Despite all of our whining about the Geneva Convention…oh the hypocrisy. This is how we treat POW’s (exhibit a, b, c, d).
Meanwhile, Al Jazeera is still down.
29
Mar 03
The Humanity
American mercenaries are killing children and wrecking entire families. Bombing markets and killing innocent people. In this photo according to the caption: The four-year old girl, blood streaming from an eye wound, was screaming for her dead mother, while her father, shot in a leg, begged to be freed from the plastic wrist cuffs slapped on him by U.S. marines, so he could hug his other terrified daughter.
In another photo, an unidentified Iraqi man is cradling the bloodied body of a young girl whose foot is clearly shredded. In yet another, family members weep near the wrapped bodies of their loved ones killed by ‘Allied’ airstrikes. I expect the Iraqi people to never forget this. We have no right to be in their country. As soon as we get rid of Saddam, I hope the Iraqi people toss us out on our ear. We bring nothing but hardship to replace hardship and subjugation to replace subjugation.
Meanwhile US Troops enjoy ‘Operation Playmate’. Is this a screwed up country or what? While we’re destroying countless lives our soldiers are receiving signed Playboy Playmate photos.
29
Mar 03
FoxNews, Unabashed Propagandists
‘Die-ins’ target war and news media:
Aaron Unger, one of the coordinators of the protest for a group calling itself the M-27 Coalition, said demonstrators broke the law to drive home a point.
“We believe the war against Iraq is a violation of international law,” Unger said. “And the media is not telling people the whole story. I know people see what we’re doing as a nuisance. But what’s happening to the people of Iraq is much more than a nuisance.”
Fox News had its own response to the demonstrators. The news ticker rimming Fox’s headquarters on Sixth Avenue wasn’t carrying war updates as the protest began. Instead, it poked fun at the demonstrators, chiding them.
“War protester auditions here today … thanks for coming!” read one message. “Who won your right to show up here today?” another questioned. “Protesters or soldiers?”
Said a third: “How do you keep a war protester in suspense? Ignore them.”
Still another read: “Attention protesters: the Michael Moore Fan Club meets Thursday at a phone booth at Sixth Avenue and 50th Street” – a reference to the film maker who denounced the war while accepting an Oscar on Sunday night for his documentary “Bowling for Columbine.”
The protesters said Fox’s sentiments only proved their point: that media coverage, in particular among the television networks, is so biased as to be unbelievable.
This and the ClearChannel sponsorship of pro-war rallies underscores the fact that corporate America is behind the war in Iraq and will do what it can to disinform and manipulate American sentiments.
29
Mar 03
BBC chiefs stress need to
28
Mar 03
Al Jazeera TV wins award
Despite Stated Policy, Force Reluctantly Being Used to Subdue Local Conflicts
“No one is going to ask them (the Iraqi opposition) who is going to work there.
“There will be a puppet government, and the United States and Britain will themselves carve up the cake,” he said, expressing the view that it was “obvious” the main object of the US-led war was to control Iraqi oil reserves.
However, some of Mr Sharon’s aides are counting on powerful hawks in the US administration and the power of the pro-Israel lobby to offset Mr Blair’s influence once the Iraq war is out of the way. Israel’s conduct severely harms the American position. The Bush administration needs to distance itself from Israel to shrink its independent power. It is becoming a liability.
28
Mar 03
Pentagon Jargon
The watchword for the day is “death squads“. The Bush government is using this to identify any armed combatants against the United States military. This is to imply that any armed opposition are murderers and predators. The implication also being that these are not the Iraqi people even though the Iraqi people reject the US invasion. I’ve heard this at least five times today. I have yet to see any Iraqi on television reporting the tactics the US ascribes to the Iraqi forces.
26
Mar 03
A little more, a little less
The following is roughly 50-60 percent personal admission. Read at your own risk:
Is it reasonable to want and expect ever increasing happiness and excitement about life? Sometimes I think that I’m fighting against forces beyond my control. Like I’m wading in the Gulf of Mexico and taking swings at the waves. Sometimes I think that life is a trial and that the world is a giant millstone grinding us down into powder to be cast to the four winds, or maybe a meat grinder which sucks up everyone and spits them out in a spray tiny, bloody chunks of flesh and bone. If the course of things is ultimately beyond my control, why do I fight it? I’ve been thinking a lot about this in regards to the current world situation and how it relates to my own personality and worldview.
I long ago made the connection between my essential feelings of rebellion, dueling pessimism/optimism/fatalism, and overwhelming idealism and my early life experiences. I think my world view is almost certainly due to my experiences growing up. My father could be very strict and very authoritarian seemingly without purpose. He seemed to dominate my family just as a matter of course. I don’t mean to suggest that I had an unhappy childhood only that I grew up in an environment where I was told how to think and behave. It could be very chaotic and unpredictable. I never really knew when my father would be angry or if he wasn’t angry how long that would last. Anyway, this and the fact that I grew up believing God was an asshole who wanted people to burn in hell unless they accepted his grace (I was raised a Southern Baptist) caused me to feel rather cynical about power and authority. Anyway it just reminded me of this Camus stuff you might find interesting on the subject of rebellion:
Camus drew three consequences from the existence of the absurd: “my revolt, my freedom, and my passion.” Decision was his, and his love of life led him to defy the absurd. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus drew those consequences from a reflection on suicide. In its sequel, The Rebel (1951), Camus expanded on his earlier themes. This time, murder provoked him. The twentieth century was proving that history is a slaughter-bench, drenched with disease, injustice, and especially man-made death. The absurd does not dictate suicide, but, Camus wondered does it legitimize murder?
