okay, first off, sir! no sir! is the website for the documentary by david zeiger. c.i. will note that again in tomorrow's snapshot to put the link in the snapshot. i'm assuming that david zeiger's 'Farewell Dave Cline' is okay to note in full (i have to edit 1 word because this site's already blocked on some high school campuses - just for my site's title!) but otherwise, this is cline as david zeiger remembers him:
I am very sad to have to report the news that Dave Cline died this past weekend.
There are many wonderful tributes to Dave being written (http://www.democracyinaction.com/dia/track.jsp?key=122601195&url_num=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.veteransforpeace.org%2F), and I would like to add some personal reflections on the part of his life with which I was deeply connected-the GI Movement against the Vietnam War. I hope you will indulge some nostalgic reminiscing here-there really is a point to it.
Let me say up front that without Dave Cline, Sir! No Sir! would not have been made.
I met Dave in the Spring of 1970, when I joined the staff of the Oleo Strut Coffeehouse outside Ft. Hood in Killeen, Texas. My introduction to him and the GI Movement was riding in a broken down Chevy with Dave driving 120 mph through central Texas and me convinced I would never get out of there alive. I'm not sure anything defines Dave Cline better than that wild ride.
Dave and I were from different worlds. I was a middle class kid who came to my opposition to the war and growing radicalism intellectually. Dave, a working class kid from Buffalo, had joined the army and been wounded three times in Vietnam. It was his last wound, from an NLF soldier at point blank range, that changed everything. The soldier shattered Dave's knee, and Dave killed him with a bullet in the chest. His first realization was it was "pure luck" that he was alive and the other guy was dead. Then it hit him that there was no real difference between the two of them. Finally, the epiphany: It was the NLF soldier who was fighting for a just cause, while Dave and his comrades were fighting for a lie. In typical Dave Cline fashion he concluded in 1970, "I had to kill a revolutionary to become a revolutionary."
And revolutionaries we were. Right there in Killeen f**king Texas. In 1971-with literally thousands of GIs rebelling against the war and joining groups like the Black Panther Party-planning demonstrations by day and hotly debating the writings of Marx, Lenin and Mao by night was a very practical thing to do. And boy could Dave debate. Even in his sleep. It wasn't uncommon for him to jolt up from his bed at 2 am to continue a discussion from earlier that day, only to have no memory of it the next morning (Dave claimed he had even slept through a mortar attack in Vietnam).
And it was in that cauldron that we grew up. We were part of an unprecedented political upheaval, and we were alive in a way that is very rare-even though we could barely afford to eat two skimpy meals a day. Terry Davis, Dave's wife at the time, reminded me recently that one of her happiest moments was when Mark Lane donated a sack of potatoes to the staff.
Dave was intense, determined, and maddeningly stubborn. In 1970, the last thing a GI wanted to do after getting out of the army was live in a military town-even if he had been active in the movement. But here was Dave, during high points and low (which were most of the time), refusing to let go or give up. His connection with the GIs, whether they agreed with us or not, was deep and seamless-and it made the Oleo Strut something special. I can't begin to quantify what I learned from Dave those two years.
Then the war ended, and we all moved into other arenas, believing deeply in the possibility of revolution right here in the United States. For a while we stayed close, but through the years political disagreements developed, and in those heady times that meant a lot. By the end of the 70s and beginning of the 80s we weren't in contact any more. Those were very difficult times. In one of the last conversations I had with Dave back then he told me that every morning he woke up thinking "Oh f**k, another day!"
So when I started to make Sir! No Sir! Dave was the first person I wanted to talk to, but I had no idea what or whom I would find. What I found was the person so many have been writing about these last few days. Wracked by illness, he was extraordinarily energetic and eager to tell his story. The day of our interview, he had just come home from a grueling three-day VFP convention and was worried he wouldn't have much energy. We talked for four hours.
And here's the most important part. After decades of both political and personal conflicts, there are still some out there who would say "Don't talk to so-and-so, 'cause he's a yada-yada." Not only would Dave have none of that, he actively spoke against it. Dave knew the tremendous importance of telling the story of the GI Movement today, in this world and with this war. Because of him, several people are in the film alongside others they wouldn't have been in the same room with a few years ago. And he carried that spirit into the dozens of screenings and Q&As he participated in these past couple of years. He has played a tremendous role in making Sir! No Sir! the spark for today's GI Movement that it has been. And that's on top of his superhuman energy in building the work of Veterans for Peace.
In these last years of his life, I don't think Dave was saying "Oh f**k, another day!" anymore.
This has been a tough year. Along with Dave, two other veterans of the GI Movement who were integral parts of the film have also died-Oliver Hirsch of the Nine for Peace, and Terry Whitmore, who deserted to Sweden after watching federal troops invade his home town of Memphis as he lay wounded in a hospital bed in Japan. Along with Dave, their lives had deep historic meaning.
For more about Dave, and information on funeral and memorial plans, please go to http://www.democracyinaction.com/dia/track.jsp?key=122601195&url_num=2&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.veteransforpeace.org%2F
Signed,
David Zeiger
it's sad when any of us have to lose a friend or family member. some 1 who knows more about that than she or any 1 else should have to is cindy sheehan. she's got another amazing column and this is from 'At What Price, Safety?' (information clearing house):
One of the more morally reprehensible notes from the supporters of death I receive is the one that goes something like this: "I am for peace, too, but not at the expense of my family." These people are saying that it is okay to ruin my family and thousands of other families in the US who have been torn apart like the bodies of our loved ones to keep other families "safe." I have news for these people, as bad as the sacrifices have been for some families in America, the people of Iraq have suffered far more for the deceptions and greed of BushCo. Think about this: America killed over a million Iraqis between Gulf I and this current occupation, and that did not keep my family safe, or the families of the people killed in 9-11. How can one sleep at night thinking that her family is safe when so many people are devastated by the policies that she thinks is keeping her family safe? Never mind the National Intelligence Estimates that have rightly showed that our transgressions in Iraq and such inhumane prison camps as Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are increasing Islamic extremism.
What makes Mrs. Safety think that the Iraqi babies are less precious than her babies? Does the geographic accident of her baby's births give them more right to be safe than the Iraqi babies? Maybe Mrs. Safety thinks that her babies deserve more protection because they are white and Christian? Or just maybe because they are hers?
I spent 24 years of my children’s lives thinking that I was doing everything I could to protect them. I guarded the boundaries of my family like a Doberman. I didn't let anything bad in those boundaries to hurt my children until 2000 when an Army recruiter broke through my defenses to lie like a son of a b**ch to my son who would ultimately be killed so Mrs. Safety's babies could have the illusion and delusion of safety. Casey and my family paid a dear price for my thinking that my babies and my boundaries are the only ones that were precious and worth protecting. It will only be when we realize that all human life if precious and worthy of protection and know that all of the world's children belong to all of us that war will stop being used as a tool in Satan’s tool-box of greed and destruction.
Many Muslims and American soldiers have told me that I may have lost a son, but I have gained millions of sons and daughters in my work for global peace and understanding.
They are all our sons and daughters as Casey was your son.
We have to stop giving our leaders free-passes to kill our children, anywhere and everywhere.
we certainly do. it's a real shame congress still hasn't woken up to that reality. they haven't had enough pressure yet. they really do think they can pat us on our little heads and tell us 'patience' and we'll keep voting them back into office.
that's not reality.
and that's not any job i've ever known of. if i screwed up a campaign, my ass got canned. i remembered that the 1st time i had to fire some 1. i made it clear, this was about the job performance.
i didn't let the man i was firing take it to a personal level. i had hired him because my agency needed more help. good help. not bad help. when he had his 3rd big screw up, that was it. it didn't matter that he was a nice person. it didn't matter what he did outside of work. what mattered was did he do the job or not?
he wasn't doing the job.
i had to fire him.
but congress seems to think that they are so entitled to their jobs that whether or not they do their jobs, we have to keep hiring them.
we don't. we can fire them. members of the house of representatives are only 'hired' for 2 years. then it's up to us to decide whether or not we want to keep them in our employment.
i'm not seeing many worth 'rehiring'. i'm seeing a lot of people who should be kicked out on their asses. they have not done their job.
many haven't even tried.
they've caved without even fighting.
let's say you hired some 1 to walk your dog. ever monday through friday they were supposed to walk your dog at 8:00 a.m. now some days they didn't show up and some days they were late. and some days they showed up on time but didn't do their job.
would you want to keep them on?
only if you enjoyed frustration and punishing yourself.
they need to get the message that no 1's happy with them and that more con games where they try to put 1 over on us are not going to bring in the votes in november 2008.
this is from usa today:
Democratic presidential candidate Bill Richardson said today that the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq has contributed to the sectarian violence there rather than bringing stability to the war-torn nation, the Associated Press writes.
"There's no question there's tribal and ethnic hatreds," Richardson told the AP during an interview. "But when those tribal and ethnic hatreds are fueled by (an) American policy of hostility, then you make the situation worse."
The AP's Nedra Pickler adds that "during an hour-long interview with its editors and reporters, the New Mexico governor argued that all combat and non-combat troops should be removed from Iraq because their presence is only contributing to violence.
" 'It's not a guarantee of success, my plan, but at least it's stability,' Richardson said. 'American foreign policy is being bled dry by the invasion of Iraq,' he said."
there is no reason every candidate running for president can't call for an end (NOW!) to the illegal war. regardless of their party, there is no reason they can't. the american people want the illegal war over and ended. the fact that some won't demonstrates that we haven't been loud enough in our demands on them. we are their bosses.
let's close with c.i.'s 'Iraq snapshot:'
Wednesday, September 19, 2007. Chaos and violence continue, when the 3800 marker is reached (3800 US service members killed in the illegal war) will anyone know, bad news keeps on coming for the mercenary company Blackwater, Newsweek (which once invented a 'marriage crisis' for women in the 80s) turns their creative 'minds' to young Iraqi women, the US military brags of the 11-year-old children they hold in Iraq prisons, and more.
Starting with war resistance, today on KPFK's Morning Review with Gabriel Gutierrez, Gutierrez spoke with two members of Iraq Veterans Against the War, war resister Agustin Aguayo and Maricela Guzman (also with the Service Women Action Network) about their experiences speaking with students about the Iraq War.
