Category: War

The war party in Washington had predicted terrorist strikes in the U.S. would accompany a war on Iraq, but now that it’s gotten the war it longed for, it admits there is little evidence Al Qaeda or any other groups plan to attack us, and this may not be making the party members happy. What they really want is a red alert, since that would mean the real martial law with which we have only been threatened up up now.
I don’t think it’s just my cynicism, but a piece in the regular “A Nation at War” section of the NYTimes this Sunday morning suggests that our very nutty and very scary secret-society, basement-clubhouse war-mongers seems to have a plan for turning around this unexpected and almost certainly disappointing development.

WASHINGTON, April 5 — After Bush administration officials and many American lawmakers predicted that terrorist attacks were nearly inevitable because of the war in Iraq, there has been little evidence that Al Qaeda or other networks are preparing to strike against the United States, senior government officials say.
As a result, intelligence analysts are turning their attention to a new potential threat, the likelihood that a protracted American presence in Iraq after the war could stir violence both in Iraq, the rest of the Middle East, in the United States and against American interests around the globe.
“I can’t believe that they are going to do nothing after Iraq,” said one senior counterterrorism official. “I’ve been frankly astonished at how quiet it’s been. I’ve got to believe that somehow, some way they are going to try to hit us. It’s just a matter of time.”

We’ve learned nothing since September 11. We’re going to continue to do whatever we can to stir the embers and fan the flames of an enemy about which we understand nothing and which is currently to be found nowhere, this time by an extended ocupation of the proud heart of ancient araby.
But we aren’t going to restrict our mischief to the overlordship of Mesopotamia. The news story immediately to the left of the one cited above tells us that our modern destroyer of civilization has cast his eyes beyond the ancient cradle of civilization, and now openly covets Persia and Syria.

Shortly after Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld issued a stark warning to Iran and Syria last week, declaring that any “hostile acts” they committed on behalf of Iraq might prompt severe consequences, one of President Bush’s closest aides stepped into the Oval Office to warn him that his unpredictable defense secretary had just raised the specter of a broader confrontation.
Mr. Bush smiled a moment at the latest example of Mr. Rumsfeld’s brazenness, recalled the aide. Then he said one word — “Good” — and went back to work.
It was a small but telling moment on the sidelines of the war.

“[Colin] Powell was taken aback,” says the Times, but he remains only window dressing for the den of criminals and fools in the White House. The paper later quotes someone described as “a senior administation official:”

“Iraq is not just about Iraq”

There’s also a trigger-happy cheering section outside the White House, and they’re not being discreet these days.

Several of the hawks outside the administration who pressed for war with Iraq are already moving on to the next step, and perhaps further than the president is ready to go. [my italics, and I have to say, huh?] R. James Woolsey, the former director of central intelligence, said on Wednesday that Iraq was the opening of a “fourth world war,” after World War I, World War II and the cold war, and that America’s enemies included the religious rulers in Iran, states like Syria and Islamic extremist terrorist groups.

For more fun (or nightmares) with speculation about the extent of the White House gang’s stupidity or devilry, see the excellent Daily Kos.

My fellow citizens are now so pumped-up about the unique genius, virtue and power that permits, indeed calls, them to destroy and kill masses of people on the other side of the world (while Americans themselves can remain in family rooms watching entertainment “news” or roar down the asphalt in 10 mpg “SUVs”), that, according to a new Los Angeles Times poll, they are already anxious to take on Iran, probably Syria as well, and perhaps tomorrow the rest of the world, unless those foreigners quickly shed whatever makes them so foreign.
For at least one aging, fat plutocrat in Marin County, California, a Hummer H2 seems to work better than viagra, even if it’s not nearly as monstrous as the vehicle he’d really like to strap on. A NYTimes “Business Day” article on April 5 says that sales remain strong for America’s favorite 4-wheel-drive penile enlargements during these dark days of war.

