in Baghdad, Mosul, Tikrit, Fallujah or anywhere else where American troops are engaged, would be shocking indeed. Only yesterday, the media reports dozens dead from suicide attacks in Mosul while mortar attacks in Baghdad claim another eight lives, including the Baghdad Chief of Police, and the official death toll for American soldiers climbed another notch....(full article)
Less developed countries’ external “debt” impedes their economic development and attempts to reduce poverty. But it generates huge revenues for rich countries. In the decade 1994 to 2004, Brazil paid rich country creditors US$400 billion in interest alone, equivalent to the entire population of Brazil working a whole year. “Debt” serves various seamlessly linked purposes, all to the advantage of rich country creditors. It is an indispensable mechanism those countries use to guarantee access to diminishing global resources. “Debt” sustains a super-abundant net flow of easy money to their already unimaginably wealthy financial centers. It helps them to dictate international terms of trade by keeping resource-rich poorer countries in quasi-colonial dependency. The deceitful mass-murderers who invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and overthrew Haiti's elected government are not concerned about people in poverty. They will ensure “debt” relief only happens in a way that sustains poor countries’ ability to keep on paying. Periodically, they remake the Procrustes bed in which they install their victims, the better to amputate what they feel larger victims don't need or to stretch more puny victims to their optimum yield. The latest G7 declaration on debt relief is another exercise in this procrustean sadism....(full article)
“We are all drowning
in filth…I feel that intellectual honesty and balanced judgment have
simply disappeared from the face of the earth.”
I've
given the date of Orwell's words lest someone think they were written by a
contemporary bearing the writer's name. Recent events surely qualify the
United States to claim some sort of title from the Guinness Book of
Records such as the world's largest moral and intellectual open sewer....
Most people under forty have no idea what investigative journalism is. Those old enough to remember Watergate and Deep Throat think it started with Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward and “All the President’s Men.” But investigative journalism has a rich and distinguished history in the United States. It started at least a century ago. But these writers weren’t called investigate journalists back then. They were “muckrakers”....(full article)
Two weeks ago the UK Independent ran an article that confirmed the US had “lied to Britain over the use of napalm in Iraq.” (6-17-05) Since then, not one American newspaper or TV station has picked up the story even though the Pentagon has verified the claims. This is the extent to which the American “free press” is yoked to the center of power in Washington. As we’ve seen with the treatment of the Downing Street Memo, (which was reluctantly reported five weeks after it appeared in the British press) the air-tight American media ignores any story that doesn’t embrace their collective support for the war. The prospect that the US military is using “universally reviled” weapons runs counter to the media-generated narrative that the war was motivated by humanitarian concerns (to topple a brutal dictator) as well as to eliminate the elusive WMDs. We can now say with certainty that the only WMDs in Iraq were those that were introduced by foreign invaders from the US who used them to incinerate the indigenous people who dared to resist....(full article)
While George W. Bush has been conducting his lollapalooza tour for Social Security, the quieter work of dismantling Medicaid has been carried on by the National Governors Association. Right on schedule, the states are starting to feel the first deep hunger pains, the beginning of the end, death by starvation. Grover Norquist, who has said of the states, “I’d like to see them all go bankrupt,” must be savoring the moment. Saturday, June 11, Governor Phil Bredesen of Tennessee, who is about to cut 300,000 people from his state’s Medicaid rolls, gave a national Saturday morning radio address laying out the anti-Medicaid position: “Uncontrolled growth in the cost of Medicaid is a crisis that’s forcing states to choose between quality health care on one hand and a quality education for our children on the other.” This is a classic neo-con false premise. Medicaid costs are 50 percent less than overall health care, which means that rising health care costs for the whole economy are at fault, not Medicaid. And certainly not education. . . . Unfortunately for the poor, the disabled, and children, Phil Bredesen’s talk on Saturday was the Democrats’ weekly radio address to the nation....(full article)
In the wake of the Downing Street Memo and other leaked British documents created before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, many have begun to question the legality of the Bush administration's actions. In particular, families of soldiers, a few Democratic senators, and hundreds of thousands of outraged Americans, are calling for an independent investigation of the Bush administration's manipulation and outright fabrication of intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq. The word "impeachment" is even being bandied about. While it is certainly appropriate to demand an independent investigation of the Bush administration's pre-invasion shenanigans, as well as to pursue bringing articles of impeachment against the President for his official misconduct, there is something larger at stake. There is the matter of the Bush administration's post-invasion atrocities....(full article)
The Minutemen Project (MP) debuted in April on the Arizona-Mexico border to block immigrants from Mexico and Central America. They were and are looking for low-wage U.S. employment. California Gov. Schwarzenegger praised the MP. Buoyed by this immigrant’s support and the popularity of white supremacy generally, the MP is now tackling the growing U.S. trade deficit, the nation’s excess of imports over exports....(full article)
People on Main St. have rejected the idea that Social Security needs to be fixed, despite the claims of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. Democrats in Congress are responding to that grassroots opposition, an expression of progressive family values. This is no time for Democrats to compromise with the Social Security proposals of the president and his GOP backers....(full article)
