Politics – Page 53 – James Wagner

the”War of Chalabi’s Chutzpah”

Some day this entire wretched adventure may be known as the “War of Chalabi’s Chutzpah,” rivalling the stupidity of another disastrous imperial obscenity which began with a fake casus belli, the “War of Jenkin’s Ear.”
Newsday seems to have something of a scoop today [has anybody heard from the NYTimes these days, except to hear it mouth Washington’s pieties?], reporting that our own Defense Intelligence Agency has decided that Chalabi, the man the Administration had expected to install as Sadaam Hussein’s successor, had duped his Pentagon paymasters in order to get the U.S. to attack and occupy Iraq.
But the report gets still more incredible. Chalabi was working in the interests of Iran all along, meaning that Bush has been working hard for a prominent member of the “Axis of Evil.” Could the theocrats in that unfortunate land be any more grateful to the Republican Party? Remember Iran-Contra as this latest treason unfolds.

WASHINGTON – The Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that a U.S.-funded arm of Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress has been used for years by Iranian intelligence to pass disinformation to the United States and to collect highly sensitive American secrets, according to intelligence sources.
“Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the United States through Chalabi by furnishing through his Information Collection Program information to provoke the United States into getting rid of Saddam Hussein,” said an intelligence source Friday who was briefed on the Defense Intelligence Agency’s conclusions, which were based on a review of thousands of internal documents.
The Information Collection Program also “kept the Iranians informed about what we were doing” by passing classified U.S. documents and other sensitive information, he said. The program has received millions of dollars from the U.S. government over several years.
An administration official confirmed that “highly classified information had been provided [to the Iranians] through that channel.”
The Defense Department this week halted payment of $340,000 a month to Chalabi’s program. Chalabi had long been the favorite of the Pentagon’s civilian leadership. Intelligence sources say Chalabi himself has passed on sensitive U.S. intelligence to the Iranians.
Patrick Lang, former director of the intelligence agency’s Middle East branch, said he had been told by colleagues in the intelligence community that Chalabi’s U.S.-funded program to provide information about weapons of mass destruction and insurgents was effectively an Iranian intelligence operation. “They [the Iranians] knew exactly what we were up to,” he said.
‘Sophisticated’ operation
He described it as “one of the most sophisticated and successful intelligence operations in history.”
“I’m a spook. I appreciate good work. This was good work,” he said.

I can appreciate good work too. Those of us who oppose this Administartion with every fiber of our being could hardly have imagined that such a damning scenario might unfold in the media, triggered and abetted by top civilian and military officials in the U.S. government, some of them certainly Republican. I already knew it would be a very interesting year, but I thought we’d probably have to do all of the work ourselves.

[image by Michael Shaw, from BAGnews]

Bush steps into “Reagan’s Bind”

(not that he’s going to notice)

SLACKTAVIST was there first, months ago.

“Reagan’s Bind” describes the conundrum in which one is unable to explain or defend one’s actions except by ascribing them to either: A) malicious intent; or B) glaring stupidity and/or incompetence.

Today Mark Morford brings us up to date:

