Category: War

Headline of lead story in current the Onion: Osama Bin Laden Found Inside Each Of Us

WASHINGTON, DC—Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced Tuesday that Osama bin Laden, prime suspect in the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, has “at long last been found.”
“For more than two years, we combed the Middle East looking for bin Laden,” Rumsfeld said. “Frankly, it was starting to be an embarrassment. You can imagine our surprise when we finally found him hiding deep inside the darkest recesses of each and every one of our souls.”

For some of us, the revelation is no surprise at all; we’re very good at creating our own demons.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – A suicide car bomb killed 47 people at an army recruitment center in Baghdad Wednesday, taking the death toll to about 100 in two attacks on Iraqis working with the U.S. occupation forces within 24 hours.

After the previous day’s bombing, our guy Rumsfeld said this sort of thing happens in cities routinely.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, asked about Tuesday’s car bombing in Iraq that killed about 50 people, said there are murders in every major city in the world “because human beings are human beings.”

What city does he lives in? And if he thinks the thousands being killed in Iraqi cities are just routine events in all civilizations [read, “Sodoms and Gomorrahs”], how does he and his Administration justify making those killed on September 11 the foundation of all U.S. domestic and foreign policy?

Could there be a more damning indictment of the intelligence of most Americans than the figures reported in the latest poll?

Despite those vulnerabilities [figures showing doubts about his economic and other domestic policies], which the Democratic presidential candidates are busily trying to exploit, Mr. Bush retains a powerful advantage on national security. Sixty-eight percent, including majorities of both Democrats and independents, gave him high marks for the campaign against terrorism, and 68 percent said the Bush administration’s policies have made the United States safer from terrorist attacks.

[While we’re at it, we should note that this poll is the work of, well, yeah, the NYTimes/CBS News, and what the heck is a newspaper doing putting its own poll as its lead front page story?]
Just where is the evidence of our increased safety? There have been no more terrorist attacks within the U.S. since September 11. If that’s evidence, it’s the same evidence that showed we were safe before September 11. Are these 68 percenters saying we’re safer because only people outside the U.S. are being slaughtered – by ourselves and others, in huge numbers which happen to include a certain count of American soldiers as well?
Accepting tyranny and waging world war, whether in bits or in total, will not make us safe.
And, back to my original question, I no longer buy the argument that our media makes us stupid. If that were true, everyone would be cheering for the little man in the flight suit. By the Times‘s count there may still be some on the sidelines.

[image from The Museum of Hoaxes]

greetings!

the full Yahoo! caption reads:

Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Tom Ridge (L) speaks with airline passenger Gloria Quevedo (R) of Chile as she is fingerprinted by Customs and Border Protection Officer Mary Armbrust at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta on January 5, 2004. The United States began fingerprinting and photographing visitors from most countries on Monday in a controversial program to try to prevent potential terrorists from slipping in through the borders. REUTERS/Tami Chappell

So patriotic that it trumps the administration’s disdain for “old Europe”, even its hatred for the French.
Today the U.S. began taking mugshots and fingerprinting all visitors coming into and leaving the fatherland, although an exception is being made for citizens of European countries and Canada. Mexicans are also excepted, for now but since we have always made “special” arrangements for what we think of as the permanent threat of the darker people from the areas to our south, I’m sure we will continue to address the problem of those immediately below our border with the seriousness we think it deserves.
Basically, if you’re not a white European, we just don’t trust you and you just better watch out.
But does anyone trust the people in charge to make Americans safe? Tom Ridge, like virtually every member of this administration, wouldn’t even have a passport if his current job didn’t require it, and that kind of provinciality and just plain incuriosity shows in the disastrous policies which this government pursues.

Guerrillas Kill 3 U.S. Troops; Bomb Kills 5 Iraqis

This is the first Reuters headline I spotted on my home page as I got up this morning. Before reading the story I had perversely assumed that “we” were the party responsible for the deaths of the 5 Iraqis. Actually it was the work of a suicide bomber in a northern Kurdish city, who died along with two guards, a passerby and a 13-year-old girl.
Now I would say that while the “score” should read, 8-0, it’s actually the coach in the White House who deserves the credit for every one of those eight – and for every other death in this monstrous war that has been and is still to be.