In his Saturday radio address, Bush boasted that he and his puppet Iraqi Prime Minister Jaafari not only "discussed" their strong partnership but reveled in the dramatic progress all his hard work in Iraq has made over the past year. A mouse in the corner might confide that Bush told Jaafari, "Do as I say or die, punk." A mouse might say that the progress of which Bush is so proud was nothing more than his chortling over his success at ravaging a nation and its people in order to turn over all its resources to Dick Cheney's Halliburton and a few other lucky US corporate contractors. Do you listen to him, America? Do you hear him? Do you believe him when he says that the blood of your children, mingled with the blood of Iraqi children, is but a "grim reminder that the enemies of freedom in Iraq are ruthless killers with no regard for human life"? Well, I believe him. Was ever there a more grim reminder of a ruthless killer with no regard for human life than his smirking self? (full article)
I've met Senator Conrad Burns on two separate occasions: once during a visit to his plush office in Washington DC, and the other at an airport in Montana while he was campaigning for reelection. It wasn't long into our first meeting that I realized the Republican couldn't care less about the state he purportedly represented. Yeah, I admit it -- I was a bit of neophyte back in the day. When I visited Sen. Burns in Washington I had a chance to chat a while with a couple of his sprightly young interns. Both had thick southern accents. I remember how overly eager I was to ask them what they thought about some of the pressing issues that were facing my home state at the time. And I was surprised to find out that neither had ever even been to Big Sky Country. When I pointed this out to Burns he just chuckled, patted me on the back, and divulged in his raspy voice, "I don't hire the cute ones for their brains, kid. I hire 'em cuz they are easy on the eyes."....(full article)
I live under what
may be the most active volcano in the world -- Kilauea on the Big Island
of Hawai’i. While watching lava cascade down its mountain peak, I consider
the predicted peak in world oil production and the damage it could do. Its destruction could be far worse on human communities than that of a
mighty volcano’s eruption, impacting not only a local area but
civilization itself. We live today under the volcanic threat of peak oil,
yet most people remain in denial about the potential dangers. According to
geologists -- experts in volcanoes and oil -- slowly flowing crises face
humanity as our supply of non-renewable fossil fuels dwindles. Few admit
how disastrous peak oil could be. People gather at Kilauea’s base to enjoy
lava fountains, seething lakes of molten rock, and incandescent rivers of
slowly flowing lava. Yet my college students and friends often scatter
when I talk about the consequences of peak oil, unable to consider the
magnitude of the end of the oil age. Watching red-hot lava come down the
peak, especially at twilight, and into the thirsty turquoise sea is
awesome. Blazing fire meets receptive water and produces steam, as the
heat is absorbed and cooled. It’s all natural. The deadly consequences of
peak oil will be human-made....
I’ve often wondered what the fascist
Republican bleedership would do if, say, about a million of us showed up
on the Capitol Building and White House doorsteps one day a tad
cranky. With sore feet, no less. But, ya know what? I’m tired of
wondering. I’m also tired of a few other things, like hearing that honesty
is “over
the top” or how views held by half this nation’s citizens are “out
of the mainstream”; of patronizingly being called a member of a “focus
group” while trying to prevent an unprovoked invasion and subsequent
occupation that have, just as predicted, killed tens of thousands and cost
billions; of watching the American corporate media give the backhand and
the back pages (if any) to news of genuine consequence; of how exercising
one’s First Amendment rights to question an insane war is unpatriotic and
“endangers
our troops”; of how having a lying, blithering idiot playing president
is somehow a good thing; of how torture is OK as long as we do it; of
having fewer rights than a corporation; of being labeled a loony for
arriving at the obvious conclusion that voting was fixed in the last (s)election
(at least); of hearing Republicans call “frivolous”
voluminous documented cases of voter intimidation and vote suppression; of
the administration regularly shoving reports and information down the
memory hole; of being tagged an anti-Semite for having the temerity to
suggest U.S. coddling of Israel and support of its brutal subjugation of
the Palestinians is simply unacceptable; of how people are poor only
because they choose to be and of how the rich have no moral obligation to
help them and, by extension, improve our society; of how necessary it is
to destroy our Constitution to protect it from those who supposedly want
to destroy our Constitution…I’m so tired of all of that, and way, way
more, so much so, in fact, that I can think of no better way to shake some
of that fatigue than by heading eastward and not stopping till I get to
Capitol Hill. I’m lookin’ for a few (around 999,999 or so) good men and
women to join me....(full article)
CAFTA Deserves a Quiet Death While the Bush Administration still aspires to ward off defeat, it is becoming increasingly clear that its failure to pass the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) represents the latest in a series of setbacks for its sputtering trade agenda. For working people throughout the Americas, this is cause to celebrate....(full article)
We can add a new chapter to the Bush Administration’s war on free speech as it was revealed yesterday that an Al Jazeera cameraman has been in custody for three years at Guantanamo Bay. Al-Hajj, a Sudanese national, was arrested in Afghanistan in 2001 and has remained in prison without being charged for four years. Is this what Rumsfeld breezily refers to as the “worst of the worst”? If so, independent journalists around the world should take note....(full article)
