Category: War

Orchard Street market on Sunday

Did Dick Cheney’s secret energy policy task force meetings discuss an Iraq war? Former NJ governor James J. Florio suggests the possibility. Sure would help explain why the administration continues to fight so hard to keep the meeting records from the public.

It is hard to imagine that the subject of Iraq and oil did not come up. Any specific discussion that just happened to preview our subsequent course of action in Iraq would be problematic for the president. What did he know and when did he know it? Pre-emptive war for reasons hidden from the public would be a historic first — and a dangerous precedent.

CORRECTION (October 2, 2003): My friend James W reminds me, “Costa Rica has not had an Army since 1948. (That reason alone puts Costa Rica high on my Good List.)”

Meanwhile, in other news [there’s always other news], “US CUTS AID TO ALLIES WHO WON’T EXEMPT US FROM WAR CRIMES…” has been the headline story all day long on Common Dreams.

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration today cut over $89 million in military aid to 32 friendly countries because they refused to exempt U.S. citizens and soldiers from the jurisdiction of the new International Criminal Court (ICC)–the world’s first permanent tribunal to prosecute the perpetrators of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
Among the countries whose aid was cut were a number of new democracies in Central and East Europe–some of which have contributed troops to bolster the U.S.-led occupation in Iraq–as well as Brazil, Costa Rica, Peru, Venezuela, Ecuador, South Africa, and several other Latin American and African countries.

Strictly speaking, this isn’t quite news, since I’m sure we had already heard some time ago that they were going to do this.
Nevertheless, it now provides evidence that it’s not only bribery and blackmail but clearly also payback schemes which steer what passes for U.S. foreign policy these days. They must love us out there by now!
But of course we should know that’s not the point, right?

We New Yorkers have been saying, “not in our name,” for over two years. After completing a study begun only a week after the 9/11 attacks, psychoanalyst and historian Charles B. Strozier, the Director of the Center on Terrorism and Public Safety at the city’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, suggests an explanation.

But what he found in his study [including repeated interviews with people in and outside of New York] surprised him. “You cannot underestimate the difference between the experience and the image of the experience,” Dr. Strozier said.
“Those who lived in Lower Manhattan breathed in the smell of the dead for weeks, like those at Auschwitz. We all knew what the smell was even if we did not speak about it. The dust settled over huge sections of the city, from Brooklyn to the Upper West Side.
“The chaos and fear were real to New Yorkers. This made the experience authentic. New Yorkers were much closer to the suffering. It was harder to become numb to it. And while they may have been angry, they were less filled with rage,” the professor said. “It was much harder to get those of us who were there to believe in the notion that killing others would somehow make us safer.”

Some of our friends seem to think that the story about the White House betrayal of a CIA operative just broke in the media. There must be many more so mistaken, so take a look at this post in early July and this one, two weeks later. Both link to early reports in the press.
Knowing this to be the case, another appropriate question has to be asked, and I do. Why was the significance of this crime ignored until now? Well, the Republicans have been working very hard since Watergate and that subsequent little speed bump, Iran-Contra, and everyone else has been asleep, as we now know to our shame.
Besides, it’s not about sex.

View of the UN from 47th Street and 1st Avenue on Tuesday
Only about two dozen people found their way to the designated free speech zone a block from the United Nations yesterday. From where we stood we had a view of the tops of the buildings and a number of media vans and mammoth, rock-filled dump trucks some distance away. Exciting.
I’d like to think that everyone who wasn’t there knows that Bush’s days are now numbered, but it may also be that the administration’s strategy has succeeded: Dissent is wrong, but if you insist on pursuing your little perversions you may do it where you will only be shouting at the cops and other security types.
The few (10?) anti-regime boobies gathered in the rain in Dag Hammarskjold Park were even slightly outnumbered and clearly out-shouted – ok, rather shamed – by the organization and enthusiasm of a group of Indonesians demonstrating for justice, human rights and a free Aceh.
Maybe America will survive if even with our own civil rights so threatened and compromised it can still inspire such courage and hope in her youngest sons and daughters, or her newest visitors. Many of these people may have much to lose with their activism – one modelled on our own best traditions. I hope we will remain worthy of such tributes.
The media yesterday? I only saw a Telemundo crew in almost two hours, but they lingered in front of us for quite a while, especially in front of the young Indonesians. There was some interest in my own waterproofed sign, which read, intending to direct an indictable Bush, “THE HAGUE, NOT THE UN.” The few diplomat-types which walked by kept straight faces, unless they made eye contact, which broke the facade and the response was then a warm smile.