But some Hummer drivers, inundated like the rest of America by war news, feel especially patriotic behind the wheel now.
“When I turn on the TV, I see wall-to-wall Humvees, and I’m proud,” said Sam Bernstein, a 51-year-old antiquities dealer who lives in Marin County, Calif., and drives a Hummer H2, an S.U.V. sibling of the military Humvee.
“They’re not out there in Audi A4’s,” he said of the troops. “I’m proud of my country, and I’m proud to be driving a product that is making a significant contribution.”
“If I could get an A1 Abrams [it weighs 60 tons], I would,” he added with a smile, referring to the tank, “but I don’t know if California would allow it.”

I suspect that when we go off to Iran Boom Boom Bernstein will be right there with the rest of the stay-at-home-patriot war mongers, pushing our boys and girls into real Humvees and A1 Abrams tanks, but staying high and dry in Marin County in his shiny boulevard version. The LATimes article suggests just how eager so many of us are for more real action, at least if we don’t have to risk our own lives:

. . . substantial portions of the public are willing to consider military action against other potential threats in the area. “I just think that the Middle East itself will never fall into a peaceful solution unless some of the people who are supporting terror are finally rooted out,” said Don Seward, who runs a small real estate business in Western Springs, Ill.
Americans are divided almost in half when asked whether the United States should take military action against Syria, which Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has accused of providing Iraq with military supplies. Syria has denied the accusation. But 42% said the United States should take action if Syria, in fact, provides aid to Iraq, while 46% said no.
More Americans take a hard line on Iran, which recently disclosed an advanced program to develop the enriched uranium that could be used in nuclear weapons.
Exactly half said the United States should take military action against Iran if it continues to move toward nuclear-weapon development; 36% disagreed.

So, is an Audi A4 un-American? And if I were able to buy something as small as the very grown-up, 80 mpg Smart coupe in this brave country of ours, would I be stoned at the wheel by my neighbors?

“Rumsfeld and his coterie now dare to complain that Saddam is violating the laws of war and does not fight fare,” according to the editorial in the April 21 print edition of The Nation .

“We are invading their country,” Chief Warrant Officer Glen Woodard observes. “I’d be by my window with a shotgun too.” Similarly, Rumsfeld, who rejected concerns about U.S. treatment of Afghan and Al Queda prisoners, now invokes the Geneva conventions on the lawful treatment of prisoners of war. Has he forgotten the pictures of Afghan prisoners, their beards shorn against their religious beliefs, displayed in Guantánamo, held in a legal limbo without the protection of POW status? Or the two homicides in a US Army prison in Afghanistan, where an Army pathologist described the cause of death as “blunt force injuries?”
American leaders would be wise to avoid invoking the Geneva conventions – or better still to observe them. The central question in the minds of many millions around the world is whether the United States, in violation of the UN Charter and long-established terms of international law, is waging an illegal war

.

Any more.
Are we going to swallow this one too?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The White House said on Friday it would consider military action in Iraq a success even if U.S. forces failed to find President Saddam Hussein, whose appearance on Iraqi television could prove he survived a U.S. bombing raid on the first night of the war.

Or this, from the Washington Post:

One marker [of victory in Iraq] explicitly rejected by the White House is the capture or confirmed death of Hussein. The administration does not want its ambitious postwar plans to be held hostage by a search for the Iraqi leader. Opinion polls have suggested that a public perception of success would be reduced if Hussein’s whereabouts remain unknown.
During early preparations for war, one official said, some U.S. thinkers “operated on the assumption that it was going to be a relatively clean break, that the end of the regime would be clear for all to see. That may not be the case. I think we’re seeing a rolling end.”