It is [also] the eternal Bush conundrum. How to appear sort of blank faced and ignorant of the true atrocities your administration commits so as to avoid any sort of direct accountability, and yet still pretend to be a savvy, aware, tough-guy leader who gets things done and takes no bull and launches unprovoked wars on anything that stands in the way of his dad’s portfolio.
After all, it has always been far too easy to smack BushCo around as being an aww-shucks dumb-guy AWOL simpleton daddy’s boy with a low-C average and a painfully inarticulate approach to the world, coupled with an astounding, world-famous ability to mangle both the English language and every foreign policy ever implemented.
It’s always felt like a bit of a grand ruse, Bush’s Forrest Gump-style dunderheadedness, a clever (if entirely plausible) way to deflect much of the responsibility for his regimes’s carnage, all designed to make the nation believe that this guy simply couldn’t be all that bad because, well, he just ain’t all that bright.
But, ironically enough, as far as the Abu Ghraib mega-scandal is concerned, Bush has dug his own hole. It is his very own bull-headed, infantile, stay-the-course, admit-no-mistakes, bomb-first-ask-questions-never approach that has caged him in and makes any move toward getting the U.S. out of the Iraq quagmire nearly impossible. It’s not the sign of a dimwit. It’s the sign of a dimwit with delusions of shrewdness. Which is, of course, far more dangerous.
. . . .
Maybe Bush is stupid in a way that is far worse, and far more dangerous for the health of this planet, than mere inarticulate, nonintellectual, semiliterate Texas cow-pie bumbling.
It is, in short, the stupidity of the indignant and the self-righteous, of the morally arrogant, of someone whose power base is threatened and yet who is still blindly forcing America down this nightmare path, even when all signs and all leaders and all U.N. councils and all weapons investigators and all flagrant U.S.-sanctioned rapes and tortures are veritably screaming in his face that it is a mistake of increasingly epic, treacherous proportions.
And so maybe, ultimately, it all comes back to us. Maybe it is the majority of people in this flag-wavin’, happily deluded, fear-drenched country who can’t believe it could happen, who simply, you know, “misunderestimated” just how poisonous Bush’s savage brand of stupidity really is.

[image from leafpile]

Rudy as fake – and camera hog

A woman holds a sign in protest as she listens to testimony by former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani at a public hearing of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States in New York City, May 19, 2004.

Just wish we could forget him.
I’d lay off the guy by now if it weren’t for the fact that Rudy Giuliani still appears to be revered around the world as some kind of hero. Jimmy Breslin might also have been able to move on, but it clearly ain’t happening yet. Giuliani is a fake, and that may actually be the best that can be said of him.
The day after the 9/11 Commissioners had preposterously annointed him during his appearance before them in New York the veteran Newsday columnist brought his readers back to reality. I’m linking to and copying part of his column here, because almost everyone out in the ether has heard of our former mayor, but fewer get to read Breslin.

He was a nowhere guy until the planes hit the World Trade Center buildings. He was a failed mayor, was Rudy Giuliani. He had a commissioner named Harding stealing so obviously that at first people couldn’t believe their eyes.
Giuliani had an open fear of blacks that produced the one most memorable sight of the last 10 years in my city.
On the roof of City Hall were cops with rifles. They were ready to rake this small, straggly column of people marching on one strip of Broadway while they pleaded for housing. Many had AIDS and needed assistance. The real trouble with the demonstrators was that some of them were not white.
On the street, the cops aimed cameras at the cripples. On the roof, they aimed rifles at the marchers.
This was Rudy Giuliani’s paranoia caused by this raggedy group of demonstrators begging for a roof over their poor heads. In his time in City Hall, there was a person of color once in awhile. If two appeared, the SWAT team was put on alert.
Giuliani ran a city of aimless departments, of tax assessors shaking people down, of correction officers bullying people in campaigns, of an illness being used for publicity, of so much golf with a lobbyist that they called him the Commissioner of Golf, of so many strutting around and snarling at the helpless and the powerless, using Giuliani’s name as a baseball bat. And always, everybody fearing and shunning blacks. Crime had dropped in his first term. It had dropped all over the country, but he made it seem like it was only his doing. “My crime decrease.”
He wanted an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum closed because it offended his strict Catholicism. And then, with a wife in Gracie Mansion and one girlfriend in a car outside, a friend of mine, a detective, drove in with another girlfriend, and he and the other girlfriend’s car nearly hit each other. He marched with his girlfriend in a parade and his kids could watch it on television.
Giuliani wanted a high security bunker, placed 23 stories high in a building at 7 World Trade Center. Anybody with the least bit of common sense knew that the bunker in the sky was insane and the price, $15.1 million, a scandal. But he said it would house “My Police Commissioner” and “My Fire Commissioner.” In Giuliani’s world, everything was “mine.”
And on the morning of Sept. 11, Rudy Giuliani’s bunker went out into the air like a Frisbee.
The first thing he did, he was telling the 9/11 Commission yesterday, was to go out and search for a new command post. He walked away from the trade center and headed for the command post that made his career: the nearest television camera.
. . . .
He went on the television. He was good. What was he supposed to be, bad? He was talking to the world from a city of catastrophe. He went on television five or six times that day. He went on more the next day. And the day after that, and for all the days of the fall of 2001, and the television made him an international hero.
. . . .
And yesterday he sat before the 9/11 commissioners and they collapsed in awe. They listened to him give a walking tour of how he tried to find a command center. Not once did anybody ask him about the stupid idea he had had for his first bunker, the one that fell out of the sky. They asked no questions of a mayor whose fire department had no radios that worked when a police helicopter said the north tower was going to fall. And 343 firefighters died. They wanted to hear nothing of blood on Giuliani’s hands. They only wanted to hear whatever he had to say and they regarded his words as those of a hero. They had no idea that the guy was a flop who got lucky with an air raid.