When Amnesty International described the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay as "the gulag of our times," the Bush administration and its supporters took extreme offense. They decried Amnesty for daring to compare Guantanamo to Stalin's camps where political prisoners were either summarily executed or slowly starved and worked to death. Guantanamo, the Bush administration claimed, was a bastion of human rights and necessary for the protection of the U.S. Regardless of whether Amnesty abused its creative license in describing Guantanamo as a gulag, it is interesting how literally Bush and his apologists took the remark. Applying an interpretive standard of strict construction, Bush & Co. were aghast that a heretofore respectable human rights organization would relegate itself to the dust bin of irrelevance by leveling such incendiary and unwarranted criticism at Bush and his stalwart defense of these United States. If, however, one applies that same standard of strict construction to Bush's remarks leading up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, an unfortunate picture emerges. It is a picture of the President of the United States employing the tools of deception and exaggeration to trick a wounded nation into embarking upon an unnecessary, unwarranted, and unwinnable war against a nation that had not done us any demonstrable harm and was incapable of doing so....(full article)
Sam Gardiner has taught strategy and military operations at the National War College, Air War College and Naval War College. He was recently a visiting scholar at the Swedish Defense College. During Gulf II, he was a regular on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer as well as on BBC radio and television, and National Public Radio. He authored “The Enemy is Us” an article describing how the Bush Administration used disinformation and psychological warfare -- weapons usually used against the “enemy” -- against the American public in order to support the war in Iraq. He has done an extensive analysis of the media coverage before the war, during the war, and during the occupation as well as of the statements of Administration officials. His conclusions are startling and of great concern. His findings can be found in a report entitled “Truth from These Podia.”....(full interview)
Chuck Richardson takes on the rightwing nutballs at FrontPage Magazine, which published a slanderous attack on SUNY-Buffalo professor James Holstun, using quotes maliciously misattributed to Richardson, a former student of Holstun's, for organizing a campus lecture featuring writer and activist Norman Finkelstein....(full article)
Forget it! That seems to be an unstated motto for American media coverage of the Iranian presidential election. The axiom comes down to: “Don’t let history get in the way of spin.” Evasion smoothes the way to the next war. For maximum propaganda effect, the agenda-setting must be decoupled as much as possible from clear truths -- about the current president’s mendacity in connection with Iraq, and about the record of U.S. government actions toward Iran....(full article)
The front page of the London Observer on 12 June announced, "55 billion Africa debt deal 'a victory for millions'." The "victory for millions" is a quotation of Bob Geldof, who said, "Tomorrow 280 million Africans will wake up for the first time in their lives without owing you or me a penny...". The nonsense of this would be breathtaking if the reader's breath had not already been extracted by the unrelenting sophistry of Geldof, Bono, Blair, the Observer et al. Africa's imperial plunder and tragedy have been turned into a circus for the benefit of the so-called G8 leaders due in Scotland next month and those of us willing to be distracted by the barkers of the circus: the establishment media and its "celebrities". The illusion of an anti-establishment crusade led by pop stars -- a cultivated, controlling image of rebellion -- serves to dilute a great political movement of anger. In summit after summit, not a single significant "promise" of the G8 has been kept, and the "victory for millions" is no different. It is a fraud -- actually a setback to reducing poverty in Africa. Entirely conditional on vicious, discredited economic programs imposed by the World Bank and the IMF, the "package" will ensure that the "chosen" countries slip deeper into poverty....(full article) ______________________________
Dressing Truth For all those who are convinced that Truth must be marketed
When Truth goes out
When Truth goes out _____________________________
Since The Rebel Sell came out last year, I had been eagerly looking forward to getting my hands on Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter’s book, which, at first glance, looked as though it might provide a necessary corrective to some of the more obnoxious forms of "culture jamming" that some have posited as a superior alternative to other methods of progressive political organizing. Alas, despite the authors’ claim to be arguing for a more coherent and effective Left politics, the book ends up in strident defense of markets and capitalism. And, rather than being constructively critical, the tone is mocking towards any and all who offer up resistance outside of the narrow confines of Heath and Potter’s recommendations. Indeed, the "counter-culture" framework that the authors rail against is a rather eclectic straw-man, into which they lump everyone from Gramsci to environmentalists, Naomi Klein and Malcolm X....(full article)
Economist Lawrence Lau pronounced on the Chinese economic miracle: “Chinese economic reforms have not only achieved ‘gain without pain,’ but also actually maximal ‘gain without pain.’” The villagers in Shengyou, Hebei province would be hard-pressed to agree with that assessment of painless gain. On June 11, a group of about 300 armed thugs brutally attacked farmers opposed to the expropriation of their land by the state. Part of the approximately one hour-long rampage was captured on video and posted on the Washington Post website. In the video, screaming, shotgun fire and flares are audible. The dispute is between farmers and the state-owned Hebei Guohua Power Company plant. The power-plant developers seek to build a storage capacity on 26 hectares of agricultural land, but hundreds of farmers occupied the land in 2003 in opposition to a compensation offer they deemed unacceptable....(full article)
The political and economic problems afflicting the United States and its allies generate effects progressively more corrosive and self-destructive. From the bogus “war on terror” to fraudulent declarations on debt relief, they seem to flounder from one transparently desperate maneuver to the next. For the moment, poisoned by successive colonial interventions, their governments expect people to believe the absurd myth that they are defending “democracy” or the “homeland”. The Guantanamo concentration camp, secret prisons at Diego Garcia and Bagram, and UK violations of European Human Rights law add detail to the broad pattern of events in Haiti, Iraq and Afghanistan. They all betray the essential sadism inherent in efforts by the US government and its allies to crush or control resistance. That brings into focus the ultimate purpose of Guantanamo, since from what ex-inmates have related it is clear the majority of the detainees there have nothing to do with “terrorism”....(full article)