Maricela Guzman: For me, when I go to schools, I definitely talk about my perspective in the service. I think it's really important to go to that route. And I do tell them about my experience specifically as a woman veteran. I do tell them that I was assaulted in the service, sexually assaulted when I was in boot camp. And I think it's really important for them to know this and it's been very difficult for me to tell my story over and over but it's really important for them to know this because I want them to understand that there are risks when you join such an organization like this. So it's very critical. And for me, what I've found, I've gotten really good feedback from the kids and I've had, you know I've talked about suicide, my suicide attempt. And I've had kids -- I've talked about seeing a psychologist and it's a big taboo when you go to these communities and this is something we don't talk about -- I'm Chicana and it's something definitely my family would never talk about. For me, talking to these kids afterwards, them coming up and telling me, "This is what happened to me. I was assaulted" or "I've tried suicide." I think, for me, that's very critical. And we're including these organic conversations when we're going to these schools -- even besides military.
Gutierrez asked Aguayo what helped him "make the determination" not to return to Iraq?
Agustin Aguayo: To me, honestly, it wasn't a hard decision once I decided that I could never go back. Basically because I experienced a moral awakening and I was forced to realize who I was. And I had to accept that I could deny myself and cause all this violence against myself or I could stand up and say, "No, I believe this is wrong and I'm willing to accept any consequences." And in the end I think it gave me a . . . feeling of great freedom. So that is . . . a personal moral determination to do what I felt was right is what helped me the most.
Gabriel Gutierrez: And your wife Helga and your two daughters have been involved in the campaign to bring awareness to your case but also in its aftermath once you've now returned. What type of work has that led to with regard to awareness and with regard to work with young people specifically?
Agustin Aguayo: Yes, I've had the privilege of speaking supporting groups that have helped other war resisters, the growing number of them. And now I'm in the position to share with them what I've been through and they, of course, these resisters that are in this path, this crossroads: "What am I going to do?" I've had the privilege of sharing my experience with them and inspiring them. And one of the happiest things I'm pleased with is the Arlington West Film and speakers program and I think in the peace work nothing is really more important than educating our young because our future really depends on how we take care of our young today and educating them. So going into inner city schools is just so important. And veterans sometimes, we're hesitant. And sometimes we really want to forget everything we've been through, everything we've experienced, our military experience, but I think we owe it to our young people. They need to know what's going on, what we experienced.
Gutierrez asked what the reaction was from students, teachers and recruiters when they speak in schools?
Maricela Guzman: Well for me, it's definitely been very difficult. I know I've been on panels -- it was this year sometime, we went to Fairfax -- and Agustin was in jail at that time and we had a panel, we had recruiters veterans that were for the war and we had Helga and we really got a good reception. It was very interesting because we weren't sure what was going to happen. And really what it came down to was that it was the kids who were asking the hard questions. So it was empowering these kids to ask the questions that needed to be asked. And the most important thing was that they heard from family members. You know, we have a lot of family members . . . who talk to these kids. We don't tell them don't be against the war. We talk about our experiences. We're storytellers we tell them of what we've gone through and I think that's why it's been such a successful program. We've become a family, we've definitely become a family, the people that do this work, the Aguayos are a family to me.
Agustin Aguayo: I think the community, administrators, are very receptive because of our tact and like Maricela said the way we share our stories Basically that's what we do. And I think our stories are so powerful in themselves even people that are for the war which I mean at this point, even people who don't want us to go out they really can't say much because all we are doing is sharing stories and nothing is more powerful than the truth.
As pointed out Arlington West Film is "doing the work that the mainstream media is not doing". Friday, September 28th, there will be a benefit performance of the musical Hair at 8:00 pm at the MET Theater, 1089 No. Oxford Avenue, Hollywood, CA 90029 with Aguayo and Cindy Sheehan among the speakers.
There is a growing movement of resistance within the US military which includes Derek Hess, Justin Cliburn, Timothy Richard, Robert Weiss, Phil McDowell, Steve Yoczik, Ross Spears, Zamesha Dominique, Jared Hood, James Burmeister, Eli Israel, Joshua Key, Ehren Watada, Terri Johnson, Carla Gomez, Luke Kamunen, Leif Kamunen, Leo Kamunen, Camilo Mejia, Kimberly Rivera, Dean Walcott, Linjamin Mull, Agustin Aguayo, Justin Colby, Marc Train, Abdullah Webster, Robert Zabala, Darrell Anderson, Kyle Snyder, Corey Glass, Jeremy Hinzman, Kevin Lee, Mark Wilkerson, Patrick Hart, Ricky Clousing, Ivan Brobeck, Aidan Delgado, Pablo Paredes, Carl Webb, Stephen Funk, Clifton Hicks, David Sanders, Dan Felushko,Brandon Hughey, Clifford Cornell, Joshua Despain, Joshua Casteel, Katherine Jashinski, Dale Bartell, Chris Teske, Matt Lowell, Jimmy Massey, Chris Capps, Tim Richard, Hart Viges, Michael Blake, Christopher Mogwai, Christian Kjar, Kyle Huwer, Vincent La Volpa, DeShawn Reed and Kevin Benderman. In total, forty-one US war resisters in Canada have applied for asylum.
Information on war resistance within the military can be found at The Objector, The G.I. Rights Hotline [(877) 447-4487], Iraq Veterans Against the War and the War Resisters Support Campaign. Courage to Resist offers information on all public war resisters. Tom Joad maintains a list of known war resisters.
In other peace news, United for Peace & Justice states they are using the Just Foreign Policy count for Iraqis who have died in the illegal war. The report on the state of Iraq has been updated to note the Iraqi dead during the illegal war is over a million. United for Peace & Justice (along with others) will begin Iraq Moratorium on September 21st and follow it every third Friday of the month as people across the country are encouraged to wear and distribute black ribbons and armbands, purchase no gas on those Fridays, conduct vigils, pickets, teach-ins and rallies, etc. That's this Friday. On Sunday, Christine Anne Piesyk (Tennessee's Clarksville Online) provided a list of some actions that will take place:.
Each of these individuals and groups -- a list too long to print here -- have something in common: each have signed up to support the Iraq Moratorium, which will make its debut as a national movement on Friday, September 21. Wear and distribute black ribbons and armbands Buy no gas on moratorium days Pressure politicians and media Hold vigils, pickets, rallies and teach-ins Hold special religious services Coordinate events in art, music and culture Host film screenings, talks and educational events Organize student actions: teach-ins, school closings Iraq Moratorium is designed to take the issue to the people, and no event or action is to small to be of merit in opposing the Iraq war.
Turning to the topic of Blackwater USA, the mercenaries that got into Iraq due to crony connections and whom Paul Bremer made above the law during his reign of King of Iraq before fleeing the country. Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!) notes today, "The private military contractor Blackwater is now believed to have killed twenty Iraqi civilians in a mass-shooting Sunday in Baghdad. The Iraqi government revoked Blackwater's license amidst reports nine civilians were killed when Blackwater guards opened fire. Blackwater says it responded after coming under attack from a roadside bomb. But in its initial report on the shooting, Iraq's Interior Ministry says the guards shot at a small vehicle that failed to make way for Blackwater's convoy to pass. An Iraqi couple and their infant were killed in the attack. The New York Times reports video footage of the shooting shows the child burned to the mother's body after their car caught fire. Blackwater guards and helicopters are then believed to have fired indiscriminately." In the New York Times, Sabrina Tavernise and James Glanz reported this morning that the Ministry of Interior's preliminary report on the incidnet found "that Blackwater security guards were not ambushed, as the company reported, but instead fired at a car when it did not heed a policeman's call to stop, killing a couple and their infant." Joshua Partlow (Washington Post) addresses the issue of stopping and the police officer via . . . interviews (take note NYT): "Traffic police officer Sarhan Dhia, 34, said he was standing under the Iraqi flags next to his white guard shack along the traffic circle when he saw the convoy of at least four armored vehicles approch, traveling against the flow of traffic. He said he jumped out into an intersecting street to prevent cars from entering the circle while the convoy passed. The next thing he knew, he said, gunfire erupted." Sarhan Dhia says there was no bombing. Blackwater originally claimed that their mercenaries were 'returning fire' after they had been shot at. They then declared that their indiscriminate spraying of a civilian area with bullets was their way of responding to car bombing. Their stories -- like the civilian area they shot up -- is riddled with holes. Leila Fadel and Laith Hammoudi (McClatchy Newspapers) also operate under the belief that reporting requires speaking to eye witnesses and they speak with Hassan Jaber Salma and Sami Hawas Karim (an attorney and a taxi driver respectively) who both -- as does every other eye witnesses quoted in press accounts -- maintain that Blackwater "opened fire without provocation" and the reporters note the ever changing story by Blackwater. Interior Ministry spokesperson Ali al Dabbagh tells McClatchy Newspapers that, "No country in the world would allow the way they [Blackwater] are operating in Iraq." Multiple outlets (including McClatchy and the New York Times) report that Blackwater helicopters also fired on civilians in the Sunday slaughter. CBS and AP cite eye witness Suhad Mizra who stepped outside of her hair salon ("about 250 meters" from the incident) and remebers, "The sounds attracted my attention so I went outside the shop to see a convoy of SUVs with security guards shooting randomly at the people at low level. We were surprised by this and we rushed inside our shops to avoid random bullets. Apparently, the guards wanted to make their way through the traffic jam made by Iraqi army checkpoint. There was no provocation and the guards were using their ammunition to move quicker in the street. Minutes later, the ambulances arrived to up the wounded and dead." Reality is that this has long been the procedure: to ram through Iraq so that the "high levels" didn't have to wait. An important question the press should be asking is: Who was Blackwater transporting? Among the many times this has happened before, Anne Garrels (All Things Considered, NPR) reports on one: "NPR witnessed a similar scenario two years ago. A State Department convoy, protected by Blackwater, raced out of a compound. Guards immediately shot at the car killing an old man, his son and his daughter-in-law. Blackwater said the car was driving erratically. A U.S. military investigation concluded Blackwater had used excessive force. No one was prosecuted.