They could at least have asked him a few real questions, and they definitely should have listened to the people who had had to share New York with him before September 11, especially the relatives of World Trade Center victims who sat in the same room with the former mayor on Wednesday. They were not happy.

Several relatives of victims said they were disgusted that the 10 members of the commission, each allowed about five minutes to question Giuliani, wasted time with redundant praise. One statement thanking Giuliani should have been enough, the families said.
“The commission members don’t press hard at all,” said Beverly Eckert, whose husband was killed.
“We leave frustrated,” said Monica Gabrielle, whose husband was killed. “They made a huge faux pas in letting Rudy Giuliani polish his crown.”
Targeting Giuliani is a reversal for many of the victims’ relatives, who in the years since the attack have generally praised him as a steady leader through the chaos. After leaving office at the end of 2001, Giuliani has consistently sided with family coalitions on issues involving the trade center site, once even calling for the entire 16 acres to become a memorial.

[image and caption from REUTERS/Peter Morgan]

Bush knows he didn’t apologize, even if the press doesn’t

Of course he’s not accepting personal responsibility, but he’s also not even apologizing for his occupying army, the country (or anything or anyone else); he’s merely saying vaguely, he’s sorry about it. But wait, read the full context of the word “sorry,” which he uses twice in his own report of what he told King Abdullah:

“I told him I was sorry for the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners and the humiliation suffered by their families,” the Republican president said during a Rose Garden appearance with the Jordanian monarch.
“I told him I was equally sorry that people who have been seeing those pictures didn’t understand the true nature and heart of America.”

If Bush is “apologizing” for American misdeeds here, he’s also “apologizing” for the ignorance of all who aren’t Americans. The latter is both an insult and an impossibility, and it makes the first statement meaningless.
He’s too stupid too realize it, but he’s just effectively shouted out once again, and this time not just to Iraqis, but to everyone in the world who is already unhappy with what our monstrous political, military and economic establishment has come to represent for them, “Bring them on!” We have no defenses for what will follow.

we must all be Arna’s Children

Ashraf Abu-elhaje, shown here in the childrens’ theatre of the Jenin refugee camp in 1996, was its most impressive student. At the time he dreamed of a future as the �Palestinian Romeo.� Six years later Ashraf led a large group of fighters in the battle of Jenin. He was killed by a rocket fired from a helicopter.

We went to see “Arna’s Children” at the Tribeca Film Festival yesterday afternoon. It is the only TFF program we expect to see, so it’s clear we had already thought it was important before we knew a great deal about it. We had heard of it through an email sent by the generous Israeli artist, filmmaker and activist Udi Aloni, who had extended an invitation to gather with others for a reception in his studio after the screening.