Early next September, the U.S. District court in Alexandria, Virginia will be the scene of a very interesting trial. One Lawrence Franklin will stand before a judge to defend himself against a six-count indictment accusing him of conspiring to disclose national defense and classified information to senior AIPAC officials -- who then passed it on to Israeli intelligence operatives. AIPAC, the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee is not an organization to be trifled with. Everybody in Washington understands that this Likudnik lobby can make and break politicians. Not only do they have a $30 million annual budget, but they have some very well placed fellow travelers in the mass media. Come election season, they can be counted on to stuff campaign war chests with funds from “independent” PACs that subscribe to their Israel First agenda. Their greatest strength is their ability to leverage their media muscle to defame and ridicule any politician who stands up to their pro-Israeli policies....(full article)
After being hyped for several weeks as the book that will “swift boat” Hillary, June 21st marked the release of Edward Klein’s notorious unauthorized biography, The Truth About Hillary Clinton: What She Knew, When She Knew it, and How She’ll Go To Become President. Published by the rightwing Sentinel Books, an imprint of Penguin Putnam, commentators from all coordinates of the political sphere note its substantive similarities to Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Again John Kerry. Klein clearly implies that Clinton experimented with lesbianism -- almost as ludicrous a claim that John Kerry shot himself to receive a Purple Heart. What makes this book particularly interesting though is not the exaggerated, embellished and outright fabricated claims of the book itself, but the hype, promotion and reactions the book has produced....(full article)
On June 13, 1971, when the New York Times published an article by Neil Sheehan called, "Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces 3 Decades of Growing U.S. Involvement." It was the first installment of a 7000-page document that came to be known as the "Pentagon Papers." How important was the public airing of a secret government study of decision-making about the Vietnam War? None other than Henry Kissinger labeled the man who leaked that study -- Daniel Ellsberg -- "the most dangerous man in America."....(full article)
Even by the abysmal standards of the Administration, Bush’s Saturday radio address hit a new low in fear mongering and duplicity. Invoking the musty imagery of 9-11, the Prince of Mendacity once again articulated the worn vision of America at war with the world. “I will continue to focus on ways to insure that America prevails in the war on terror…protecting our citizens from those who would do us harm.” Presumably, the President’s antidote involves alienating allies, inflaming half the American electorate, savaging the military, vanquishing the economy and creating the most prolific breeding ground for terrorism the world has ever seen....(full article)
Somebody, please, send Robert Pape's book to Bush. Pape, the director of the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism at the University of Chicago, has arrived at a conclusion Bush needs to understand, although it is contrary to what he believes, or what he tells us he believes. "Suicide bombings are part of a conscious strategy that has a record of success in other places. Suicide bombing has gained adherents not because so many fanatics are looking for an excuse to throw away their lives, but because it works," is how Steve Chapman, writing for the Baltimore Sun, summarizes Pape's research. Bush seems to believe that if the corporate media ignores suicide bombing, the suicide bombers will go away because, after all, the act is simply a demented craving for media attention. "A conservative columnist for The New York Times has suggested that the media simply cease coverage of suicide bombings," writes Joe Conason for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "It was a strange proposal from someone working at one of the world's most important news organizations, but one that aptly reflected current attitudes in the White House, the Defense Department and much of official Washington.... Both President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney evidently believe their own uplifting rhetoric and brusque dismissals of criticism. They won't let reality-based analysis intrude on their faith-based perspective."....(full article)
The recent congressional hearing on the Downing Street Memo and subsequent White House rally and their aftermath has ushered in new energy and confidence to the anti-war movement. The excitement of the realistic possibility of the impeachment of Bush and the participation of elected officials will help to broaden the movement even further. What is absolutely crucial for US anti-war and anti-imperialist activists at this juncture is to not simply stop at the doorstep of the progressives in the Democratic Party....(full article)
I think it’s safe to say the mainstream media (MSM) are having a very hard time with the Downing Street Memos (DSM). I know the corporate media are not our friends, but I’m still stunned by the hostility the DSM seem to arouse in (for want of a better word) journalists. It ranges from Frank Rich, one of the good guys, who nevertheless needed to be told by Al Franken that “conventional wisdom” aside, it still matters whether or not Bush lied about taking the country to war. By the time Rich wrote his latest New York Times column last Sunday, he had clearly returned to consciousness, but his attitude is indicative of the air reporters have to breathe, their unreal, hot-house reality. No one is immune to the mind-altering effects of our experiment in neural media saturation, least of all the practitioners of the art of mass thought control....(full article)
“We went to war because we were attacked,” President Bush said Saturday in his weekly radio address. Yeah, by al-Qaeda not Iraq. For President Bush to say publicly that the United States attacked Iraq because of 9/11 is not only an outright lie but it's a disservice to the over 1,700 men and women that died in combat in Iraq and thousands of other soldiers who were maimed believing they were fighting a war predicated on finding weapons of mass destruction. There have been no less than half-a-dozen federal probes into 9/11 all of which have concluded that there wasn't a link between the al-Qaeda terrorists who blew up the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and Saddam Hussein's regime. But Bush is desperate. His ratings have slipped below 50 percent. The public is growing tired of the Iraq war. Republicans in Congress fear that a further decline in the president's poll numbers could hurt their chances of being reelected next year. What to do? Once again, get the public to believe Iraq was responsible for 9/11 and that the war was justified. In other words, lie....(full article)