"Meanwhile," Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!) informs, "Blackwater is now being accused of another fatal shooting of an Iraqi civilian. An Iraqi engineer living in Britain has revealed Blackwater guards shot his seventy-five year old father in the southern Iraqi town of Hilla last month. Safaa Rabee says his father had pulled over to the side of the road to let a Blackwater convoy pass. But Rabee says the last vehicle in the convoy opened fire when his father pulled back on to the road. An Iraqi police chief told Rabee he has no legal recourse to pursue his father's killers." As the US government continues to attempt damage control, many more of these stories are likely to come out.
Meanwhile Newsweek continues to prove it is the gutter of all news weeklies. In the 'safe' Kurdistan region of Iraq (not safe -- but Newsweek needs their fantasies), young women (teenagers) are showing up at hospitals with burns and many are dying from them (since August 10th alone, 25 young women have died) and the best guess Newsweek can offer is that it's a copy-cat trend by romantic teenage females. As with their notion of the region being 'peaceful,' their notion of women is ridiculously out of touch. Young women have been repeatedly targeted in that area, they've been kidnapped and forced into marriages, they've been persecuted for not being the right sect, go down the list. But romantic young women self-mutilating (to the death!) is the myth they toss out. .
Turning to some of today's reported violence . . .
Bombings?
Hussein Kadhim (McClatchy Newspapers) reports a roadside bombing in Kirkuk that left five wounded "(four of them are policemen while the fifth man is a civilian)".
Shootings?
Hussein Kadhim (McClatchy Newspapers) reports an attack in Mosul in which 1 Iraqi soldier died, 14 unidentified people died and four Iraqi soldiers were wounded.
Corpses?
Hussein Kadhim (McClatchy Newspapers) reports eight corpses discovered in Baghdad.
CBS and AP report: "The military said five U.S. soldiers were killed in Iraq Tuesday. Three died following an explosion near their patrol northeast of Baghdad. Another soldier was killed in a vehicle accident in the northern province of Ninevah. On Wednesday, the military said another soldier had been killed in an attack in southern Baghdad. The Multi-National Division-Baghdad soldier was killed by small arms fire while conducting combat operations Tuesday in a southern section of the Iraqi capital, according to a brief military statement. The soldiers' names were not released pending notification of relatives. The deaths raised to at least 3,787 members of the U.S. military who have died since the Iraq war started in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count." Maybe. (Not a slap down. We noted the string along announcements numbered five deaths this morning.) Today the US military announced: "A Multi-National Division-Baghdad Soldier was killed during a small arms fire attack while conducting combat operations in a southern section of the Iraqi capital Sept. 18." That is in the count of five. Later today, the US military announced: "A Task Force Lightning Soldier died of a non-battle related cause, Wednesday, in Sala ad Din Province." And they announced: "A Multi-National Division-Baghdad Soldier was killed during combat operations in an area weat of the Iraqi captial Sep 19." Reuters count is 3786 since the start of the illegal war. ICCC's total is 3791 US service members killed in the illegal war thus far. The reason for the confusion? M-NF is supposed to announce deaths with the Defense Dept later announcing the names of the dead (after next of kin is notified). But M-NF has been slacking on the job -- it's not a tough job, they just issue press releases all day long. They've 'suceeded' in hiding the dead. And with the 3800 mark looming, let's not kid and pretend this is just an accident. M-NF has a pattern of doing this when every realities are in conflict with the spin coming out of the White House. ICCC has period details and their count includes deaths never announced by M-NF but announced by the Defense Dept when the DoD provides the names of the dead. ICCC's period details indicate that six deaths took place on Tuesday -- six deaths that have been announced.
In other number news, Prensa Latina reports that there are 25,000 Iraqis imprisoned by the US -- up from 10,000 "a year ago." IRIN reveals that the Iraqi Lawyers Association is asking the parliament to provide the location of all prisoners currently being held and that "[l]awyers representing families of Iraqi detainees have accused the government of concealing information about detainees, including their whereabouts" quoting attorney Ayad Daraji stating, "Hundreds of Iraqis have been detained by the Iraqi police or army in the past three years and their locations and conditions are unknown. There is no evidence as to whether they are alive or not. Families aren't allowed to visit them and this raises big questions about the detainees' situation." As the numbers grow and families often have no idea that members have been imprisoned, Walter Pincuse (Washington Post) reports on a program entitled "religious entitlement" that the US military is using on the prisoners "some of whom are as young as 11" according Maj. Gen. Douglas M. Stone who brags that the programs will "bend them back to our will." The age should cause further alarm but the realities don't appear to even be sinking in. For instance, CBS News (or "News") Keach Hagey sees it as a topic to have some funnin' with: "But what really emerges from the article -- a summary of a conference call Stone held from Baghdad with a group of defense bloggers -- is a portrait of Stone as a formidable character who's almost as fun to quote as Donald Rumsfeld was." Hagey and others need it get it through their thick skulls that this isn't 'cute' or 'funny' or even 'new.'
Yesterday, Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise Of Disaster Capitalism was released in the US. In it, she details "the love shack" in the Guantanamo prison used as a reward to those terrorized and broken down. There's not a damn bit of difference here except for the fact that the Iraqi prisoners are supposed to be protected by Geneva with no waiver. Though Hagey can't grasp reality staring in his face, it's not 'funny' that 11-year-olds are prisoners. It's not 'funny' that the US -- having taken these children from their families -- think they can 'break' them and rebuild them to their liking. That is what The Shock Doctrine outlines. Erasing memory, starting with a clean slate, refusal to see people as people but as pawns for the US to play with. Those who don't grasp how disgraceful this is are either playing dumb or are historically ignorant. It is not the right of the US military to snatch children from their homes and attempt to do some reprogramming of them. That is a crime and it is in violation of Geneva.
Yesterday, Elaine (Like Maria Said Paz) wrote about the Free Sami Al-Haj -- a journalist imprisoned in Guantanamo for over five years now and subject to the same torture and disregard for basic rights as every other prisoner in Guantanamo -- and concluded, " The real terrorism is the silence we allow ourselves to be forced into out of fear." Or out of stupidty as is the case with Keach Hagey.
In other non-progress news, Alissa J. Rubin and James Glanz (New York Times) cover the upcoming Red Cross report on Iraqi refugees which notes the "radically reshaping" taking place in Iraq (not unlike the aims in the US prison) which indicates "partitioning the country into semiautonomous Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish enclaves would not be easy" (impossible actually because the three divisions ignore Iraq's minority populations) and note, "The migration data, which are expected to be released this week by the Iraqi Red Crescent Organization but were given in advance to The New York Times, indicate that in Baghdad alone there are now nearly 170,000 families, accounting for almost a million people, that have fled their homes in search of security, shelter, water, electricity, functioning schools or jobs to support their families. The figures show that many families move twice, three times or more, first fleeing immediate danger and then making more considered calculations based on the availability of city services or schools for their children." Peter Apps (Reuters) gets to the point quickly, "Iraq's humanitarian crisis is getting worse and more Iraqis are fleeing their homes despite the recent surge of U.S. troops, aid workers say, with donors reluctant to fund support for millions of displaced. Last week, President George W. Bush presented a relatively upbeat picture of conditions in Iraq and said forces could be cut by around 20,000 by next July. He linked the reduction to improvements on the ground particularly in Baghdad where the surge was centred and the volatile Anbar governorate." There is no improvement for Iraqis. There is, however, the US military bragging that they will "break" 11-year-old prisoners -- how proud their parents must be.
Finally, a voice for peace passed away Friday. As Amy Goodman (DemocracyNow!) noted on Monday, Dave Cline a founder of Vietnam Veterans Against the War passed away. Margaret Prescod noted the passing Tuesday on KPFK's Sojourner Truth, IVAW's Michael Hoffman offers a look back at Cline. Veterans for Peace has a memorial online and they have created a fund to cover the expenses of Cline's burial. At Sir! No Sir!, director David Zeiger writes of Cline, "Dave and I were from different worlds. I was a middle class kid who came to my opposition to the war and growing radicalism intellectually. Dave, a working class kid from Buffalo, had joined the army and had been wounded three times in Vietnam. It was his last wound, from an NLF soldier at point blank range, that changed everything. The soldier shattered Dave's knee, and Dave killed him with a bullet in the chest. His first realization was it was "pure luck" that he was alive and the other guy was dead. Then it hit him that there was no real difference between the two of them. Finally, the epiphany: It was the NLF
soldier who was fighting for a just cause, while Dave and his comrades were fighting for a lie. In typical Dave Cline fashion he concluded in 1970, 'I had to kill a revolutionary to become a revolutionary.' "
9/18/2007
music & other things
france elected a right-winger and now sarkozy is trying to attack the country's pension plans. that is just disgusting. this has been attempted before and it will be interesting to watch how extreme he will get in his attempt to suppress the people. i don't believe the french will easily go along with this. they have a better standard of living than we do. it's all about selling out the people for big business. and isn't that the way governments operate?
england's neo-liberal bible, the guardian of london (or is it essex?) dubs it, in the opening paragraph, 'his first major battle to modernise France'. they are sick. that brave guardian. hey, remember all the work they did reporting on the downing street memos? nope. that's because they didn't. couldn't embarrass their boy tony blair.
the concord monitor provides the joke of the day:
Readers will learn that Souter relies on a fountain pen for all his writing and had not heard of Diet Coke or the Supremes before coming to the court in 1990. He remains unmarried, apparently despite the best efforts of those around him. Both Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and former first lady Barbara Bush tried to fix up Souter, Toobin writes. After one date, Souter told a woman he'd had a good time and said goodnight with this: "Let's do this again next year," according to Toobin.
sherry sent me a thing by a bryan fader and asked me if i could 'spot the mistake'? i think i have:
Getting caught up in trends can be fun. Mirroring the stars we see has been happening forever. Everyone had Farrah Fawcett's hair in the ‘70s. My clients tell me that Jane Fonda's shag was all the rage in the late '60s -- and it goes on and on.
he or his clients need to buy a clue. jane fonda cut off her very long hair for 1969's they shoot horses don't they. the shag that is famous is from 1971's klute. therefore, it was not 'all the rage in the late '60s.' it was famous and it was the rage, but not in the 60s. fonda had a shorter version of it in 1969 and it probably did become popular by 1970 but it hit it's height of popularity after klute. there were even rumors that david cassidy was trying to pull off her shag when he played keith partridge.
while i'm on pop culture, i'll note this:
The Facing The Music programme featured commentary about Spector's infamous love of guns, and host Keith Morrison revealed the record producer fired a gun in a studio while recording with John Lennon and held a gun to the heads of Leonard Cohen and Mamas + The Papas star Michelle Phillips.
spector's a creep - always has been and he smells, or did the 1 time i met him in a club - and i'm not going to start covering the trial but you've got john lennon, michelle phillips and leonard cohen in that - all favorites of mine.
diana ross will be among the honored at this winter's kennedy center honors. good for her, she deserves it. some 1 will have to explain to justice souter who diana ross is - that is if they believe that laughable book by jeffrey toobin.