ARNA’S CHILDREN tells the story of a theatre group that was established by Arna Mer Khamis. Arna comes from a Zionist family and in the 1950s married a Palestinian Arab, Saliba Khamis. On the West Bank, she opened an alternative education system for children whose regular life was disrupted by the Israeli occupation. The theatre group that she started engaged children from Jenin, helping them to express their everyday frustrations, anger, bitterness and fear. Arna’s son Juliano, director of this film, was also one of the directors of Jenin’s theatre. With his camera, he filmed the children during rehearsal periods from 1989 to 1996. Now, he goes back to see what happened to them. Yussef committed a suicide attack in Hadera in 2001, Ashraf was killed in the battle of Jenin, Alla leads a resistance group. Juliano, who today is one of the leading actors in the region, looks back in time in Jenin, trying to understand the choices made by the children he loved and worked with. Eight years ago, the theatre was closed and life became static and paralysed. Shifting back and forth in time, the film reveals the tragedy and horror of lives trapped by the circumstances of the Israeli occupation.

We stayed in the theatre for the generous Q&A which immediately followed the film. Only when the lights went up did we notice that Jeffrey Wright and Glenn Close were also in the audience. We were impressed with their commitment, whether professional or human, but not more than we were with the fact that the festival director was there. Peter Scarlet is responsible for this very large operation showing a number of films simultaneously in widely-spread venues, but he was there to announce the picture and stayed with the filmmakers throughout the discussion after, eventually participating in it.
Even for people who think of themselves as pretty familiar with the issues and the reality of the subject of this magnificent documentary, the film was shattering, and the emotional experience was only made more distressing by a number of things we heard from the director and producers after. One of the revelations was that of all the little boys who had grown up working with Arna in her theatre group, only one survives today.
We were both made physically sick by the emotions tapped that afternoon, and we agreed together that we were unable to imagine going anywhere at that moment, even to be among people who would understand what we were feeling.
There is almost certainly no reason to think that the insanity and horror being visited upon “the other” in the Middle East will end in our time. Films like this may occasionally awaken hope that, were enough people able to see it, the revelation of the humanity and misery of our victims would be sufficient to make us all intelligent peacemakers. This film could change the world, but, except for the incredibly small number already pretty much aware of what’s going on, people will not see it. If we survive our times, “Arna’s Children” may some day be seen in the same way we see the evidence of other monstrosities, like “The Diary of Anne Frank” – after the fact, but with great reverence.
I’m very sorry, but I see no reason to be optimistic about the possibility that the people of this country or of its client Israel will regain consciousness and reason in time to avoid even the destruction of their own societies, to say nothing of the mortal damage being done to those of others.
Ok, maybe I’m just depressed today. Ask me how I feel about it tomorrow.

[image from the Arna site]

suburban police SUVs occupy Manhattan sidewalk

19th Street, east of 8th Avenue this afternoon: the signs read: “NO PARKING 8am to 6pm”

In 1962, at the peak of urban flight, New York City law was changed to permit police officers to live outside the city for the first time in its history. New York hasn’t been the same since. Although there have been many more frightening consequences, here we see one of the most visible.
Each of the vehicles shown above, almost all privately-owned and almost all SUVs, had large police permits lying on their dashboards. The 10th Precinct headquarters is located mid-block. So while they’re already getting free parking, apparently the street itself isn’t big enough for these commuters’ monsters. The narrow sidewalk of this quiet, tree-shaded residential block has to be commandeered for their convenience.
This is a scene reproduced all over the city, wherever there are police (or fire) stations. It’s no wonder that police routinely ignore threats to the safety and convenience of millions of New York pedestrians; the officers we pay for are essentially part of an occupying army, and they don’t know how to use their feet. I won’t even bring up large squad cars regularly double parked outside Krispy Kreme, or routinely blocking busy pedestrian crosswalks.