And these are only the Americans.
[image from “Counting the Body Bags” on nyc indymedia center]

I had to skip yesterday; just couldn’t take the scenes. Here’s why:
As a nation, we’re swimming in self-pity, we’re shaking in fear, and we’re reveling in revenge.
But were being really, really stupid. Pity, fear and revenge do not make good policy for individuals or nations.
We talk incessantly about what was done to us, but no one is asking why; we’re sure it’ll happen again, but we haven’t done much to prevent that; and we want to beat the shit out of “them,” even though “they” didn’t do it.
I don’t want to hear about September 11. I want to hear about September 10 and September 12. We need a serious investigation of how this thing happened, and a serious policy which might prevent it happening again.
What we are getting is ignorance and violence, an ignorance and a violence which can only produce greater ignorance and violence, as have already seen and as we can expect to see so long as we are committed to it.
The most truly horrifying take on why we are not getting what we really need is the argument that our de facto government is using September 11 for its own political purpose and for its plain money greed. You don’t have to believe that this administration had any part in or knew in advance about the devastating blows we suffered that day to be able to say it has done everything that it could to profit from it, and that so far its efforts have been very successful.
The first step in our recovery has not yet been taken. That step will be the removal of this evil regime.
Paul Krugman recounts its history of exploitation, and warns that, since those who directed it are finally in very serious trouble on all fronts, removing them will be very, very messy.

. . . Where once the administration was motivated by greed, now it’s driven by fear.
In the first months after 9/11, the administration’s ruthless exploitation of the atrocity was a choice, not a necessity.
. . . .
Now it has all gone wrong. The deficit is about to go above half a trillion dollars, the economy is still losing jobs, the triumph in Iraq has turned to dust and ashes, and Mr. Bush’s poll numbers are at or below their pre-9/11 levels.
Nor can the members of this administration simply lose like gentlemen. For one thing, that’s not how they operate. Furthermore, everything suggests that there are major scandals – involving energy policy, environmental policy, Iraq contracts and cooked intelligence – that would burst into the light of day if the current management lost its grip on power. So these people must win, at any cost.
The result, clearly, will be an ugly, bitter campaign – probably the nastiest of modern American history.

They will be wrapped in bibles and flags, and you and I will be accused of immorality and treason.

New York patriot: and nobody’s stooge
Go here for a gallery of images from today’s demonstration at Federal Hall.
Years ago most of us would not have thought we’d ever find ourselves in a police barricade pen next to the Stock Exchange on Broad and Wall Streets demonstrating against U.S. fascism. But there we were this afternoon, and the real terror is that I don’t think this stuff surprises us now.
For two hours of a gorgeous late summer day in New York, a serious community of between two and three thousand people yelled, chanted and listened closely to dozens of speakers addressing them and, in absentia, the scary man who was lunching across the street.
John Ashcroft, the appointee of an appointed president, was addressing a closed-door meeting of invited high-level New York-area law enforcement officials as part of a national “tour” for his police state apparatus. The trips were designed to sell the administration’s extraordinary Justice Department agenda as it’s described in the original “Patriot” Act, in the terms of its expansive but still only proposed sequel, dubbed “Patriot” II, or in something called the “Victory” Act.
Ashcroft was speaking just a few blocks from the site of the World Trade Center, and the New York speech, delivered two days prior to the anniversary of its destruction, is supposedly the last in the series.
Not the least disturbing part of this affront to all republican and democratic decency and true patriotism was the fact that it took place in Federal Hall, the site of George Washington’s inauguration. It was on this plot that the United States Congress first met, and where it wrote and passed the Bill of Rights.
Like most everything done by this administration, everything about Ashcroft’s sales-trip visits, including the time, the location and the guest lists, are supposed to be kept secret from the American people. And yet, with only two days notice secured through irregular means, some 60 organizations were able to bring a very large and enthusiastic crowd of outraged New Yorkers to confront on their own turf this arrogant rogue government and its continuing and unprecedented attacks on civil liberties.
The reason for it was sobering enough for today’s oddly cheerful assembly, but the most chilling evidence of that necessity was the insult of so many machine-guns and attack-dogs held by so many of the armored special in our immediate vicinity, on the streets and sidewalks, on subway entrances, next to the heroic bronze of George Washinton on the steps of his place, and especially the stairs and the roof of the Memorial itself. The real terrorist was inside Federal Hall this afternoon.
Another country.
The unelected vice president, Dick Cheney, arrives here on Thursday to help us celebrate his party’s great day, and less than one year from now the big monkey himself will be accepting that gang’s nomination for a second appointment to misrule – in poor old, wounded, grieving but oh so grateful New York.
Well, serving them is not our agenda, and the Republicrats have to know that.
September 11 is nothing more than a political tool for these people, as is all of New York City itself, a place more removed from their world than any other part of the country.
We have to do something by which they will remember us elsewise – and if not fondly, well. “Well” will do very nicely.

It’s all laid out here, in a compact piece from the Toronto Star, via Common Dreams, by the paper’s own Haroon Siddiqui.