Finlay Johnson Richards, 2, of London, England, points at New York City police officers patroling Union Square as part of Operation Hercules as his twin sister Maya Rose looks on, Monday, Dec. 22, 2003 in New York.

The uniforms and the guns have descended in force once again.
Our little general tells his people to just go about their lives, and leave everything in his care. And all has been absolutely super under that arrangement so far, no?
Jimmy Breslin describes what this looks like on the streets here in New York.

. . . over the weekend, Homeland Security raised the terrorism alert to condition orange. By Saturday night, the streets of midtown looked like a parking lot at a police precinct. Vans were all along the curbs. Patrol cars were up on the sidewalks. All had lights, yellow and white, flashing in the night air.
Cops took over the sidewalks and lined them with metal barricades. On Seventh Avenue, 44th Street was blocked and traffic waved on. A friend was in a cab on Seventh Avenue trying to get to the Algonquin Hotel on 44th and Sixth, but as the cab couldn’t turn on 44th, he said he would get out.
The driver stopped and said, “Get out now. Hurry up!” They were too slow. A cop was at the door when it opened and he shouted that he was giving the cabbie a summons. Nobody was to stop. This was a civil defense emergency.
This great big city now belonged to the nearest badge.

We’re now being told that the “alert” will not be called off at the end of the holiday season. Is that supposed to please or upset us? Do we bother to think about it at all? All of this is only a rehearsal anyway, for something much bigger. If and when just one more terrorist succeeds within our borders, much more than lives will be lost. Our entire political system will be destroyed forever, permanently replaced by a military dictatorship. We can be sure no voice will be heard to object.
If, in this interim, anyone manages to think about it at all, she or he knows that no SWAT team, no army, can make us safe. Only an intelligent executive, and above all an intelligent foreign policy, could give us and the rest of the world any security. But Americans don’t want intelligence, especially in their government.
Hail to the [fill in the blank] chief!
In the Fall of last year I wrote in this space:

Almost two years ago, in the months after the 2000 elections, I bored or frightened my friends with my prediction that we would never have another Presidential election, and we would very likely be relieved of the messiness of another congressional election as well. I believed that the Republicans would never give up what had been so ill-gotten in the winter of 2000-2001.
I was certain that some pretext would be invented to distort the electoral process, or even entirely suspend the Constitutional niceties providing for the election of a Congress and a President, in order to protect us from enemies at home or aboad.
Absent any compelling case for Republican involvement in the events of September 11, we still have a case for a Republican conspiracy, one which is subverting the political process at this very moment, and it’s working very well indeed. Most of the Democrats have bought into the monstrous idiocy of this regime’s war arguments and practices, with disagreement only in the details, at best.

It looks like they’re going to pull it off.

[image, and the excerpt from its caption there, are from Yahoo! News (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)]

(Conceived and executed by Ed Sedarbaum. This product conforms to official Patriot Act requirements: it’s useless.)

What possible purpose is served by the government making an announcement that should totally distract, if not scare us to death? Hmm.

[the image caption is from the artist himself]

Shaking Hands: Iraqi President Saddam Hussein greets Donald Rumsfeld, then special envoy of President Ronald Reagan, in Baghdad on December 20, 1983 [in the midst of the war begun in 1980, when Iraq attacked Iran]. (video clip still)

Hussein now as good as dead? If we think about it for a second, we can see that’s not a good thing for “freedom.” [since Bush, we have to put the word in quotation marks]
First, let’s see, what do we know for sure about the Iraqi dictator’s sudden reappearance?
There seems little reason to doubt that Saddam Hussein is in Iraq and currently in the custody of its American owners. Everything else being reported should be subject to the most intense scrutiny.
What we do know, those of us who have kept abreast of the story from the beginning, is that it isn’t in the interest of anyone in power in the U.S., Britain, or just about any other nation, and not excluding the paper governing committee we have installed in Iraq, to see him actually put on trial. Any legitimate, fair trial would permit Hussein to speak in his defense. Every one of his current enemies has been compromised by contacts, agreements, support and conspiracies which stretch back 30 years, many continuing even until only months before the hostilities which began in March.
From Bloggy, writing about our own government’s relationship to the man we now describe as a monster:

Are they going to allow his defense to bring up things like the fact we provided satellite intelligence to him when he was gassing Iranians and others during the Iraq/Iraq war, or that Rumsfeld was happy to meet with him during that time? I doubt it.