The United States today has the most superior military and strongest army the world has ever known. It can boast the most advanced military hardware, the best-trained men and women, and the option of demolishing cities and annihilating millions just by pressing a few buttons. With all this might and the world’s highest defense expenditure, one has to ask are Americans really feeling more secure than they have in the past. Recent research indicates they are not....(full article)
In his memoir of Vietnam, former war correspondent Jacques Leslie recalls visiting an American aircraft carrier in the South China Sea, when suddenly "I was engulfed in technology, released to a vast metallic universe where nothing grew, where doubt had no place." The young reporter for the Los Angeles Times found that "the press officers who took turns accompanying me could tell me all about the astonishing mechanics of jet takeoffs and landings, of how the pilots got graded on their bombing accuracy, but they couldn't say if the pilots thought of people below as they dropped their bombs or ever felt regret. Most of the pilots couldn't tell me either, preferring to dwell on the marvels of their flying machines." American media coverage has long glorified such marvels, and the hype about military technology remains profuse. What happens to people on the other side of the awesome firepower is downplayed or ignored, while the awesome weaponry is often presented as implicit further evidence of America's greatness. It's hardly objective reporting. Nor is it in any way good, old- fashioned skeptical reporting. Nor does it tell the whole story. It's mostly mindless cheerleading that avoids asking readers or viewers to think about the terrible carnage and horribly ruined lives the use of such weapons causes....(full article)
Jim VandeHei of the Washington Post
tells us that George Bush, who had hoped to spend the summer ramming
Social Security firecrackers down our throats, is being forced by his
plummeting poll numbers to take a second look at shoring up the lies about
how peachy keen everything is in Iraq. Not that Bush ever looks at poll
numbers, or spends any time worrying about what the street rabble thinks
-- but with elections coming up, some Frights (Friends on the Right) are
beginning to nervously gnaw their fingernails....
Now that Michael Jackson has been cleared on all charges of “conspiracy”, child molestation and plying teenaged boys with liquor, balloons and fantasies of fame, the only thing left is to accuse him of what we already knew – that he’s really, really rich, really, really weird and, by now, about as “black” as Paris Hilton. I mention the black thing – if you prefer, African-American -- only because Jackson himself is determined to regard his legal battles as being “racist” in origin. But even he can’t take that assertion too far. Jackson’s lawyer, Thomas Mesereau Jr., said last week that the perennially described “self-styled King of Pop,” having escaped prison by the skin of his teeth -- if those really are his teeth -- has decided to “alter his lifestyle” and “get those boys out of his bedroom.”....(full article)
Under Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution, "The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors." Any reasonable interpretation of the Constitution's impeachment clause, and the historical application thereof, leads to the inescapable conclusion that articles of impeachment should be brought against President Bush for his commission of high crimes against the United States. It is the consensus among legal and constitutional scholars that the phrase "other high Crimes and Misdemeanors" refers to "political crimes." While not necessarily indictable crimes, "political crimes" are great offenses against the federal government. They are abuses of power or the kinds of misconduct which can only be committed by a public official by virtue of the unique power and trust which he holds. Thus, high crimes and misdemeanors refer to major offenses against our very system of representative democracy. Likewise, high crimes and misdemeanors can be serious abuses of the governmental power with which the President has been trusted. In the case of Iraq, it is becoming harder and harder to deny that Bush engaged in official misconduct that caused serious and likely irreparable injury to the United States....(full article)
On June 14, Andrea
Mitchell, NBC’s chief foreign affairs correspondent, gave her take on
mainstream media (MSM) coverage of the
Downing Street Memo (DSM). She said, “There have been anti-war groups
and anti-Bush groups who’ve tried to generate this [coverage] on the
Internet, but . . . there’s no smoking gun here,” because “if you go back
to Bush’s own comments [in 2002], you had to be brain-dead not to know
what he was up to.” On June 15, The Washington Post took the same
position, even more emphatically: “The memos add not a single fact to
what was previously known about the administration’s prewar
deliberations.” This might come as a surprise to George Bush and Tony
Blair, who were claiming as recently as last week that war with Iraq was,
as they claimed in July, 2002, a last resort undertaken only after all
other options were exhausted. In their joint press conference on June 7,
George Bush answered his first question about the DSM saying, “And
somebody said, well, you know, we had made up our mind to go to use
military force to deal with Saddam. Nothing could be farther from the
truth. . . . Look, both of us didn’t want to use our military. Nobody
wants to commit military into combat. It’s the last option.”....(full
article)
The Friedman Solution: Reinstate the
Draft
When America’s foremost political pundit and spokesman for the powerful Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Tom Friedman, says it’s time to reinstate the draft, we should all pay attention. Friedman’s comments appeared in his June 15 column where he reiterated his past predictions that the war in Iraq was still “winnable” if we “do it right.” What’s needed, Friedman postulates, is to “double the boots on the ground and redouble the diplomatic effort to bring in the Sunnis.” “Double the boots on the ground”? Sounds like the draft to me....(full article)
“Our focus is not on the past. It’s on the future.”