(souter's not getting married. gals, release the fantasy!)
lastly, how dumb are they in the u.k.? this article on kanye west's new cd mentions samples and identifies the song sampled (michael jackson's 'p.y.t.' and i forget the elton john tune and don't want to punish myself by re-reading the bad writing) but then it mentions 'laura nyro' and doesn't say the song. (i'm guessing the writer didn't know it.)
i haven't heard kanye's new cd. so i called c.i. and asked what it was? c.i. said kanye's sampling laura nyro's 'save the country.' that was, for the young kids out there, a big hit for the 5th dimension. laura didn't chart with her own songs. her biggest hit - and only top 100 nationally - was a cover of carole king & gerry goffin's 'up on the roof.'
laura nyro was an extremely gifted artist. (she's dead now.) she wrote some of the songs every 1 knew at 1 time. my favorite, barbra streisand, had a huge hit with laura's 'stoney end' (which was also covered very well by peggy lipton). the 5th dimension went to number 1 with nyro's 'wedding bell blues' (and a lot of other songs she wrote were recorded by them). 'and when i die' - big hit for blood, sweat & tears - was another nyro composition and she also wrote 'eli's coming' which was a huge hit for 3 dog night.
for years, i hated christmas & the beads of sweat. i hated, hated it. it took me forever to appreciate it. (it's not a christmas album, just f.y.i.) i've always loved eli & the 13th confession and the first songs. new york tenderberry was always special. but christmas and the beads of sweat took time to grow. my favorite laura album is live at the bottom line. and my favorite track on it is 'the japenese restaurant.'
i don't know what my favorite song is, though. it might be 'save the country' ('in my mind i can't study war no more') or it might be 'when i was a freeport and you were the main drag.'
she was an incredibly gifted writer and she was often seen as the next dylan. (dylan had gone country when laura was at the height of her gifts.)
anyway, let's close with c.i.'s 'Iraq snapshot:'
Tuesday, September 18, 2007. Chaos and violence continue, low and behold the US military announces deaths, Blackwater remains in at least semi-hot water, IVAW deserves tremendous credit and applause for their leadership on Saturday, and more.
Starting with war resistance. On Saturday in DC, demonstrations against the illegal war started a new phase of activism. As Feminist Wire Daily noted, "Several women's groups, including CODEPINK and the National Congress of Black Women, sponsored a women's convergence earlier in the day before joining the larger rally at the White House before the march." But this was the event at which Iraq Veterans Against the War truly made their presence felt. That is not taking anything away from A.N.S.W.E.R., CODEPINK or anyone else; however, part of the strength of the action may be due to those organizations who refused to participate? Regardless, IVAW's membership continues to grow and their voices are among the surest and loudest out there. Mike Ferner (Dissident Voice) reports on IVAW and we'll pick it up with war resister Eli Israel who is the first US service member to publicly refuse to serve while stationed in Iraq: "Eli Isreal, a native Kentuckian who had already completed a hitch in the Marines and then enlisted in the Army after September 11, 2001, repeated the Enlistment Oath taken by every person joining the military, that swears them to protect and defend the US Constitution against 'all enemies, foreign and domestic.' He asked the crowds on the sidewalks to consider what they would do 'when your leaders tell you to fight an unjust war based on lies. The Occupation of Iraq is a form of terrorism and we refuse to support it!' With his comrades falling quiet and raising their fists high in the air in salute, the former Military Secret Security sergeant who guarded General Petraeus 'and all those other bastards,' said 'We walk in silence for our brothers and sisters who died for a lie. We didn't join the military to become slaves to the military-industrial complex. We joined to serve our country."
There is a growing movement of resistance within the US military which includes Derek Hess, Justin Cliburn, Timothy Richard, Robert Weiss, Phil McDowell, Steve Yoczik, Ross Spears, Zamesha Dominique, Jared Hood, James Burmeister, Eli Israel, Joshua Key, Ehren Watada, Terri Johnson, Carla Gomez, Luke Kamunen, Leif Kamunen, Leo Kamunen, Camilo Mejia, Kimberly Rivera, Dean Walcott, Linjamin Mull, Agustin Aguayo, Justin Colby, Marc Train, Abdullah Webster, Robert Zabala, Darrell Anderson, Kyle Snyder, Corey Glass, Jeremy Hinzman, Kevin Lee, Mark Wilkerson, Patrick Hart, Ricky Clousing, Ivan Brobeck, Aidan Delgado, Pablo Paredes, Carl Webb, Stephen Funk, Clifton Hicks, David Sanders, Dan Felushko,Brandon Hughey, Clifford Cornell, Joshua Despain, Joshua Casteel, Katherine Jashinski, Dale Bartell, Chris Teske, Matt Lowell, Jimmy Massey, Chris Capps, Tim Richard, Hart Viges, Michael Blake, Christopher Mogwai, Christian Kjar, Kyle Huwer, Vincent La Volpa, DeShawn Reed and Kevin Benderman. In total, forty-one US war resisters in Canada have applied for asylum.
Information on war resistance within the military can be found at The Objector, The G.I. Rights Hotline [(877) 447-4487], Iraq Veterans Against the War and the War Resisters Support Campaign. Courage to Resist offers information on all public war resisters. Tom Joad maintains a list of known war resisters.
Ferner also recounts how Adam Kokesh provided "one of the most memorable moments of the day" when, leading a march past pro-war hawks, he declared, "Column, HALT! Left FACE!" so that the verterans were facing the pro-war hawks with Kokesh saluting leaving "the gathered eagles momentarily taken aback and the crowd cheering." Rebecca offers her thoughts on Saturday's actions, "i was really impressed with the huge turnout. as you probably noticed, some organizations elected to sit out and not promote the action. even so, even without them, the turnout was huge" and, of the police attacks on the demonstrators, "i imagine we'll see more attacks like that on the people. it's really the only hope there is to continue the illegal war." Escambray notes, "Capitol Hill security guards doused the demonstrators with chemicals after dozens laid on the street to symbolically represent the thousands of US soldiers killed in the Iraq war".
Adam Kokesh was among the speakers and has posted his speech (at Sgt. Kokesh Goes to Washington): "As we all know now, we were lied into this war and is lies that are keeping us there. They lied about Weapons of Mass Destruction, they lied about Jessica Lynch, they lied about Pat Tillman, and they lied about Al Qaeda and Saddam. And those are just the lies we know about! But I'm not so mad that I was lied to, as I am that I cannot trust my government any more. It astounds me that yet so many Americans want more than anything to trust out government. When will we wake up, and realize that the power of the truth is greater than any force brought to bear by any Army ever fielded?"
Among the other speakers were Ralph Nader. Nader, as many have noted, was not invited to speak at the last big DC rally. Though some cries of "Apologize for the war!" could be heard as Nader began to speak, they died down quickly. (For the record, Nader doesn't owe an apology for an illegal war that he did not start. Nor do those running Al Gore's 2000 campaign need to apologize for an illegal war that Gore did not start.) Nader noted that, "The impeachable offenses of Bush outnumber the impeachable offenses of any US president." He took Congressional 'leadership' to task for their refusal to impeach the Bully Boy. His critique was greeted with huge cheers. And, by the end of his speech, sounded like someone running for the presidency. (Community note, Nader's speech runs in full in today's Hilda's Mix.) Nader has not announced an intent to run but a campaign to draft him into running, "Run, Ralph Run!", has been started.
Staying with US politics, one effort a draft campaign appears to have not been successful. Kimberly Wilder (On the Wilder Side) reports on former US House Rep's Cynthia McKinney's decision not to seek the presidential nomination of the Green Party for 2008. The Green Party's convention is scheduled to take place from July 10th through July 13th in Chicago, IL. Last week, the Green Party issued a statement noting that they "will use their presence in various antiwar demonstrations and other events throughout September and October to press the Green Party's demand for immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq" and quotes the co-chair of the party's Peace Action Committee Deanna Taylor stating, "The greatest danger to the peace movement is that organizations and voters who oppose the war are being fooled into seeing the election of Democrats as a step towards peace, stability, and the observance of human rights in the Middle East." In Democratic Party news, Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!) notes that "Congressman Dennis Kucinich has accused Democratic Party leaders in Iowa of excluding him from two presidential events this week. On Sunday six of the Democratic candidates were invited to speak to over 12,000 Democratic voters at Senator Tom Harkin's Steak Fry. But Kucinich and former Senator Mike Gravel were not invited. They also weren't invited to a recent Democratic presidential forum in Davenport Iowa. Kucinich said: 'When Party leaders and their allies pre-select which candidates they will allow the voters to hear, it's a disservice to the voters. Iowans deserve better than a rigged game." Saturday, Trina (Trina's Kitchen) recapped some of the developments in Kucinich's campaign including a new staffer, retired Army Capt. Mike Klein, Kucinich's criticism of the illegal war -- "a smokescreen to cover the immorality and criminality of the real reason he took us to war and the reason he refuses to end it: oil" -- his hosting of a student debate in Florida and his campaigning in Hawaii -- the state Democratic presidential candidates tend to write off (at their own risk). TransWorldNews notes of Gravel that the "former Alaska Senator, is not shy about placing the blame for the length of the War in Iraq on the current crop of Democrats eyeing the nomination for President. Especially front runners Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, according to Gravel, as they were in a position to do something about the country's involvement [but] when the opportunity presented itself chose to fault others instead of taking the appropriate action."