There will of course be no fair trial. There may in fact be no trial at all.
At least one blogger has suggested that there’s a possibility that the former dictator has actually been in U.S. custody for some time. Then why weren’t we told about it?
Easy. Early reports describe the captured Hussein as appearing bewildered, disoriented, perhaps in some kind of stupor, even “broken.” The circumstances of his discovery and arrest were anything but public. It all happened under cover of darkness, and the 600 troops which were part of the task force did not know the nature of the operation. Could the events of Saturday night have been an invention? But to what end?
I’m sure many hypotheses might be advanced, but my own should appeal to more than just those who revel in conspiracy theories. I think Saddam Hussein may have been captured some time ago, and the reason we are only hearing about it now, the reason it is being described as if it had just happened is that his captors first needed some time with him in private. I think there’s a good chance he’s now been “modified.”
Ok, too fantastic? Perhaps, especially since the same purpose would be served if Hussein didn’t get to testify in the first place. Any number of people could be found to see that he was murdered first, but maybe it would be neater if he managed to die of some unfortunate medical condition. No matter how the arrangements are handled, we’re never going to hear what he has to say.
So in fact his life is already over. Only the details have to be worked out.
How did we get to the point where we could imagine the very worst in the conduct of our own goverment? In fact I think we now can actually expect the very worst.
And I think this means it’s all over.

[image and caption from George Washington University, The National Security Archive]

Boys at war

The caption which accompanies this photo from the current Yahoo News slideshow reads:

Two US soldiers from the 2nd Battalion of the 173 Airborne Brigade take position next a group of Iraqi youths during a massive raid in Hawijah, 45 kilometres (nearly 30 miles) west of Iraq’s northern oil center of Kirkuk.(AFP/Mauricio Lima)

[from the look of it, in this case the photographer probably agreed with the Iraqi youths’ estimate of the danger]

The Rockefeller Center Christmas tree under arrest, for being attractive

Apparently we have everything to fear, especially fear itself.
Bush is in the White House.
On Sunday Newsday‘s Dennis Duggan stared that fear in the eye. He didn’t blink.

I went to Rockefeller Center yesterday to take in the preparations for next week’s Christmas tree lighting, a sparkling symbol of good will.
But what a surprise to see the tree surrounded by heavily armed anti-terror cops.
And my reception was anything but warm: Private security guards bum-rushed me twice.
In between these two sets of verbal walking papers, I sat on an outdoor bench with Gregory Murphy, 50, who had witnessed the destruction of the Twin Towers from his Brooklyn Heights home.
“These people here,” he said, pointing to some of the patrolling security guards who work for Tishman Speyer Properties, “are making me very nervous.”
Tishman Speyer owns Rockefeller Center, the Chrysler Building and 666 Fifth Avenue.
Earlier in the day, they turned down my request to speak to their security people.
“They are worried about security,” I was told by a flak-catcher with the Howard Rubenstein public relations firm, which represents Tishman Speyer.
Murphy, an engineer, was trying to relax – which was difficult among bomb-sniffing canines.
“It’s pretty nerve-racking. I saw those police, kids really, with their fingers on the triggers, and that didn’t make me feel secure at all.”
I was stopped by square-badge security guards patrolling the plaza. The first time I was asked what I was doing there. “I hope you’re not interviewing anyone,” one of them warned.
Of course I was, and I was doing it the second time a security guard on the real estate developer’s payroll stopped me. This time I was asked to show my press card, but after flashing it, I still wasn’t allowed to cross Fifth Avenue and enter Rockefeller Plaza.

Merry Christmas?
It should have been obvious for some time that both the interests of terrorists everywhere and those of a hell-bent administration in Washington are being served by our fear, especially since the extraordinary security measures it inspires are not likely to confound any intelligent plans of the former and they certainly ease the way for the agenda of the latter.
FDR was speaking about the depression when he warned the country against fear, but he was to be no stranger to either domestic disaster or real war. He would be ashamed of our cowardice and our stupidity today.

[image from Newsday/Julia Gaines]