Not content with getting things completely upside down in their own country, American liberals are now touring internationally, dispensing with their erroneous “lesser evil” outlook as freely as their more radical “neo-con” cousins are dropping freedom enclosed in bombs and delivering democracy from the barrels of tanks and guns. This “lesser evil” way of looking at reality has recently been applied by Norman Solomon (who also supported an “Anybody But Bush” stance in the 2004 US elections) to the socio-political reality known as Iran, and more specifically to its ninth presidential elections held on June 17, 2005....(full article)
I have this dream: I’m a U.S. forest ranger. (Must be the hat.) I oversee a national park, and for longer than I care to admit, I’ve allowed all of its trees, streams, plants, critters -- you know, the foresty-type stuff -- to be subjected to regular dumping of tons of toxic waste by a guy who looks suspiciously like a Republican. (I’m sure he is, actually; after all, the distribution of noxious garbage is a GOP specialty, though current Democrats certainly merit a dishonorable mention.) I know that what he’s doing is wrong and regularly tell him so. I’ve sharply honed my scolding skills and now sound quite officious while chastising him, but, even as I continue polishing my admonishing, I nonetheless allow him to continue fouling, unabated, the public’s domain. The payoff? (full article)
Like a voice crying from beneath a collapsed building, every now and then a well-known and respected Israeli startles us with a sharp plea: the country must cease its immoral, illegal and self-destructive occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people. Despite the horror, the apparent hopelessness of what we hear and see in the debris, we are encouraged that a familiar voice is speaking from a place where we have come to expect silence. Perhaps this means the current situation is not hopeless. Haim Yavin, the news anchor of Israel’s leading television station, is the latest in a series of desperate voices....(full article)
It now appears the dire consequences that puritanical hysterics have attributed to human sexuality -- from ill-health, early death, and societal decay, to being the flat-out progenitor of nearly every aspect of worldly travail -- is applicable to the very act they hold more sacred than chastity: work. Ever since the first fantasy-prone Puritans trudged upon the shores of North America, intent on establishing the New Jerusalem, that ever-shilled-for Shining City On A Hill (now in an ongoing state of brownout, on to the way to a full scale blackout), they and their descendants have carried on the conviction that the only impediment to the construction of a godly municipality -- where grace, piety, and purity would reign and whose glowing righteousness would serve as a beacon of divine light to drive the darkness from the face (not to mentioned those Satanically besieged genital regions of the human anatomy) of this sin-blinded earth -- was human sloth, vitality-sucking carnality, and a general disobedience to the admonitions of the Holy Bible . . . that cosmic interoffice memo circulated to increase heavenly dividends by maximizing earthly efficiency....(full article)
If political Islam is a movement much the photo negative of capitalism itself, what options are open for those who oppose both? This is one of the many vitally important questions Afflicted Powers, one of the best new books on where things stand since 9/11 and the Iraq War, tackles....(full review)
It's bad enough that the Bush administration had so little international support for the Iraqi war that their “coalition of the willing” meant the U.S., Britain, and the equivalent of a child's imaginary friends. It's even worse that, as the Downing Street Memo confirms, they had so little evidence of real threats that they knew from the start that they were going to have manufacture excuses to go to war. What's more damning still is that they effectively began this war even before the congressional vote. With Congressman John Conyers about to hold hearings, coverage of the Downing Street memo is finally beginning to leak into the media. In contrast, we've heard almost nothing about the degree to which this administration began actively fighting the Iraq war well in advance of the March 2003 official attack -- before both the October 2002 US Congressional authorization and the November United Nations resolution requiring that Saddam Hussein open the country up to inspectors....(full article)
Four years ago, I wrote an article arguing that the United Nations, Holland and France were implicated in the slaughter of the male population of Srebrenica. At the time many apologists for the Bosnian Serbs claimed that the whole “incident” was an exaggeration. Last year, The Bosnian Serbs confessed their role in the massacre. And last week, a video emerged proving that the Scorpions, a unit of Special Forces of the Serbian Army, also took part in the carnage. The United Nations should open its files and confess to their criminal failure to prevent the atrocity at Srebrenica. The case against Butros Butros-Ghali, then Secretary General of the United Nations is especially compelling. For the sake of the integrity of the international legal system, he too should stand trial at The Hague....(full article)
Ostensibly, the Food and Drug Administration ("FDA"), as well as the Environmental Protection Agency ("EPA"), are regulatory agencies entrusted to protect the health and safety of the public. However, as starkly revealed by recent events, neither the FDA nor the EPA is particularly concerned about the public. Rather, they see us as test subjects, lab rats, to be exploited for experimentation by or on behalf of the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. Take, for instance, the April threat by Senators Bill Nelson and Barbara Boxer to block Bush's nomination of Stephen Johnson to head the EPA. The Senators took exception to the EPA's CHEERS (Children's Environmental Exposure Research Study) program, in which low-income, minority families were promised up to $970.00 if they allowed the application of pesticides and other chemicals in rooms primarily occupied by their infant children. The study was partially funded by the American Chemistry Council, a lobbying arm of pesticide manufacturers, to the tune of $2 million. Johnson promised to terminate the CHEERS program in exchange for his confirmation. Nothing like exploiting infants and the poor on behalf of the pesticide industry....(full article)
President Bush is currently lobbying Congress to reauthorize portions of the Patriot Act that are scheduled to expire. While the Patriot Act contains provisions much needed in the war on terrorism, it also has elements that are in conflict with the civil liberties enshrined in the Constitution. Many of the provisions are violations of the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures. The Patriot Act allows the government to search someone’s home or office without informing them. It allows the government to obtain an individual’s library records, medical history, and financial documents, among many other items, without any probable cause of a crime. It requires judges to approve of wiretaps without knowing whom the suspect is. Immigrants and non-citizens can be jailed for an indefinite period of time, without any requirement that the government demonstrate that they are a threat to national security. It’s not surprising that the federal government is attempting to strip people of their fundamental rights and freedoms. During the last two centuries, this has been a common occurrence in America during a time of war....(full article)
Oppressed Christians: Looking for a five-star holiday? Have we got a deal for you! GITMO-By-The-Sea. Don’t laugh, folks. Our Naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, could just be poised to become the country’s hottest tourist destination for folks of faith....(full article)
In late April, the Washington-based
Americans
United for Separation of Church and State, a longtime religious
watchdog group, called the nation's attention to numerous incidents of
religious bias and the official promotion of fundamentalist Christianity
at the Colorado Springs, Colorado-based United States Air Force Academy --
a problem that apparently has been brewing for quite some time. Unlike
other recent scandals at U.S. military academies involving cadets
cheating, the violation of the honor code, and cases of sexual harassment
and rape -- which were often written off as the behavior of a few errant
cadets -- attorneys for Americans United found that at the Air Force
Academy there was "systematic and pervasive religious bias and intolerance
at the highest levels of the academy command structure."....
