Author: jameswagner

No, Iraq did not throw UN weapons inspectors out of the country in 1998, and, yes, UN weapons inspectors did exceed their mandate sufficiently to collect eavesdropping intelligence used in American efforts to overturn the government. They left because they were told we were about to bomb Iraq, and they were indeed spies.
Facts are irrelevant to the warlords in Washington, but some of us prefer to relate to things other than myths. FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting) alerts us to the sins of just one media outlet, USA Today, but it seems to me that these same false stories are ubiquitous in the American press and TV news.

An August 8 USA Today article that described how Saddam Hussein is “complicating U.S. plans to topple his regime” repeated a common myth about the history of U.S./Iraq relations. Reporter John Diamond wrote that “Iraq expelled U.N. weapons inspectors four years ago and accused them of being spies.”
But Iraq did not “expel” the UNSCOM weapons inspectors; in fact, they were withdrawn by Richard Butler, the head of the inspections team. The Washington Post, like numerous other media outlets, reported it accurately at the time (12/17/98): “Butler ordered his inspectors to evacuate Baghdad, in anticipation of a military attack, on Tuesday night.
“USA Today wouldn’t have to consult the archives of other media outlets to find out what happened: A timeline that appeared in the paper on December 17, 1998 included this entry for December 16: “U.N. weapons inspectors withdraw from Baghdad one day after reporting Iraq was still not cooperating.” USA Today also reported (12/17/98) that “Russian Ambassador Sergei Lavrov criticized Butler for evacuating inspectors from Iraq Wednesday morning without seeking permission from the Security Council.”

But there’s more.

As for Iraq accusing weapons inspectors of being spies, Diamond might have mentioned that this accusation has proven to be correct. The Washington Post reported in 1999 (1/8/99) that “United Nations arms inspectors helped collect eavesdropping intelligence used in American efforts to undermine the Iraqi regime.”
USA Today was clearly aware of the spy story, since the paper wrote an editorial excusing it. Headlined “Spying Flap Merely a Sideshow” (1/8/99), the paper argued that “spying on Saddam Hussein is nothing new and nothing needing an apology. But the Clinton administration suddenly is scrambling to explain why it did just that.” The paper added that the information gathered “no doubt found uses other than just weapons detection. That may not be playing by the books, but it’s understandable and probably inevitable.”

But this is all irrelevant, since both the Bushie gang and, apparently, the majority of Americans think it’s really better not to let sleeping dogs lie.

David Budbill navigates a few of the world’s religions to see how we got to where we are today and where we might go from here, in his latest notes, “Christians and the War on Terror.”

When I was a student at Union Seminary in New York in the early 1960s, I had to take a church history course. Our text was called THE HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH, a huge tome, which I retitled THE CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY IN THE NAME OF JESUS CHRIST. What I learned from that course is that the carnage wreaked upon the world by the Christian Church down through the ages makes the Taliban look like bad guys from a skit on Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.
There’s a strong desire in the United States these days to return to those golden days of yesteryear and mount again a Holy Crusade against the heathen infidel, a desire to return to the idea that if conversion of the heathen by introduction to The Book–The Bible–doesn’t do the trick, then conversion by the sword is not only necessary but sanctified and Godly.

But both the message and the weaponry has changed since the last age of colonialism.

Here at the beginning of the 21st Century it’s not so much The Bible that is “The Book” as it is the book of Capitalist Materialism and today the sword is not literally a sword, but rather more likely a laser guided bomb delivered from a plane so high up in the sky it is invisible. These differences not withstanding, a new Crusade has begun.
Whether it is in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, The Philippines, Georgia, Palestine, Cuba, Libya, Syria or WhoKnowsWhereElse–the list of those included in The Axis of Evil gets longer every day–it is clear that this new Crusade, this Pax Americana, with which we now attempt to blanket the entire world, is a Holy War.

But hold, we can still visualize an alternative, if still only a dream, to the current horrible reality, which should have remained only a nightmare.
[the last few lines of Chapter 80 of Lao Tzu’s Tao Teh Ching]

Their food is plain and good, and they enjoy eating it.
Their clothes are simple and beautiful.
Their homes secure.
They are happy in their ways.
Though they live within sight of their neighbors,
and their chickens and dogs call back and forth,
they leave each other in peace as they all grow old and die.