Turning to the subject of US mercenaries. Blackwater's latest slaughter continues to garner attention. On Sunday, Blackwater fired into crowds and they've repeatedly changed their story ever since. Are the mercenaries in our out? Martin Fletcher (Times of London) notes that any effort to eject them from Iraq -- any Iraqi effort -- "would be resisted strenuously by the US Government, whose security arrangements will be thrown into chaos if Blackwater can no longer operate in Iraq." Which is why US Secretary of State and Anger Condi Rice spent 15 minutes on the phone with puppet of the occupation Nouri al-Maliki. Ned Parker (Los Angeles Times) noted that "several contractors predicted Monday that it was unlikely the Iraqi government would carry through with the threat to expel Blackwater."For all intents and purposes they belong to the [U.S.] Department of State," one contractor said of Blackwater employees". Kim Sengupta (Independent of London) reports on "an extraordinary telephone news conference, the US embassy spokeswoman could not answer whether the company was still working for the Americans inside the Green Zone, or what its legal position was along with similar foreign contractors within Iraq." Sengupta also notes the ever changing story of Blackwater for why the opened fire on unarmed Iraqi civilians killing at least 8 on Sunday. Ned Parker (Los Angeles Times) notes that Ali Dabbagh spoke to the press in Baghdad and noted that the Iraqi investigation "had found that guards with the private security company Blackwater USA had fired without provocation on a Baghdad traffic circle, killing eight people and wounding 13" and that a child was among the dead. As Leila Fadel, Joseph Neff and Hussein Kadhim (McClatchy Newspapers) point out, "Whether the Iraqi Interior Ministry will be able to enforce its decision to ban North Carolina-based Blackwater Security from operating in Iraq is likely to be a major test between the government of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki and the United States. Blackwater, founded by a major Republican Party benefactor, is among the most prominent -- and most controversial -- of dozens of companies that provide security to both government and private individuals in Iraq. In 2003, the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority exempted the companies and their employees from prosecution under Iraqi law, but Iraqi officials disputed whether that exemption remains in effect, and U.S. officials declined to comment."
Today, Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!) explored the topic with Jeremy Scahill -- journalist and author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army -- and Doug Brooks who is the president of International Peace Operations Association ("a trade group for the private secuirty industry")
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, clearly, Nouri al-Maliki made the mistake of believing that there is a sovereign Iraqi government for about fifteen minutes over the past twenty-four hours, and it appears now that there's a real diplomatic shuffle going on. Condoleezza Rice called Nouri al-Maliki ostensibly to apologize, but it does seem that the US is putting a tremendous amount of pressure on the Iraqi government not to expel Blackwater.
And, you know, what's important to understand about this is that Blackwater is a relatively small player, in terms of numbers in Iraq. They have about a thousand operatives on the ground inside of the country. But symbolically, this is of enormous importance, because Blackwater is the official mercenary company of the US government. They protect the senior US officials in Iraq, the US ambassador. My understanding is that it was a chief of mission operation that they were protecting yesterday, which could mean that it was a very senior US official that the principal or the noun, so to speak.
But we also have to say, there's nothing new here. Iraqis for four years have been terrorized by these mercenaries, who ride around the country, and they'll do anything to keep their ever-important US lives protected, even if it means shooting Iraqi civilians. And so, if Iraq does follow through on this and expel Blackwater, it would be an extraordinary development.
[. . .]
I mean, the reality here is that every time Iraq has made any kind of noise about prosecuting contractors, the contractors are whisked out. It becomes a major discussion between Washington and Baghdad diplomats. And the fact of the matter is, this is solid proof. There is no sovereignty in Iraq of the government at all. The US gutted out the Iraqi legal system, made it virtually impossible for Iraqis to hold accountable murderers and thugs inside of the country who are foreign operatives. And so, when the Bush administration talks about how great everything is going in Baghdad, we have to remember that when US mercenaries shoot Iraqis, the Iraqis are basically powerless to stop them.
Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise Of Disaster Capitalism is out today in the United States and from the book we'll note this on the lives of Iraqis:
It began, as it often does, with the disappearance of women behind viels and doors, then the children disappeared from the schools -- as of 2006, two-thirds of them stayed home. Next came the professionals: doctors, professors, entrepreneurs, scientists, pharmacists, judges, lawyers.
[. . .]
That is what happenes with projects to build model societies in other people's countries. The cleansing campaigns are rarely premeditated. It is only when the people who live on the land refuse to abandon their past that the dream of the clean slate morphs into its doppelganger, the scorched earth -- only then that the dream of toral creation morphs into a campaign of total destruction.
The unanticipated violence that now engulfs Iraq, is the creation of the lethally optimistic architects of the war -- it was preordained in that original seemingly innocuous, even idealistic phrase: "a model for a new Middle East." The disintegration of Iraq has its roots in the ideology that demanded a tabu rase on which to write its new story. And when no such pristine tableua presented itself, the supporter of that ideology proceeded to blast and surge and glast again in the hope of reaching the promised land.
On Democracy Now! today, Doug Brooks declared that the mercenaries (Blackwater, et al) were "better than US soldiers" (Goodman asked that, Brooks replied "Absolutely"). And Jeremey Scahill noted, "Well, I think that most people in the world first learned of Blackwater USA on March 31st, 2004, when four Blackwater operatives were ambushed and killed in the Iraqi city of Fallujah. Their bodies were burned, they were dragged through the streets, strung up from a bridge over the Euphrates River. And the Bush administration responded to that attack by leveling Fallujah and destroying the city. In fact, it was the first of a number of sieges against the city of Fallujah, and it really fueled the Iraqi resistance that haunts the occupation to this day. That was the first time that many people heard of any kind of a private security or private military company, a mercenary company, operating in Iraq." The two slaughters of Falluja. Stemming from that incident (caused in part by Paul Bremer shutting down a press because he didn't care for a cartoon mocking him). Sabrina Tavernise (New York Times) sidesteps that reality (possibly because Dexy Filkins provided rah-rah coverage of the November 2004 slaughter?) and offers that "One of the most terrifying images of the war for Americans involved four of Blackwater's contractors in Falluja who were killed in 2004, and their bodies hung from a bridge." That was the most terrifying image? For Americans? Tavernise thinks Americans weren't shocked by the bombings in northern Iraq that claimed approximately 500 lives on one day this summer? If Tavernise isn't speaking for the State Dept (a constant problem for the Times), she might want to consider -- among many other attacks -- the June 16, 2006 attack in Youssifiyah in which US service members David Baineau, Kristian Menchaca and Thomas Tucker were killed with the latter two's corpses being discovered after they'd been tortured to death. Clearly the US State Dept saw the Falluja attack as the worst but Tavernise might want to explain why she sees it as such. Tavernise does mange to reveal that an employee of Blackwater (apparently drunk) shot dead the bodyguard of Iraq's Shi'ite vice president on Christmas Eve (2006) and was faced no charges (in Iraq or the US) but got whisked out of the country and she notes that "A law issued by the American authority in Iraq before the United States handed over soverieignty to Iraqis, Order No. 17, gives the companies immunity from iraqi law. A security expert based in Baghdad said Monday night that the order, issued in 2004, had never been overturned." One of the Bremer orders that the press wasn't overly interested in covering in real time.
Staying with the US State Dept for a minute more, CBS and AP report, 'A congressional committee has launched an investigation into the State Department's Inspector General, alleging that he blocked fraud investigations, including potential security lapses at the newly built U.S. embassy in Baghdad. Also under scrutiny is whether a major security firm was 'illegally smuggling weapons into Iraq,' according to a letter to IG Howard J. Krongard that was obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press."
In some of today's reported violence . . .
Bombings?
Mohammed Al Dulaimy (McClatchy Newspapers) reports a Baghdad roadside bombing that claimed 1 life and left two police officers wounded, a Baghdad bus bombing that claimed 2 lives and left five wounded and 3 Baghdad car bombings that claimed a total of 13 lives and left 35 wounded. Reuters notes a bombing in Jalawla that claimed the lives of 4 Iraqi civilians (fourteen more wounded), a Mosul car bombing that left two Iraqi soldiers wounded
Shootings?
Mohammed Al Dulaimy (McClatchy Newspapers) reports assailant attacked a representative of Ayatollah Sistani in Basra (Emad Abdul Kareem) while he was departing a mosque leaving him wounded and 1 of his guards dead. Reuters notes a police officer was shot dead in Shirqat.
Corspes?
Mohammed Al Dulaimy (McClatchy Newspapers) reports 9 corpses were discovered in Baghdad. Reuters notes that 3 corpses were discovered in Mosul and 3 in Qaim.
In a novel development, the US military announced deaths today: "Three Task Force Lightning Soldiers were killed in Diyala Province, Tuesday, following an explosion." ICCC's total for the number of US service members killed in the illegal war now stands at 3786 (with 44 for the month). If that number suprises many it may be because the total stood at 3781 Sunday night. As noted this morning, the names of two who had died were announced by the Defense Dept on Monday; however, M-NF never announced those deaths. The usual pattern is what M-NF has done today with the "Three Task Force Lightning Soldiers were killed in . . . " After that, the US Defense Dept follows up by releasing the names of the dead after the next of kin has been notified. Altering the process allows them to hide the deaths. M-NF didn't stop putting out their press releases -- they were still, for instance, happy to offer "Soldiers take citizenship oath" -- they just stopped announcing the deaths. They've done that before, they will do it again. Because M-NF finally did their job, Reuters was able to report on the deaths and note the count is 3,784 US service members killed in the illegal war thus far. The 3800 mark looms.
Meanwhile the US people still want US troops withdrawn even if their represenatives (and sadly, an apologist in the peace movement) don't see it as anything to get too worked up over. CBS' latest poll came out yesterday and 68% still is calling for troops to be brought home.
