James Wagner

Most thinking folks know there really is no independent mainstream press left in the U.S.
Molly Ivins is more generous, but even she’s paid by the commercial media. While she thinks it could still profit from some soul-searching to see why it has completely failed in its role, her own outline of the extent of that failure is a clear indictment of its alliance with the establishment.

According to a poll conducted by The New York Times and CBS, 42 percent of Americans believe Saddam Hussein was personally responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center, something that has never even been claimed by the Bush administration. According to a poll conducted by ABC, 55 percent believes Saddam Hussein gives direct support to al-Qaida, a claim that has been made by the administration but for which no evidence has ever been presented. President Bush has lately modified the claim to “al-Qaida-type” organizations. This is how well journalism has done its job in the months leading up to this war. A disgraceful performance.

These beliefs are not found in any numbers anywhere else in the world. Either Americans are uniquely stupid or we’re getting the wrong information.
And then there is Matt Taibbi in the New York Press. Taibbi uses the story of Bush’s recent staged showing in the East Room to show how the White House press corps “politely grabs its ankles” in Dubya’s awesome presence.

The Bush press conference to me was like a mini-Alamo for American journalism, a final announcement that the press no longer performs anything akin to a real function. Particularly revolting was the spectacle of the cream of the national press corps submitting politely to the indignity of obviously pre-approved questions, with Bush not even bothering to conceal that the affair was scripted.
. . . .
Even Bush couldn’t ignore the absurdity of it all. In a remarkable exchange that somehow managed to avoid being commented upon in news accounts the next day, Bush chided CNN political correspondent John King when the latter overacted his part, too enthusiastically waving his hand when it apparently was, according to the script, his turn anyway.
KING: “Mr. President.”
BUSH: “We’ll be there in a minute. King, John King. This is a scripted…”
A ripple of nervous laughter shot through the East Room.
. . . .
Reporters argue that they have no choice. They’ll say they can’t protest or boycott the staged format, because they risk being stripped of their seat in the press pool. For the same reason, they say they can’t write anything too negative. They can’t write, for instance, “President Bush, looking like a demented retard on the eve of war…” That leaves them with the sole option of “working within the system” and, as they like to say, “trying to take our shots when we can.”

Like I said, the independent press really is as dead as a dodo.

From Not In Our Name:

In the event that the worst happens, and the U.S. does launch its vicious “Shock and Awe” bombing of the people of Iraq, go immediately to www.notinourname.net for the latest information on resistance plans.

While you’re there, note that their statement of conscience is almost unique in that it exposes and repudiates the whole political program behind this war, and we need more of that. The enemy is not this war. The war is only a tool of the enemy.

There may be more of a relationship than we already knew between this White House and the destruction of the town of Guernica, where the Nazis first tested the weapons of modern warfare.
Military analyst Vladimir Slipchenko’s description is probably our best idea of what the Iraq “war” will look like, but this expert’s account is introduced by a statement about the “purpose” of this massacre that none of us has seen in the U.S. media.

The main purpose of the war is indeed being left out of the picture and nobody is saying anything about it. I see the main purpose of the war as being the large-scale real-life testing by the United States of sophisticated models of precision weapons. That is the objective that they place first All the other aims are either incidental, or outright disinformation.
For more than 10 years now the United States has conducted exclusively no-contact wars. In May 2001 George Bush Jr., delivering his first presidential speech to students at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, spoke of the need for accelerated preparation of the US Armed Forces for future wars. He emphasized that they should be high-tech Armed Forces capable of conducting hostilities throughout the world by the no-contact method. This task is now being carried out very consistently.
It should be observed that the Pentagon buys from the military-industrial complex only those weapons that have been tested in conditions of real warfare and received a certificate of quality on the battlefield. After a series of live experiments — the wars in Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan — many corporations in the US military-industrial complex have been granted the right to sell their precision weapons to the Pentagon. They include Martin Lockheed, General Electric, and Loral. But many other well-known companies are as yet without orders from the military department. The bottom line is $50-60 billion a year. Who would want to miss out on that kind of money? But the present suppliers of precision weapons to the Pentagon are also constantly developing new types of arms and they must also be tested The US military-industrial complex demands testbed wars from its country’s political leadership. And it gets them.
And that is the main aim of the new war in Iraq.

Early this morning in a BBC news radio report, I first heard about U.S. Defense Secretary Rumsfield’s press briefing statement yesterday that the U.S. might invade Iraq without Britain.