Budbill’s regular “Cyberzine” itself assumes the very gentle, but indomitable, presence of the individual in the natural world of which it is an integral part.

I just can’t resist adding one final, possibly very perverse, thought to the item posted just below. With apologies to the millions whose lives were destroyed by its most horrible works, perhaps in some measure we should be extraordinarily grateful that the Soviet Union lasted almost half a century after World War II. I’m beginning to realize that its presence and the rival power it represented was, at least in some respects, a very good thing, keeping us and the world safe from our very worst impulses and excesses until the end of the century.

The deadly-menace nutcases in Washington now say “we” (using whatever ordinary or special units we want to invent and use) have the right to go anywhere at any time to murder anyone for any reason, without telling anyone and without any ultimate accountability to anyone.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is considering ways to expand broadly the role of American Special Operations forces in the global campaign against terrorism, including sending them worldwide to capture or kill Al Qaeda leaders far from the battlefields of Afghanistan, according to Pentagon and intelligence officials.
Proposals now being discussed by Mr. Rumsfeld and senior military officers could ultimately lead Special Operations units to get more deeply involved in long-term covert operations in countries where the United States is not at open war and, in some cases, where the local government is not informed of their presence.* This expansion of the military’s involvement in clandestine activities could be justified, Pentagon officials believe, by defining it as “preparation of the battlefield” in a campaign against terrorism that knows no boundaries.

*Can we imagine, the tables turned, how we would look upon any country on earth doing the same thing on our own territory, regardless of its excuses?
[I only note in passing that the NYTimes news story is exclusively concerned with the legal or precedent issues involved in putting such operations into the hands of the regular military rather than the C.I.A. The fact that we would violate every international relationship and every international law with impunity and without expectation of retribution is not discussed. So I will.]
While many would argue we’ve been in this filthy business for much of the last fifty years or so, I guess we’re now going to be less shy about admitting it. What is also new is our confidence that we now have the absolute right to do anything we want to do, having been hurt on September 11 so embarassingly and to a degree we imagine unprecedented in world history. The bottom line however is that, for the first time since the beginning of the Cold War, no one can stop us, or so we think now.
I believe we are wrong to assume invulnerability when it comes to our latest plans for aggression. Aside from the immediate internal costs, economic and psychological, of this endless war to end terrorism, the world will be beating a path to our doors, and even beyond, not because they like us this time, but becasue they want to see us stopped, if not destroyed. No fortress America and no war against a virtually incorporeal foe can make us safe, but it can and will destroy our liberties and even our prosperity. The horrible violence Israel is suffering today, and that which it is visiting upon others, is a preview, and probably a mild preview, of what is in store at home for a rogue-nation America in terrible fear of its vulnerability and decline.
Will Congress save us from this stupidity, this horror? A fool’s dream; expect nothing and we will not be disappointed. The Supremes? Their moral status may never have been so abysmal; their weight, if counted, will be thrown into the court of the enemies of the republic.

Travel adventures within the West Bank:

[The general secretary of the Tulkarm Blood Bank Society, Azzam Al-Araj, writes,] There is a curfew in effect in my town in Palestine. When I take the risk of walking to my office, which is about a mile from my house, I often bring my 8-year-old son, Mahmod, to show that I am not a threat to the Israeli forces in the town. But he does not always accompany me. In June I made it from Tulkarm to Toledo, Spain, to spend a month with my colleagues from throughout the Middle East, including Israelis, to talk about the future of civil society and governance in our region.
I am not going to describe in detail the killing of Palestinians, the stifling curfew, the malnutrition among Palestinian children, the house demolitions going on around me, or my wife’s daily trauma when each member of my family leaves to go to work or class and she remains home to pray that we all return home safely. Instead, I am going to tell you a story about hope overcoming occupation. It is a mundane tale, really, compared with all that is happening here, and yet in a small way it is important.
In order to attend the international institute in Toledo, I left my home in Tulkarm on Monday, June 17, at 5:30 in the morning with the intention of taking a flight on June 22 from Amman, Jordan, to Madrid.

The distance between his town and Amman is 60 miles, but only for crows, these days. Azzam needed five days, and he almost didn’t make it. The story which continues his account is anything but mundane, at least in a world we would want to live in.