But there are some lies that are being told to our children every day in order to convince them to sign up to be sent into the Baghdad meat grinder. Proponents of the policy in Iraq are quick to point out that everyone in the military volunteered, but what does that mean if most of them were tricked into enlisting by the lies that recruiters tell every day? It means that to support the troops means to cut through the lies, bring them home, and stop this criminal occupation!
And we are back to Adam Kokesh. The above was part of his speech delivered Saturday in DC. Iraq Veterans Against the War have kicked off Truth in Recruiting. Maureen O'Donnell (Chicago Sun-Times) reports on yesterday's actions in Chicago with IVAW's Aaron Hughes explaining, "Every minute that a recruiter's spending with someone from the movement is a minute that they're not recruiting for the war" and O'Donnel notes that five demonstrators were in the army recruiting station on 1239 N. Clybourn, Chicago's WBEZ (91.5 FM) notes that IVAW "hopes to keep the campaign going until the war stops." Chicago's WLS-TV quotes Huges stating, "We are asking people to go befriend recruiters, spend time with them -- find out the real issues. Find out all the things that they're telling you, that they're offering you, and then talk to a veteran and realize how much of that's not true."
Saturday was a strong moment for IVAW and they deserve nothing but praise for their leadership and actions. War Hawks are e-mailing regarding a story and we'll note it here. Alan Garthright and Hector Gutierrez (Rocky Mountain News) have reported that Iraq vet Ricardo Cortez who was apparently speaking out against the illegal war is now held on charges in an attack on "his estranged wife . . . [and] her companion". If Cortez is guilty, and not to minimize or excuse his actions, it only demonstrates again the way that the Veterans Affairs Dept. is failing veterans who return and need help. This is not the first act of violence -- if Cortez committed it -- committed by a veteran -- in this illegal war or any other -- nor is it as though the civilian population doesn't also get charged with violent crimes. If Cortez did do what he's charged with, this goes to the lack of medical screening for returning veterans and those e-mailing who thinks this 'proves' anything about veterans against the illegal war should be aware that many pro-war veterans have been charged with much worse including murdering their wives. The issue isn't their stance on the Iraq War, the issue is most likely the lack of medical attention that the military is providing to those returning.
england's neo-liberal bible, the guardian of london (or is it essex?) dubs it, in the opening paragraph, 'his first major battle to modernise France'. they are sick. that brave guardian. hey, remember all the work they did reporting on the downing street memos? nope. that's because they didn't. couldn't embarrass their boy tony blair.
the concord monitor provides the joke of the day:
Readers will learn that Souter relies on a fountain pen for all his writing and had not heard of Diet Coke or the Supremes before coming to the court in 1990. He remains unmarried, apparently despite the best efforts of those around him. Both Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and former first lady Barbara Bush tried to fix up Souter, Toobin writes. After one date, Souter told a woman he'd had a good time and said goodnight with this: "Let's do this again next year," according to Toobin.
sherry sent me a thing by a bryan fader and asked me if i could 'spot the mistake'? i think i have:
Getting caught up in trends can be fun. Mirroring the stars we see has been happening forever. Everyone had Farrah Fawcett's hair in the ‘70s. My clients tell me that Jane Fonda's shag was all the rage in the late '60s -- and it goes on and on.
he or his clients need to buy a clue. jane fonda cut off her very long hair for 1969's they shoot horses don't they. the shag that is famous is from 1971's klute. therefore, it was not 'all the rage in the late '60s.' it was famous and it was the rage, but not in the 60s. fonda had a shorter version of it in 1969 and it probably did become popular by 1970 but it hit it's height of popularity after klute. there were even rumors that david cassidy was trying to pull off her shag when he played keith partridge.
while i'm on pop culture, i'll note this:
The Facing The Music programme featured commentary about Spector's infamous love of guns, and host Keith Morrison revealed the record producer fired a gun in a studio while recording with John Lennon and held a gun to the heads of Leonard Cohen and Mamas + The Papas star Michelle Phillips.
spector's a creep - always has been and he smells, or did the 1 time i met him in a club - and i'm not going to start covering the trial but you've got john lennon, michelle phillips and leonard cohen in that - all favorites of mine.
diana ross will be among the honored at this winter's kennedy center honors. good for her, she deserves it. some 1 will have to explain to justice souter who diana ross is - that is if they believe that laughable book by jeffrey toobin.
(souter's not getting married. gals, release the fantasy!)
lastly, how dumb are they in the u.k.? this article on kanye west's new cd mentions samples and identifies the song sampled (michael jackson's 'p.y.t.' and i forget the elton john tune and don't want to punish myself by re-reading the bad writing) but then it mentions 'laura nyro' and doesn't say the song. (i'm guessing the writer didn't know it.)
i haven't heard kanye's new cd. so i called c.i. and asked what it was? c.i. said kanye's sampling laura nyro's 'save the country.' that was, for the young kids out there, a big hit for the 5th dimension. laura didn't chart with her own songs. her biggest hit - and only top 100 nationally - was a cover of carole king & gerry goffin's 'up on the roof.'
laura nyro was an extremely gifted artist. (she's dead now.) she wrote some of the songs every 1 knew at 1 time. my favorite, barbra streisand, had a huge hit with laura's 'stoney end' (which was also covered very well by peggy lipton). the 5th dimension went to number 1 with nyro's 'wedding bell blues' (and a lot of other songs she wrote were recorded by them). 'and when i die' - big hit for blood, sweat & tears - was another nyro composition and she also wrote 'eli's coming' which was a huge hit for 3 dog night.
for years, i hated christmas & the beads of sweat. i hated, hated it. it took me forever to appreciate it. (it's not a christmas album, just f.y.i.) i've always loved eli & the 13th confession and the first songs. new york tenderberry was always special. but christmas and the beads of sweat took time to grow. my favorite laura album is live at the bottom line. and my favorite track on it is 'the japenese restaurant.'
i don't know what my favorite song is, though. it might be 'save the country' ('in my mind i can't study war no more') or it might be 'when i was a freeport and you were the main drag.'
she was an incredibly gifted writer and she was often seen as the next dylan. (dylan had gone country when laura was at the height of her gifts.)
anyway, let's close with c.i.'s 'Iraq snapshot:'
Tuesday, September 18, 2007. Chaos and violence continue, low and behold the US military announces deaths, Blackwater remains in at least semi-hot water, IVAW deserves tremendous credit and applause for their leadership on Saturday, and more.
Starting with war resistance. On Saturday in DC, demonstrations against the illegal war started a new phase of activism. As Feminist Wire Daily noted, "Several women's groups, including CODEPINK and the National Congress of Black Women, sponsored a women's convergence earlier in the day before joining the larger rally at the White House before the march." But this was the event at which Iraq Veterans Against the War truly made their presence felt. That is not taking anything away from A.N.S.W.E.R., CODEPINK or anyone else; however, part of the strength of the action may be due to those organizations who refused to participate? Regardless, IVAW's membership continues to grow and their voices are among the surest and loudest out there. Mike Ferner (Dissident Voice) reports on IVAW and we'll pick it up with war resister Eli Israel who is the first US service member to publicly refuse to serve while stationed in Iraq: "Eli Isreal, a native Kentuckian who had already completed a hitch in the Marines and then enlisted in the Army after September 11, 2001, repeated the Enlistment Oath taken by every person joining the military, that swears them to protect and defend the US Constitution against 'all enemies, foreign and domestic.' He asked the crowds on the sidewalks to consider what they would do 'when your leaders tell you to fight an unjust war based on lies. The Occupation of Iraq is a form of terrorism and we refuse to support it!' With his comrades falling quiet and raising their fists high in the air in salute, the former Military Secret Security sergeant who guarded General Petraeus 'and all those other bastards,' said 'We walk in silence for our brothers and sisters who died for a lie. We didn't join the military to become slaves to the military-industrial complex. We joined to serve our country."
There is a growing movement of resistance within the US military which includes Derek Hess, Justin Cliburn, Timothy Richard, Robert Weiss, Phil McDowell, Steve Yoczik, Ross Spears, Zamesha Dominique, Jared Hood, James Burmeister, Eli Israel, Joshua Key, Ehren Watada, Terri Johnson, Carla Gomez, Luke Kamunen, Leif Kamunen, Leo Kamunen, Camilo Mejia, Kimberly Rivera, Dean Walcott, Linjamin Mull, Agustin Aguayo, Justin Colby, Marc Train, Abdullah Webster, Robert Zabala, Darrell Anderson, Kyle Snyder, Corey Glass, Jeremy Hinzman, Kevin Lee, Mark Wilkerson, Patrick Hart, Ricky Clousing, Ivan Brobeck, Aidan Delgado, Pablo Paredes, Carl Webb, Stephen Funk, Clifton Hicks, David Sanders, Dan Felushko,Brandon Hughey, Clifford Cornell, Joshua Despain, Joshua Casteel, Katherine Jashinski, Dale Bartell, Chris Teske, Matt Lowell, Jimmy Massey, Chris Capps, Tim Richard, Hart Viges, Michael Blake, Christopher Mogwai, Christian Kjar, Kyle Huwer, Vincent La Volpa, DeShawn Reed and Kevin Benderman. In total, forty-one US war resisters in Canada have applied for asylum.
Information on war resistance within the military can be found at The Objector, The G.I. Rights Hotline [(877) 447-4487], Iraq Veterans Against the War and the War Resisters Support Campaign. Courage to Resist offers information on all public war resisters. Tom Joad maintains a list of known war resisters.
Ferner also recounts how Adam Kokesh provided "one of the most memorable moments of the day" when, leading a march past pro-war hawks, he declared, "Column, HALT! Left FACE!" so that the verterans were facing the pro-war hawks with Kokesh saluting leaving "the gathered eagles momentarily taken aback and the crowd cheering." Rebecca offers her thoughts on Saturday's actions, "i was really impressed with the huge turnout. as you probably noticed, some organizations elected to sit out and not promote the action. even so, even without them, the turnout was huge" and, of the police attacks on the demonstrators, "i imagine we'll see more attacks like that on the people. it's really the only hope there is to continue the illegal war." Escambray notes, "Capitol Hill security guards doused the demonstrators with chemicals after dozens laid on the street to symbolically represent the thousands of US soldiers killed in the Iraq war".