Again Camus answered emphatically “No!” If the absurd implies that everything is permitted, it does not follow that nothing is forbidden. Building on the insight that the most authentically human response to absurdity is to protest against it, Camus emphasized that such defiance is and should be fundamentally social and communal. Life is fundamentally lived with others. Absurdity enters existence not simply because one’s private needs go unmet, but because so many conditions exist that destroy family and friends, waste our shared experience, and rob human relationships of significance. Hence, far from dictating suicide or legitimating murder, the absurd should lead to rebellion in the name of justice and human solidarity. “I rebel,” wrote Camus, “therefore we exist.”
Here, like Sisyphus, we face an uphill climb, because the rebellion Camus advocated is characterized by moderation. By moderation, Camus did not mean to say that our actions should be hesitant, dispassionate, or weak. But he did not want the rebel to become the revolutionary who so often destroys life under the pretense of saving it. “The logic of the rebel,” asserted Camus, “is to want to serve justice so as not to add to the injustice of the human condition, to insist on plain language so as not to increase the universal falsehood, and to wager, in spite of human misery, for happiness.” Camus was no pacifist. He knew that at times the logic of the rebel might even require the rebel to kill. But Camus’s true rebel will never say or do anything “to legitimize murder, because rebellion. in principle, is a protest against death.”
As if the task of rebellion were not difficult enough, Camus once more reminds us that the rebel can never expect to escape the fate of Sisyphus: “Man can master in himself everything that should be mastered,” he wrote. “He should rectify in creation everything that can be rectified. And after he has done so, children will still die unjustly even in a perfect society. Even by his greatest effort man can only propose to diminish arithmetically the sufferings of the world.” Perhaps things would have been different if the world had been ours to create, but at least “man is not entirely to blame; it was not he who started history.” On the other hand, Camus added, neither “is he entirely innocent, since he continues it.” The task before us, Camus concluded, is “to learn to live and to die, and, in order to be a man, to refuse to be a god.”
26
Mar 03
The New American Empire
U.S. Forces Prepare Martial Law for Iraq:
“The U.S. cannot take over the mantle of law enforcement for the Iraqi people,” said Lt. Col. Richard Vanderlinden, commander of the 709th Military Police Battalion. “The expectation is that the Iraqi law enforcement structure will remain intact.” …
“Any riots and we are going to put them down. We’re going to send in the infantry. Restoring civil authority and peace is the highest priority. We are not going to let people run riot and rampant,” said Capt. Jim Wherry of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, the army’s legal arm.
Offenders, Wherry said, could then be tried under the U.S. Code of Military Justice, detained for post-war trials by civil authorities or face punishment meted out by the Americans under Iraqi laws. The entire Iraqi judicial code has been translated into English and made available to the U.S. military. …
How the coalition will establish the boundary between U.S. military and Iraqi laws remains a “work in progress,” Wherry said.
“We’re still making it up as we go along and hope for the best,” Wherry, of Rock Island, Ill., said. “We are trying to have as little to do with this country as possible while, in effect, taking it over.”
Still, Saddam’s vast security apparatus is expected to be purged of loyalists and those suspected of torture and other human rights violations. Some supporters of the regime, however, will have to be kept in place.
“After World War II, we got rid of all the Nazis in six months and then found out we could not run the country without the Nazis,” Wherry said.
A nightmare scenario would be a postwar, revenge-based bloodbath, with the police and judiciary melting away and the United States having to become cop, judge and jailer.
You are seeing that the United States believes more in power than liberty, subjugation than freedom. The tactic of replacing only the topmost layers of authority is not new. The Mongols were very successful in doing so, removing the emperors and local rulers and replacing them with their Mongol chiefs.
25
Mar 03
Coincidence?
US general with Iraq role linked to hardline Israelis:
The retired general named as civilian governor of occupied Iraq has visited Israel on a trip paid for by a right-wing group that strongly backs an American military presence in the Middle East.
Lieutenant-General Jay Garner, the co-ordinator for civilian administration in Iraq, put his name in October 2000 to a statement blaming Palestinians for the outbreak of Israeli-Palestinian violence and saying that a strong Israel was an important security asset to the United States.
The statement was sponsored by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (Jinsa), which pays for retired US military officers to visit Israel for security briefings by Israeli officials and politicians. Richard Perle, one of the architects of the US invasion of Iraq, is a member of the institute’s board of advisers, as was Vice-President Dick Cheney before he took office in 2001.
Lt-Gen Garner went on Jinsa’s annual trip to Israel in 1998. Two years later, he and 42 other senior retired officers said: “We are appalled by the Palestinian political and military leadership that teaches children the mechanics of war while filling their heads with hate. The security of the state of Israel is a matter of great importance to US policy in the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean, as well as around the world. A strong Israel is an asset that American military planners and political leaders can rely on.”