For the past two and a half years, since planes crashed into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, virtually everything this junta has done at home and around the world it alleges to have done in the name of destroying, first, Osama Bin Laden, and then, when he escaped our might, his alleged buddy and co-conspirator, Saddam Hussein, who now may also have escaped. But we definitely never hear about Bin Laden any more, and as of today Hussein has apparently also been relegated to the dustpin. Their usefullness to the grander political purposes of our occupiers in Washington is finished, but new monsters are already being manufactured in Washington and we will be hearing about them soon.
We can at least try to remember that by their accusations about the authors of September 11, the Bushies have failed in the assignment they announced they had set for themselves and for which they gambled, and lost, the world.
The incredibly embarassing admission that it has abandoned its quest for accountability and revenge may serve at least one positive purpose for the administration: Any talk of, or actual moves toward, holding Saddam and his regime accountable far war crimes could not help but provoke discussion of the war crimes of the American and British governments themselves.

We’ve lost the “war against terrorism.”
An American citizen, a 38-year-old software engineer and author, has been held in solitary confinement in a federal prison in Portland, Oregon, for the last two weeks. He has not been charged with a crime, he has not been interrogated and he has not been brought before a judge. The government will not tell anyone why he is being held in prison. His file has been sealed by a federal court at the request of the Department of Justice.
Mike Hawash was arrested in a parking lot by the FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Force when he arrived for work at the Intel Corporation’s suburban Portland offices. Simultaneously, FBI agents in bulletproof vests and carrying assault rifles awoke his wife Lisa and their three young children in their home, which they proceeded to search.

Federal officials will not comment on Mr. Hawash, though they have been pressed by Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, and by a group of supporters led by a former Intel vice president, for basic information about why he is being detained.
In a statement after his arrest, the F.B.I. said he was being held as a material witness in an “ongoing investigation” by the Joint Terrorism Task Force. Federal search warrants in the case are sealed.
The case has drawn the attention of civil liberties groups nationwide, who say Mr. Hawash’s case is an example of how the Bush administration is holding a handful of American citizens without offering them normal legal protection.
Although at least two American citizens are being held without normal legal rights as “enemy combatants,” Mr. Hawash has not been categorized as such. As a material witness, he is being held to compel testimony. But supporters say he has not been told anything about what the government may want from him.

The facts are sufficiently eloquent and do not need much embellishment here. It suffices to say that we are no longer a nation of laws.

Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the courts have made conflicting rulings on the legality of holding material witnesses without charging them. A federal judge in Manhattan, Shira A. Scheindlin, said such detentions were “an illegitimate use of the statute,” but another ruling in the same court, by Chief Judge Michael B. Mukasey, said detaining witnesses to compel testimony was a legitimate investigative tool.
Attorney General John Ashcroft has defended the tactic, saying it is “vital to preventing, disrupting or delaying new attacks.”
The Justice Department has not said how many Americans have been held without charges in terrorism investigations since Sept. 11. Civil liberties groups say they believe the number is about 20, though most are not American citizens.

There is of course tons of stuff on this story on the internet. One site is Warblogging.com.
When they went after people who were not citizens, sadly we hardly raised a collective eyebrow. They have now been putting away “certified” Americans as well, and we cannot claim ignorance of their disappearances.
Are we interested yet?

It’s official. It’s impossible for Americans to get real news. Our “news” sources have actually become, almost sui generis, government propaganda.
The Peter Arnett story is the latest, and perhaps the most dramatic, evidence of the sad development which has left us so ignorant of the world and vulnerable to its threats. Writing in New York Newsday, University of Austin professor of journalism Robert Jensen argues,