The Downing Street Memo -- minutes of a meeting with Prime Minister Tony Blair and his advisors that reveals the U.S. was “fixing” the intelligence to support the Iraq War -- was not enough to get the mainstream U.S. media or members of Congress to take the issue seriously. Now there is Downing II, III, IV, V, VI and VII! As the evidence mounts, the failure of the media to seriously investigate the issue is baffling. Why aren’t they interviewing current and former U.S. military intelligence officials about these reports from the highest levels of the British government? Isn’t the media supposed to investigate and expose the truth for their readers and viewers? (full article)
A group of Republican legislators proposes to rescind the 22ndAmendment to the American Constitution. This is the Amendment, passed after four terms of Franklin Roosevelt scared the bejesus out of Republicans, limiting a President to two terms in office. The legislators apparently believe that with continued Republican gains in Congress, they may be in a position to change the Constitution by 2006, in time to extend Bush's benevolent work. Of course, Bush must actually be re-elected in 2008, but that represents a mere technicality. Bush was appointed in 2000 by a Supreme Court whose capacity for critical thinking already resembled that of senior judges in the early Reich. By 2008, Bush will have loaded the Court with creatures who might have made splendid careers in the Holy Inquisition under Torquemada....(full article)
The summer of 1965 found the United States in turmoil. President Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, who had taken office in 1963 following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, was already stepping up troop deployments to Vietnam, and an embryonic anti-war movement was beginning to gain the traction that would ultimately cause Johnson to decline to run for reelection in 1968. Elsewhere in the nation, however, millions of Americans were not yet focused on Vietnam. Their struggle -- begun soon after the Civil War in the 1860s -- continued to be to secure equality and justice for African Americans....(full article)
William Blum on perceptions of the US from
abroad, the persistence of anti-communism, why NATO exists, "reforming"
the Indonesian military, how meaningful is the distinction between
liberals and conservatives, and more....
Washington keeps
condemning Iran's government and making thinly veiled threats. But in
Iran, many people are in the midst of challenging the country's rulers, in
the streets and at the ballot box. The June 17 election for president
could be a turning point or a hollow spectacle -- no one knows which --
but the Bush administration is eagerly trashing the whole thing. "The
United States has not waited for the first ballot to be cast before
dismissing Iran's presidential election as rigged," Agence France
Presse reported over the weekend. But Iran's election is not rigged.