Adam Kokesh was among the speakers and has posted his speech (at Sgt. Kokesh Goes to Washington): "As we all know now, we were lied into this war and is lies that are keeping us there. They lied about Weapons of Mass Destruction, they lied about Jessica Lynch, they lied about Pat Tillman, and they lied about Al Qaeda and Saddam. And those are just the lies we know about! But I'm not so mad that I was lied to, as I am that I cannot trust my government any more. It astounds me that yet so many Americans want more than anything to trust out government. When will we wake up, and realize that the power of the truth is greater than any force brought to bear by any Army ever fielded?"
Among the other speakers were Ralph Nader. Nader, as many have noted, was not invited to speak at the last big DC rally. Though some cries of "Apologize for the war!" could be heard as Nader began to speak, they died down quickly. (For the record, Nader doesn't owe an apology for an illegal war that he did not start. Nor do those running Al Gore's 2000 campaign need to apologize for an illegal war that Gore did not start.) Nader noted that, "The impeachable offenses of Bush outnumber the impeachable offenses of any US president." He took Congressional 'leadership' to task for their refusal to impeach the Bully Boy. His critique was greeted with huge cheers. And, by the end of his speech, sounded like someone running for the presidency. (Community note, Nader's speech runs in full in today's Hilda's Mix.) Nader has not announced an intent to run but a campaign to draft him into running, "Run, Ralph Run!", has been started.
Staying with US politics, one effort a draft campaign appears to have not been successful. Kimberly Wilder (On the Wilder Side) reports on former US House Rep's Cynthia McKinney's decision not to seek the presidential nomination of the Green Party for 2008. The Green Party's convention is scheduled to take place from July 10th through July 13th in Chicago, IL. Last week, the Green Party issued a statement noting that they "will use their presence in various antiwar demonstrations and other events throughout September and October to press the Green Party's demand for immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq" and quotes the co-chair of the party's Peace Action Committee Deanna Taylor stating, "The greatest danger to the peace movement is that organizations and voters who oppose the war are being fooled into seeing the election of Democrats as a step towards peace, stability, and the observance of human rights in the Middle East." In Democratic Party news, Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!) notes that "Congressman Dennis Kucinich has accused Democratic Party leaders in Iowa of excluding him from two presidential events this week. On Sunday six of the Democratic candidates were invited to speak to over 12,000 Democratic voters at Senator Tom Harkin's Steak Fry. But Kucinich and former Senator Mike Gravel were not invited. They also weren't invited to a recent Democratic presidential forum in Davenport Iowa. Kucinich said: 'When Party leaders and their allies pre-select which candidates they will allow the voters to hear, it's a disservice to the voters. Iowans deserve better than a rigged game." Saturday, Trina (Trina's Kitchen) recapped some of the developments in Kucinich's campaign including a new staffer, retired Army Capt. Mike Klein, Kucinich's criticism of the illegal war -- "a smokescreen to cover the immorality and criminality of the real reason he took us to war and the reason he refuses to end it: oil" -- his hosting of a student debate in Florida and his campaigning in Hawaii -- the state Democratic presidential candidates tend to write off (at their own risk). TransWorldNews notes of Gravel that the "former Alaska Senator, is not shy about placing the blame for the length of the War in Iraq on the current crop of Democrats eyeing the nomination for President. Especially front runners Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, according to Gravel, as they were in a position to do something about the country's involvement [but] when the opportunity presented itself chose to fault others instead of taking the appropriate action."
Turning to the subject of US mercenaries. Blackwater's latest slaughter continues to garner attention. On Sunday, Blackwater fired into crowds and they've repeatedly changed their story ever since. Are the mercenaries in our out? Martin Fletcher (Times of London) notes that any effort to eject them from Iraq -- any Iraqi effort -- "would be resisted strenuously by the US Government, whose security arrangements will be thrown into chaos if Blackwater can no longer operate in Iraq." Which is why US Secretary of State and Anger Condi Rice spent 15 minutes on the phone with puppet of the occupation Nouri al-Maliki. Ned Parker (Los Angeles Times) noted that "several contractors predicted Monday that it was unlikely the Iraqi government would carry through with the threat to expel Blackwater."For all intents and purposes they belong to the [U.S.] Department of State," one contractor said of Blackwater employees". Kim Sengupta (Independent of London) reports on "an extraordinary telephone news conference, the US embassy spokeswoman could not answer whether the company was still working for the Americans inside the Green Zone, or what its legal position was along with similar foreign contractors within Iraq." Sengupta also notes the ever changing story of Blackwater for why the opened fire on unarmed Iraqi civilians killing at least 8 on Sunday. Ned Parker (Los Angeles Times) notes that Ali Dabbagh spoke to the press in Baghdad and noted that the Iraqi investigation "had found that guards with the private security company Blackwater USA had fired without provocation on a Baghdad traffic circle, killing eight people and wounding 13" and that a child was among the dead. As Leila Fadel, Joseph Neff and Hussein Kadhim (McClatchy Newspapers) point out, "Whether the Iraqi Interior Ministry will be able to enforce its decision to ban North Carolina-based Blackwater Security from operating in Iraq is likely to be a major test between the government of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki and the United States. Blackwater, founded by a major Republican Party benefactor, is among the most prominent -- and most controversial -- of dozens of companies that provide security to both government and private individuals in Iraq. In 2003, the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority exempted the companies and their employees from prosecution under Iraqi law, but Iraqi officials disputed whether that exemption remains in effect, and U.S. officials declined to comment."
Today, Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!) explored the topic with Jeremy Scahill -- journalist and author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army -- and Doug Brooks who is the president of International Peace Operations Association ("a trade group for the private secuirty industry")
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, clearly, Nouri al-Maliki made the mistake of believing that there is a sovereign Iraqi government for about fifteen minutes over the past twenty-four hours, and it appears now that there's a real diplomatic shuffle going on. Condoleezza Rice called Nouri al-Maliki ostensibly to apologize, but it does seem that the US is putting a tremendous amount of pressure on the Iraqi government not to expel Blackwater.
And, you know, what's important to understand about this is that Blackwater is a relatively small player, in terms of numbers in Iraq. They have about a thousand operatives on the ground inside of the country. But symbolically, this is of enormous importance, because Blackwater is the official mercenary company of the US government. They protect the senior US officials in Iraq, the US ambassador. My understanding is that it was a chief of mission operation that they were protecting yesterday, which could mean that it was a very senior US official that the principal or the noun, so to speak.
But we also have to say, there's nothing new here. Iraqis for four years have been terrorized by these mercenaries, who ride around the country, and they'll do anything to keep their ever-important US lives protected, even if it means shooting Iraqi civilians. And so, if Iraq does follow through on this and expel Blackwater, it would be an extraordinary development.
[. . .]
I mean, the reality here is that every time Iraq has made any kind of noise about prosecuting contractors, the contractors are whisked out. It becomes a major discussion between Washington and Baghdad diplomats. And the fact of the matter is, this is solid proof. There is no sovereignty in Iraq of the government at all. The US gutted out the Iraqi legal system, made it virtually impossible for Iraqis to hold accountable murderers and thugs inside of the country who are foreign operatives. And so, when the Bush administration talks about how great everything is going in Baghdad, we have to remember that when US mercenaries shoot Iraqis, the Iraqis are basically powerless to stop them.
Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise Of Disaster Capitalism is out today in the United States and from the book we'll note this on the lives of Iraqis:
It began, as it often does, with the disappearance of women behind viels and doors, then the children disappeared from the schools -- as of 2006, two-thirds of them stayed home. Next came the professionals: doctors, professors, entrepreneurs, scientists, pharmacists, judges, lawyers.
[. . .]
That is what happenes with projects to build model societies in other people's countries. The cleansing campaigns are rarely premeditated. It is only when the people who live on the land refuse to abandon their past that the dream of the clean slate morphs into its doppelganger, the scorched earth -- only then that the dream of toral creation morphs into a campaign of total destruction.
The unanticipated violence that now engulfs Iraq, is the creation of the lethally optimistic architects of the war -- it was preordained in that original seemingly innocuous, even idealistic phrase: "a model for a new Middle East." The disintegration of Iraq has its roots in the ideology that demanded a tabu rase on which to write its new story. And when no such pristine tableua presented itself, the supporter of that ideology proceeded to blast and surge and glast again in the hope of reaching the promised land.
On Democracy Now! today, Doug Brooks declared that the mercenaries (Blackwater, et al) were "better than US soldiers" (Goodman asked that, Brooks replied "Absolutely"). And Jeremey Scahill noted, "Well, I think that most people in the world first learned of Blackwater USA on March 31st, 2004, when four Blackwater operatives were ambushed and killed in the Iraqi city of Fallujah. Their bodies were burned, they were dragged through the streets, strung up from a bridge over the Euphrates River. And the Bush administration responded to that attack by leveling Fallujah and destroying the city. In fact, it was the first of a number of sieges against the city of Fallujah, and it really fueled the Iraqi resistance that haunts the occupation to this day. That was the first time that many people heard of any kind of a private security or private military company, a mercenary company, operating in Iraq." The two slaughters of Falluja. Stemming from that incident (caused in part by Paul Bremer shutting down a press because he didn't care for a cartoon mocking him). Sabrina Tavernise (New York Times) sidesteps that reality (possibly because Dexy Filkins provided rah-rah coverage of the November 2004 slaughter?) and offers that "One of the most terrifying images of the war for Americans involved four of Blackwater's contractors in Falluja who were killed in 2004, and their bodies hung from a bridge." That was the most terrifying image? For Americans? Tavernise thinks Americans weren't shocked by the bombings in northern Iraq that claimed approximately 500 lives on one day this summer? If Tavernise isn't speaking for the State Dept (a constant problem for the Times), she might want to consider -- among many other attacks -- the June 16, 2006 attack in Youssifiyah in which US service members David Baineau, Kristian Menchaca and Thomas Tucker were killed with the latter two's corpses being discovered after they'd been tortured to death. Clearly the US State Dept saw the Falluja attack as the worst but Tavernise might want to explain why she sees it as such. Tavernise does mange to reveal that an employee of Blackwater (apparently drunk) shot dead the bodyguard of Iraq's Shi'ite vice president on Christmas Eve (2006) and was faced no charges (in Iraq or the US) but got whisked out of the country and she notes that "A law issued by the American authority in Iraq before the United States handed over soverieignty to Iraqis, Order No. 17, gives the companies immunity from iraqi law. A security expert based in Baghdad said Monday night that the order, issued in 2004, had never been overturned." One of the Bremer orders that the press wasn't overly interested in covering in real time.