Question: Would the United States go to war without Great Britain?
Mr Rumsfeld: “This is a matter that most of the senior officials in the government discuss with the UK on a daily or every-other-day basis. And I had a good visit with the Minister of Defence of the UK about an hour ago.
Their situation is distinctive to their country, and they have a government that deals with a parliament in their way, a distinctive way.
And what will ultimately be decided is unclear as to their role; that is to say, their role in the event that a decision is made to use force.
There’s the second issue of their role in a post-Saddam Hussein reconstruction process or stabilisation process, which would be a different matter.
And I think until we know what the resolution is, we won’t know the answer as to what their role will be and to the extent they’re able to participate in the event the president decides to use force, that would obviously be welcomed.
To the extent they’re not, there are workarounds and they would not be involved, at least in that phase of it.”
Question: We would consider going to war without our closest ally, then?
Mr Rumsfeld: “That is an issue that the president will be addressing in the days ahead, one would assume.”

I was shocked, but also, I’ll admit, perversely delighted to have my estimate of the administration’s incompetence further confirmed, even though my immediate thought was of the classic, distressing kindergarten grade, “does not play well with others.” This junta has already made it clear that it holds in contempt any need for cooperation at home, and for two years it has been perfectly content to thumb its nose at the entire world. Yesterday it decided to do without its only remaining serious ally, Tony Blair.
Later in the morning I found that Maureen Dowd was also thinking of the White House in terms more appropriate to dysfunctional toddlers.

The Bush bullies, having driven off all the other kids in the international schoolyard, are now resorting to imaginary friends.
Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, spoke to the Veterans of Foreign Wars here yesterday and reassured the group that America would have “a formidable coalition” to attack Iraq. “The number of countries involved will be in the substantial double digits,” he boasted. Unfortunately, he could not actually name one of the supposed allies. “Some of them would prefer not to be named now,” he said coyly, “but they will be known with pride in due time.”
Perhaps the hawks’ fixation on being the messiahs of the Middle East has unhinged them. I could just picture Wolfy sauntering down the road to Baghdad with our new ally Harvey, his very own pooka, a six-foot-tall invisible rabbit that the U.S. wants to put on the U.N. Security Council.
Ari Fleischer upped the ante, conjuring up an entire international forum filled with imaginary allies.
He suggested that if the U.N. remained recalcitrant, we would replace it with “another international body” to disarm Saddam Hussein. It wasn’t clear what he was talking about. What other international body? Salma Hayek? The World Bank? The Hollywood Foreign Press Association?

We need more heroes to match this one! Daniel Ellsberg asks for leaks of information which would discredit a maniacal and immoral policy.

Ellsberg, an ex-Marine and military analyst, said he held out hope that exposing alleged lies by the Bush administration could still avert an unjust war. He warned that whistleblowers may face ruin of their careers and marriages and be incarcerated.
“Don’t wait until the bombs start falling,” Ellsberg said at a Tuesday press conference in Washington. “If you know the public is being lied to and you have documents to prove it, go to Congress and go to the press.”
Ellsberg did not leak the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times until 1971, although he says he had information in the mid-1960s that he now wishes he had leaked then.
“Do what I wish I had done before the bombs started falling” in Vietnam, Ellsberg said. “I think there is some chance that the truth could avert war.”

You know the stuff’s out there.

Reza K. Baluchi is free at last. The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service has decided not to appeal a judge’s decision eleven days ago which officially granted him political asylum. During the interim Baluchi has been kept in the Arizona jail which has been his cage since November.
Even the I.N.S. could not have been indifferent to the appeal of a pure soul and what must have been an enormous outpouring of support from those who had heard of his plight.
Our hero was to be picked up today by his lawyer, Suzannah Maclay.

Mr. Baluchi intends to pick up his bicycle and camping equipment from storage in Yuma, Ariz., and head for Los Angeles. When is ready, he said, he will run from there across the country, his peace mission resumed.

The C.I.A. has kidnapped, and is now interrogating and holding hostage to the full cooperation of their father, the 7 and 9 year-old sons of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.
TalkLeft, which identifies itself as an “online source of liberal coverage of crime-related political and injustice news,” writes,

We didn’t realize that enemy combatant status was hereditary. A lawyer and a guardian ad litem should be appointed for these kids immediately. The kids should be returned home without delay to whatever family they have left. This is taking “sins of the father” to an unprecedented and unconscionable level.

This is what we did not see. And these images do not even include the corpses and mutiliations of civilians.
The photographs and the statement which accompanies them are from a new book by war-correspondent Peter Turnley:

This past war and any one looming, have often been treated as something akin to a ‘Nintendo game’. This view conveniently obscures the vivid and often grotesque realities apparent to those directly involved in war. As a witness to the results of this past Gulf War, this televised, aerial, and technological version of the conflict is not what I saw and I’d like to present some images that I made that represent a more complete picture of what this conflict looked like.

Thanks to the “photo-eye newsletter.”