There is a fierce electioneering battle underway, with some significant
differences between candidates. Meanwhile, hindered rather than helped by
the bellicose statements from Washington, courageous Iranian activists
have begun a new wave of actions against the status quo of theocracy....(full
article)
Schwarzenegger Blues:
Recall the Governator Aside from the fact that the governator suddenly looks old and fragile, there is little encouraging about California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s latest political maneuvering. His call for a special election might be admirable if he or his sponsors were paying for it. After all, it is more about a man’s ego and ambition than any concept of good governance. The worst thing about the governor’s abuse of the initiative process is that it will likely damage the process itself. Initiatives and referendums are the application of direct democracy and those of us who truly believe in democracy are wary when politicians attack the process when it does not serve their purposes. Certainly, there should be reform to remove big money and restore the grassroots to the process. No one should be paid to collect signatures and contributions should be limited to individuals at fixed limits but that is not the issue now. The real question is: Since we are going ahead with this lame brained special election, why is the governor not on the ballot? (full article)
Since the U.S. Supreme Court's installation of George W. Bush as President in January of 2001, the peoples of the world have witnessed a government in the United States of America that demonstrates little if any respect for fundamental considerations of international law, international organizations, and human rights, let alone appreciation of the requirements for maintaining international peace and security. What the world has watched instead is a comprehensive and malicious assault upon the integrity of the international legal order by a group of men and women who are thoroughly Machiavellian in their perception of international relations and in their conduct of both foreign policy and domestic affairs. This is not simply a question of giving or withholding the benefit of the doubt when it comes to complicated matters of foreign affairs and defense policies to a U.S. government charged with the security of both its own citizens and those of its allies in Europe, the Western Hemisphere, and the Pacific. Rather, the Bush Jr. administration's foreign policies represent a gross deviation from those basic rules of international deportment and civilized behavior that the United States government had traditionally played the pioneer role in promoting for the entire world community. Even more seriously, in many instances specific components of the Bush Jr. administration's foreign policies constitute ongoing criminal activity under well-recognized principles of both international law and U.S. domestic law, and in particular the Nuremberg Charter, the Nuremberg Judgment, and the Nuremberg Principles....(full article)
The 35th summit of the Organization of American States (OAS) was held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida in the first days of June this year. It marked another tactical defeat for the Bush regime's State Department under Condoleezza Rice and her Latin American point man Roger Noriega. Noriega and Rice performed in tune with the aleatory mix of wishful thinking, hypocrisy and bullying that traditionally mar US diplomacy in Latin America....(full article)
We are on the verge
of a welfare disaster in this country. Eighty percent of autistic children
are under the age of 17. In a few short years, the states are going to be
forced to provide support for an overwhelming number of disabled autistic
adults. “The costs will be in the trillions,” according to Ann Dachel. Ann
should know. She is a special education teacher, a member of the National
Autism Association, and the mother of a boy with autism and a daughter who
developed epilepsy after receiving a Hepatitis B vaccine. Thimerosal is a
mercury-based preservative that for many years was added to childhood
vaccines to boost drug company profits. In the 1990s the CDC added more
and more Thimerosal-containing vaccines to the mandatory vaccine schedule
without adding up the cumulative amounts of mercury that children were
receiving from the vaccines. Finally, in 1999, after watching the dramatic
autism and other neurological disorders, officials at the CDC and FDA
realized that a fully vaccinated infant was receiving up to 125 times what
the EPA considered safe for mercury exposure. Because half the officials
involved were on payrolls of the drug companies they were charged to
regulate, they have never ordered the pharmaceutical industry to stop
using Thimerosal. In fact, the product is still used in some vaccines.
Last year's flu vaccine had a mercury content eight times the EPA safe
limit and it was recommended for six-month-old babies and pregnant
women....
Are you ready to suit up or suit up your kids (and the kids of your kids) in body armor and die for Israel? Before you dismiss me as an anti-Semitic crank, consider the following: “Ephraim Halevy, the former chief of Israel’s Mossad intelligence service and the current national security adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, says plans have been made for a substantial U.S. military presence in the Middle East lasting decades,” al-Jazeera reports. “High-ranking U.S. policymakers have ‘raised the idea of establishing an American trusteeship regime in the areas of the Palestinian Authority, if it should turn out that the Palestinians are not ripe for self-rule. That arrangement would require an American operational military presence along Israel’s border with the Palestinian territories.’” Of course, if Israel has its way, the Palestinians will never be “ripe for self-rule” (many Israelis even refuse to consider the word “Palestinian” and believe most Arabs are recent immigrants to Palestine, or instead of Palestine Judea and Samaria, the Hebrew biblical names for the land stolen from the non-Palestinians) and since the Arab demographic trend is against the Israelis (Arabs have more kids than Israelis) and there is no way the Israelis will ever have enough soldiers to muster an “operational military presence” on the so-called border, it will be up to your kids and your kids’ kids (since Halevy says this will last decades) to keep the Arabs in check (and suffering from malnutrition and disease)....(full article)
Remember, in those first fragile days and
weeks after September 11, 2001, when we told each other again and again
that we had to go on with life as usual -- or else they win? We were
afraid to go back into the city and face all the flyers on the walls, the
National Guardsman in Penn Station; no one wanted to get caught on the
subway; some people couldn’t get on an airplane. But we got through it. We
may have developed a few quirks, like keeping the gas tank full and always
having plenty of duct tape around, but for the most part we’ve gone back
to normal life. Or have we? I believe that on the most fundamental level,
we have not gone on as usual. With very little public debate of any kind,
and with virtually no informed debate, we have abandoned many of our most
cherished democratic principles.
In the truest sense,
and to our increasing national grief, they have won....
With a historic election just days away for Iran, and with the US wolf at its door, Rosa Faiz looks at how: the Iranian bourgeois “liberals” have historically been able to work with both factions of the ruling classes, whether the immediate rulers came in the uniforms of the monarchists or the robes of the clergy, or a combination of both. And this, better than anything else, proves the incapacity of the Iranian liberals for consistency and adherence to their own supposed ideals when it comes to two of the most fundamental cornerstones of bourgeois liberalism: 1) commitment to the separation of religion from governance (an absolute minimum), neglected by the “liberals” who comfortably work inside the clerical regime; and 2) commitment to democracy, neglected by the “liberals” who find it unproblematic to work with the monarchists."....(full article)
The vanquished know war. They see through the empty jingoism of those who use the abstract words of glory, honor, and patriotism to mask the cries of the wounded, the senseless killing, war profiteering, and chest-pounding grief. They know the lies the victors often do not acknowledge, the lies covered up in stately war memorials and mythic war narratives, filled with words of courage and comradeship. They know the lies that permeate the thick, se | |