Not really a news development, as the peace activists who have been regular targets of Israeli attacks know well, but it would actually be real news over here, except that it’s not in the news. The reason neither the existence of such groups nor the official assault on their activities is covered by our media is political, not because it’s too routine to merit report.
My friend Steve, an American leaving at this moment for his flight to Israel and Palestine, just emailed myself and others this comment, accompanied by a link to a story and dramatic photo from the Israeli daily Haaretz:

“If you’re asked why Palestinians don’t engage in
non-violent protest (they do), or why Israeli and
Palestinian peace activists don’t work together (they
do), you can point to this not at all unusual Israeli
police/army attack on a joint Israeli/Palestinian
peaceful protest.”

We don’t get the full story here, in the country which virtually invented the free press.
[I expect to share with others, on this log, Steve’s reports from the Middle East over the next several weeks.]

Reportage specific to the experience of the arabs around Har Homa (the project discussed below) concludes the article:

A small group of Israeli Arab and Palestinian workers is also living in Har Homa, in a plywood shack. They work and sleep in shifts, guarding the construction materials from theft. They wash outside, from a spigot, and they watch movies in Arabic received on a large satellite dish.
Under threat of suicide bombers, Israel has seized control of seven of eight Palestinian cities in the West Bank and placed them under curfew. It has dug ditches around cities like Bethlehem and filled them with barbed wire. Still, Israeli security officials say, thousands of Palestinians find ways each day to get into Israel, not, in their case, to kill others and themselves but to find work.
The Palestinian workers said they could make up to 100 shekels daily here — about $21 dollars — compared with nothing at all in the West Bank. As the conflict has ground on and Israel has sealed off Palestinian areas, the Palestinian economy has collapsed.
The men said other Palestinians did not criticize them. “Everybody knows that it’s a settlement, but nobody asks you not to work,” said one man, who gave his name only as Hassan, 30, the father of five. “They know the alternative: not to eat.” Hassan lives half an hour away, but he stays at Har Homa for two weeks at a stretch to avoid getting caught.

One of the guards at the site, Salem Alkuran, 18, an Israeli arab from Beersheba, is quoted disputing the statement of a more irreconcilable compatriot, whose family owned part of the land before it was captured by Israel in 1967, “We can live together,” he said. “It’s impossible to move the whole country.”

I know the biblical Tower of Babel was probably located near the Black Sea, but it seems that modern Israelis have decided to build a new one between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, on Palestinian land of course.
The complete story of this latest tower’s origins and construction should give pause to anyone thinking of occupying this colonial outpost, and not only if they are superstitious.
The land belongs to the Palestinians and the labor is Palestinian, but the project is entirely Israeli, and for Israelis alone. The status of the Palestinians as virtual slaves of an occupying power could hardly be better illustrated than by this example. The people to whom the land belongs (as long and still recognized by the entire world) must toil to build this complex for its masters, because there is no other employment available to them under the rule, and the curfew, imposed by the Israelis.

[Foreign laborers] work alongside a few Palestinians who — conscience-stricken but desperate for the wages, understanding the conflict in their bones — sneak past the Israeli police, defying Israeli law to help Israeli contractors build what the Palestinians regard as an Israeli settlement on stolen land.
“My heart is bleeding,” said Salman Jahalin, 28, his corduroys covered with the hilltop’s powdery white dust. “I feel guilty for being here and doing this kind of work. But I have no other choice.”
Mr. Jahalin, the father of four, is from the West Bank village of Zaatara. In addition to being a laborer at Har Homa, he has become one of its first — if illegal — residents. He sleeps most nights on the stone floor of a newly built storeroom rather than risk being caught and arrested by the Israeli border police while returning home.

This is a horrendous injustice, but is an evil whose consequences cannot fail to be thrown back upon its perpetrators. It’s simply wrong, and not a good idea, for anyone who thinks ahead–or who even looks back.
Where is the authority? Where is the argument? These questions don’t have to be asked, since there are no respectable answers. There is only power greed, mysticism, xenophobia and fundamentalism. There is no book.
Did the modern Palestinians cause the diaspora which drove Jews from Palestine and scattered the around the world? Did the modern Palestinians cause the holocaust which drove so many Jews to seek a Jewish homeland in their midst?