Peter Arnett has an overblown sense of his own importance and lousy political judgment. That’s been true ever since he became a television “personality,” and he’s hardly the only one with those traits.
But Arnett’s pomposity and hubris are not what got him fired by NBC and National Geographic this week after giving a short interview to Iraqi state television. When the controversy first emerged, NBC issued a statement of support, which evaporated as soon as the political heat was turned up and questions about Arnett’s patriotism got tossed around. In short: Arnett was canned because he took seriously the notion that, even in war, journalists should be neutral.
. . . .
If . . . criticism of Arnett [for being obliging or disingenuous in his relations with the Iraqi regime] is appropriate, we should also ask whether American journalists are overly deferential to U.S. officials. Consider George W. Bush’s March 6 news conference, when journalists played along in a scripted television event and asked such softball questions as “How is your faith guiding you?” Journalists that night were about as critical as Arnett was with the Iraqis.
Such performances leave the rest of the world with the impression that American journalists – especially those on television – are sycophants, and Arnett’s firing only reinforces that impression. That’s why before the end of the day he had a new job with the British tabloid The Mirror, which described him as “the reporter sacked by American TV for telling the truth about the war.”
Arnett certainly hasn’t cornered the market on truth, and many U.S. reporters and photographers are doing fine work under dangerous conditions.
But many other American journalists have abandoned any pretense of neutrality and become de facto war boosters. All over the world, viewers are seeing images of the effects of the war on the Iraqi population that are largely absent from U.S. television. We shouldn’t mistake the limited critique of strategy and tactics – should the United States have unleashed a harsher attack from the beginning, and should the invasion have waited until more troops were in place? – for a serious challenge to the Bush administration’s spin on the war.

Iraqis have just arrested Saddam Hussein, formed a secular democratic government of unity and demanded the U.S. and Britain leave the country immediately and pay reparations for 12 years of damages and loss of lives.
April fool.

Jimmy Breslin continues to cover the war from the subways of New York.

This subway is my base for this war, the subways of the city, a battlefield that could be the most important action in the war. Because you can lose through enemy action, an attack on the subway now, and 10 and 20 years from now, or by your own people snatching freedom from you on the grubby pretext of security.

Yesterday afternoon Breslin sat at the counter of a coffee shop at the Port Authority Bus Terminal while on the wall CNN enjoyed a coffee counter exclusive on showing the war.

Now on television was a story about Peter Arnett, a correspondent in Baghdad for NBC, who was fired for saying something on Arab television in Baghdad. His words were about the same as what is reported on television and newspapers here.
It was silly for Arnett to go on the Arab television because they were only going to steal it from Arnett’s NBC anyway.
However, if Arnett said this on Arab television because NBC wouldn’t let him say it to America, then there is deep trouble.

Newsday‘s intrepid reporter ends his column today with an anecdote culled from years of professional duties sitting with New York’s most quotable bar and cafe denizens.

Perched on a barstool [years ago] in the old Costello’s on 44th Street, visitor I.I. Rabi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for the CAT scan and MRI, and who also was a consulting engineer on the first atom bomb, told us:
“It is a fact in this country that you have free speech. But everybody is afraid to use it.”

Molly Ivins reminds us in The Progressive this month that, in spite of his other failings, Hermann Goering was no fool.
While under arrest in Nuremburg in 1946 the Nazi leader told an interviewer, “Why of course the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece?” He went on to insist that it was up to the leaders of every country and every form of government to drag the people along. Goering would have none of the interviewer’s naive objection that in democracies people have a say in the matter through their elected representatives.

Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

Ivins recognizes how conflicted many Americans are now that “ghastly conflict” in Iraq is underway, but she offers encouragement to those who persevere in protesting the deadly policies of the regime in Washington.

Speak up, speak out, but never let anyone else define what you think–including the President. It is never “My country, right or wrong.” As the Radical Republican Senator Carl Schurz of Missouri once put it, “Our country, right or wrong. When right, to be kept right; when wrong, to put right.”

Could any report on this, the sixth day of the slaughter in this unjust war, be more revealing of the failure of American journalism, even of America? This is the actual NYTimes headline, spread in two horizontal lines across all six columns of the front page of the “Late Edition” this morning:

ALLIES AND IRAQIS BATTLE ON 2 FRONTS;
20 AMERICANS DEAD OR MISSING, 5O HURT

This goes well beyond the effrontery in the famous pre-World War II headline in the Times of London: “Fog in Channel: Continent isolated.”
Unless “the newpaper of record” is reporting that after five days no Iraqis are dead or hurt, the Times is joining our fascist regime, and most Americans, in refusing to recognize the humanity of our victims.
“All the News That’s Fit to Print”
[This headline doesn’t appear online right now. If it was there earlier, it’s now been succeeded by another which is more distanced.]