Incidently, the continued presence of these angle-parked precinct officers’ private tanks even at night makes the street signs somewhat disingenuous:
policeparking 1.JPG
the same block at 7:30pm last Friday

street storage: street parking

Let us suppose you have a chest of drawers that you sorely need for storage space but cannot fit into your small apartment. What to do?
Here is one thought: Why not put it on wheels and leave it curbside in front of your building? Naturally, you accept a theft risk and an obligation to move the chest across the street every few days to comply with alternate-side parking rules.
Absurd, right? You can’t just leave personal property on the street.
But what if we call that thing on wheels, oh, a car? Suddenly, it becomes O.K. to gobble up precious public space for your own benefit. Not only that, but on most streets you also need not pay a dime for this storage area.

So begins Clyde Haberman’s “NYC” column in today’s NYTimes.
While eventually we will be forced to ban on-street parking in New York, presumably starting only with Manhattan at first, it’s not going to be easy, not least because of the sense of entitlement fostered for car owners by every city administration for over half a century.
Before 1950 it was illegal to park overnight in Manhattan. Transportation Alternatives activist John Tierney has cited how old photographs demonstrate “gracefully uncluttered streets. Many of the sidewalks were much wider than today’s and adorned with greenery.”

The city’s pedestrian majority, as Police Commissioner Arthur Wallander approvingly observed in 1947, was firmly opposed to ”the public streets being used as garages.” But the city’s politicians had their own cars to park and favors to hand out. So some of the world’s most expensive real estate has ended up being used to store hulks of metal, at unbeatable prices.

But of course he’s not been alone in encouraging New Yorkers to take back the streets. Two and a half years ago Frank Pelligrini proposed in Time that incoming mayor Bloomberg be so bold as to make his mark by doing the right thing by all New Yorkers.

Banning parking would rev all the economic engines that the city runs on, and eliminate the real source of economic dead weight, namely private-vehicle owners who are just waiting for an excuse to get out of town for the weekend anyway

[image from unrev.com]

Ed Koch riding a trojan horse?

the keys to the city?

Ah, now I understand why former Mayor Ed Koch appears to be pimping for this Summer’s Republican Convention. Koch has accepted a job as chairman of a drive to attract thousands of volunteers to help with the event, but a NYTimes story which appeared April 28 seems to offer redemption for the old man.

It is accepted as an article of faith among protesters planning to demonstrate against the Republican National Convention this summer that agents seeking to undermine their efforts have infiltrated their ranks. But now the protesters are talking about infiltrating the convention to undermine the event itself.
“Really?” said Kevin Sheekey, president of the New York City Host Committee, when told that protesters were talking about flooding the ranks of volunteers to disrupt convention operations.
The city is obligated to find a total of 8,000 New Yorkers to volunteer to help things run smoothly, and would-be protesters are hoping that by signing up, they can work from the inside during the convention, scheduled Aug. 30 through Sept. 2.
“A lot of people are talking about it in general,” said William Etundi Jr., a founder of counterconvention.org, a Web site that serves as a bulletin board for anti-convention activities. “The Republicans are coming to New York City, so maybe the real New York should come to them.”

Koch has enraged progressives for years, but the closeted, way-erstwhile Democratic community activist could hardly have expected to abandon absolutely everything he ever represented* in order to beat the drum for a Republican candidate who has never disavowed his personal support while governor for the Texas law which mandates imprisonment for homosexuals. Or could he?
Yes he could. If you see him around town, tell him exactly how he’s doing, even though he’s no longer asking us the question. Oh, and while you have his attention, don’t forget to ask him what he did about AIDS during his watch.
Of course we know that Koch is not actually in the loop for the horse project, so what’s really going on? How did we get to the point where a political party’s supreme campaign stunt can be represented as “non-political,” in the former mayor’s own words. On Sunday, the Times’s Michael Slackman wrote that current mayor Michael Bloomberg, also a former Democrat, is trying to persuade New Yorkers that the convention is not political because it is happening in their city. Even Koch admits that it’s “one of the most political events of the nation.”

Political, indeed, said William K. Dobbs, spokesman for United for Peace and Justice, a group that hopes to have hundreds of thousands of protestors focusing on the convention in a very partisan way. “If the R.N.C. is non-partisan, I’m Greta Garbo,” said Mr. Dobbs. “A political party’s convention by its nature is partisan. This is loony.”

____________________
*
From an interview which appeared in POZ last December, where Michael Musto and Tony Kushner are discussing the film version of “Angels In America”:

Musto: One thing that is missing is the line outing former New York City mayor Ed Koch, an arch-enemy of AIDS activists, as gay.
Kushner: I dont know if that was gone in the screenplay or taken out in editing. Maybe the [filmmakers] figured no one knows who Ed is anymore, which would be a lovely thing to believe. Oblivion is what Ed deserves. When the play was on Broadway, a New York name lawyer whos a friend of Kochs asked me if Id please take the line out because it was really hurting Eds feelings. I left it in. It was mean to do, but I really hated him. Hes such a ghastly man and such a betrayer of the progressive vision he rose to prominence on. He became such a reactionary blimp.

[Tiepolo, The Procession of the Trojan Horse in Troy (1773) oil on canvas, 39 x 67 cm, National Gallery, London, the image from The Web Gallery of Art]

subway [in]security

this is as sophisticated as it gets

Ray Sanchez knows what the city won’t tell us: No one is really doing anything about subway security. But then, why should we be surprised? The subway isn’t the politicians and bureaucrats’ thing. They don’t use it.
At the same time it hasn’t escaped the notice of some of us that there’s still talk about entirely shutting down Penn Station and the Main Post Office during the Republican Convention for the safety of hundreds or thousands of treasured Republican plutocrats.

The conductor stood in the cab of the subway car, her door ajar. People have a false sense of security on the subway, she said. “The politicians who never ride the trains are very reassuring, aren’t they?”
The New York Police Department is rushing to train 10,000 officers in counter-terrorism in time for the summer’s Republican National Convention, but there are transit workers without fire and evacuation training.
“I’m one of them,” said the conductor, who has eight years on the job. “You hope common sense is enough to get you through an emergency, but, you know, common sense goes out the window.”

And, in the event, the riders too, if there’s going to be no direction from “security.”

[image from Rachelle Bowden at rachelleb]

crush the Church before it crushes all reason

it’s a slippery slope

But it’s 2004! Why do we still have to deal with this accursed thing? I’ve absolutely had it with the abominations of the Catholic Church, and don’t get me started on all the other monstrously evil cults which compete with it in advancing fear and superstition in this benighted land and around the world.
Bloggy discovered last night that my home state of Michigan is about to institutionalize unreason, bigotry and hate.

Doctors or other health care providers could not be disciplined or sued if they refuse to treat gay patients under legislation passed Wednesday by the Michigan House.
The bill allows health care workers to refuse service to anyone on moral, ethical or religious grounds.
The Republican dominated House passed the measure as dozens of Catholics looked on from the gallery. The Michigan Catholic Conference, which pushed for the bills, hosted a legislative day for Catholics on Wednesday at the state Capitol.

If these idiots want religious war, I think we should let them have it. I’m in.
I know the Catholic Church like few others do. My family has practiced its magic for almost two thousand years and most of them continue to do so. I was educated in a Catholic elementary school staffed entirely by nuns, an Augustinian Prep School manned by black-robed priests and brothers, and a Jesuit not-so-liberal-arts university.
In that time I learned just about everything they wanted me to learn about “The Church,” and I never questioned the system, but within a few weeks of my arrival at the University of Wisconsin Madison the entire structure of intellectual restraints collapsed and I learned how to breathe freely for the first time.
Years later I find even more darkness all around me, and I am its enemy.
In spite of cries of alarm coming from those who carry its torches, religion is not persecuted in this country. Reason is persecuted in this country. Religion is winning.

[image from a French Charles Taze Russell site, where it is captioned, “Fratricide Autodafé à Paris”]