Staying with the US State Dept for a minute more, CBS and AP report, 'A congressional committee has launched an investigation into the State Department's Inspector General, alleging that he blocked fraud investigations, including potential security lapses at the newly built U.S. embassy in Baghdad. Also under scrutiny is whether a major security firm was 'illegally smuggling weapons into Iraq,' according to a letter to IG Howard J. Krongard that was obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press."
In some of today's reported violence . . .
Bombings?
Mohammed Al Dulaimy (McClatchy Newspapers) reports a Baghdad roadside bombing that claimed 1 life and left two police officers wounded, a Baghdad bus bombing that claimed 2 lives and left five wounded and 3 Baghdad car bombings that claimed a total of 13 lives and left 35 wounded. Reuters notes a bombing in Jalawla that claimed the lives of 4 Iraqi civilians (fourteen more wounded), a Mosul car bombing that left two Iraqi soldiers wounded
Shootings?
Mohammed Al Dulaimy (McClatchy Newspapers) reports assailant attacked a representative of Ayatollah Sistani in Basra (Emad Abdul Kareem) while he was departing a mosque leaving him wounded and 1 of his guards dead. Reuters notes a police officer was shot dead in Shirqat.
Corspes?
Mohammed Al Dulaimy (McClatchy Newspapers) reports 9 corpses were discovered in Baghdad. Reuters notes that 3 corpses were discovered in Mosul and 3 in Qaim.
In a novel development, the US military announced deaths today: "Three Task Force Lightning Soldiers were killed in Diyala Province, Tuesday, following an explosion." ICCC's total for the number of US service members killed in the illegal war now stands at 3786 (with 44 for the month). If that number suprises many it may be because the total stood at 3781 Sunday night. As noted this morning, the names of two who had died were announced by the Defense Dept on Monday; however, M-NF never announced those deaths. The usual pattern is what M-NF has done today with the "Three Task Force Lightning Soldiers were killed in . . . " After that, the US Defense Dept follows up by releasing the names of the dead after the next of kin has been notified. Altering the process allows them to hide the deaths. M-NF didn't stop putting out their press releases -- they were still, for instance, happy to offer "Soldiers take citizenship oath" -- they just stopped announcing the deaths. They've done that before, they will do it again. Because M-NF finally did their job, Reuters was able to report on the deaths and note the count is 3,784 US service members killed in the illegal war thus far. The 3800 mark looms.
Meanwhile the US people still want US troops withdrawn even if their represenatives (and sadly, an apologist in the peace movement) don't see it as anything to get too worked up over. CBS' latest poll came out yesterday and 68% still is calling for troops to be brought home.
But there are some lies that are being told to our children every day in order to convince them to sign up to be sent into the Baghdad meat grinder. Proponents of the policy in Iraq are quick to point out that everyone in the military volunteered, but what does that mean if most of them were tricked into enlisting by the lies that recruiters tell every day? It means that to support the troops means to cut through the lies, bring them home, and stop this criminal occupation!
And we are back to Adam Kokesh. The above was part of his speech delivered Saturday in DC. Iraq Veterans Against the War have kicked off Truth in Recruiting. Maureen O'Donnell (Chicago Sun-Times) reports on yesterday's actions in Chicago with IVAW's Aaron Hughes explaining, "Every minute that a recruiter's spending with someone from the movement is a minute that they're not recruiting for the war" and O'Donnel notes that five demonstrators were in the army recruiting station on 1239 N. Clybourn, Chicago's WBEZ (91.5 FM) notes that IVAW "hopes to keep the campaign going until the war stops." Chicago's WLS-TV quotes Huges stating, "We are asking people to go befriend recruiters, spend time with them -- find out the real issues. Find out all the things that they're telling you, that they're offering you, and then talk to a veteran and realize how much of that's not true."
Saturday was a strong moment for IVAW and they deserve nothing but praise for their leadership and actions. War Hawks are e-mailing regarding a story and we'll note it here. Alan Garthright and Hector Gutierrez (Rocky Mountain News) have reported that Iraq vet Ricardo Cortez who was apparently speaking out against the illegal war is now held on charges in an attack on "his estranged wife . . . [and] her companion". If Cortez is guilty, and not to minimize or excuse his actions, it only demonstrates again the way that the Veterans Affairs Dept. is failing veterans who return and need help. This is not the first act of violence -- if Cortez committed it -- committed by a veteran -- in this illegal war or any other -- nor is it as though the civilian population doesn't also get charged with violent crimes. If Cortez did do what he's charged with, this goes to the lack of medical screening for returning veterans and those e-mailing who thinks this 'proves' anything about veterans against the illegal war should be aware that many pro-war veterans have been charged with much worse including murdering their wives. The issue isn't their stance on the Iraq War, the issue is most likely the lack of medical attention that the military is providing to those returning.
thoughts on/from d.c.
late because i had to nurse the baby and those of us still in d.c. were doing activism during the day and having fun at night. i hollered, as soon as i logged on, 'kat! give me something!' so we're both leading with 'Thousands March for Peace in Washington DC' (feminist wire daily):
Thousands of protesters marched from the White House to the Capitol on Saturday to demand an end to the war in Iraq. Several women’s groups, including CODEPINK and the National Congress of Black Women, sponsored a women’s convergence earlier in the day before joining the larger rally at the White House before the march. Addressing the very large crowd were Medea Benjamin of CODEPINK, Cindy Sheehan, Ralph Nader, and many others.
The march was mostly peaceful, but protestors were arrested after hundreds laid on the ground in a "die in." The Washington Post reports 189 protestors were arrested, including 10 who, according to the march’s organizers, were veterans of the war.
now i'm not big on online activism and don't push most of that stuff. i will note Free Sami Al-Haj because (a) i do think it will have an impact, (b) i do think he needs to be freed and (c) elaine mentioned this saturday morning and all she has to do is ask. c.i. wrote about the petition and sami al-haji much better than i can so read c.i.'s thing on it from saturday.
i'm so tired. kat said 'be lazy like me' (she's not lazy) 'and just take links from the third estate.' but i grabbed from mike.
The Third Estate Sunday Review's Dona, Jess, Ty, Ava and Jim,
Betty of Thomas Friedman Is a Great Man,
C.I. of The Common Ills and The Third Estate Sunday Review,
Kat of Kat's Korner (of The Common Ills),
Cedric of Cedric's Big Mix,
Mike of Mikey Likes It!,
Elaine of Like Maria Said Paz,
Trina's Trina's Kitchen,
and Wally of The Daily Jot
all were in d.c. and i may not mention all (because i'm tired!) but the sentiment and spirit inclues all.
let me talk a little about saturday. due to the crackdown by the d.c. police, we left the baby with a relative of flyboy's for the demonstration and boy was i glad we did. i didn't get sprayed but i swear that is what made dona so sick. she thinks it was a virus. i disagree. she felt sick after the demonstration and it only got worse. she was rubbing her eyes throughout saturday and by late night was throwing up. she's fine now, but i do believe that's why she's sick. both she and c.i. were near the spraying and c.i. had a killer headache. c.i. gets migraines - has for years - they are at the base of the back of the head. this was a top of the head all the way down thing and i kept pointing out, 'that is not 1 of your migraines.' i don't know what the police were using. some reports say pepper spray some say chemical spray. i think it was uncalled for regardless and that a lot of people who weren't even doing anything related to the supposed 'reason' for spraying got sprayed.
c.i. threw up once right after the demonstration and that's the other reason i think it was the spraying. stuff cycles through c.i. quickly. a 24 hour flu is a 6 hour 1. and c.i.'s always bash on through regardless. but i think both of them - c.i. and dona - were sick because of the spraying. (and no pills took away the migraine. c.i. had it until late tonight - non-stop from the demonstration.)
i was really impressed with the huge turnout. as you probably noticed, some organizations elected to sit out and not promote the action.
even so, even without them, the turnout was huge. i would go with 100,000 but note that it could have been more. it was packed.
i thought the 'die-in' made the point beautifully. in the snapshot, c.i. talks about what happened to carlos (beat up by right-wingers attempting to desecrate his son's coffin). i didn't even know about that at the time. the 1st i heard about it was early sunday morning, when c.i. got off the phone and mentioned it while we were working on the edition for third. we were all shocked.
cindy sheehan spoke beautifully and i also loved medea benjamin's speech. i couldn't hear many of the other speakers that well. (including nader. i'm sure he spoke brilliantly but i couldn't hear him, he cut in an out where i was standing.) in my area, i didn't even realize it was ramsey clark speaking. i couldn't hear the intro or the speech. afterward, kat would tell me about ramsey's speech and that was when i realized he was 1 of the 1s i couldn't hear. (i did recognize nader.)
maria did a great job editing down the interviews. i believe francisco and miguel helped but i know maria worked hard on it. (their newsletter, el espirito.) we were so far behind and so tired (before dona even got sick) that we decided to pull together the comments we got from others participating and just hand it over raw to maria and let her shape it while we focused on trying to get out the edition of the third estate sunday review. in the middle of a feature, dona started throwing up. i wasn't grossed out - please i deal with spit up and dirty diapers all day these days - but i was shocked. she was looking sick progressively as the day ran on. after people got that taken care of and got her into bed, c.i. declared a two-hour break. jim either co-declared it or went along with it, i don't remember. i was too busy insisting to every 1, 'dona's sick because of the spraying.' but jim wrote a quick note and every 1 went to sleep.
except jim and c.i. who stayed up taking care of dona. i didn't realize she wasn't asleep or i would've helped them. mike woke me up after the nap and goes 'listen'. jim and c.i. were singing to dona to help her finally fall to sleep. (they sang so well together! and c.i. was playing jess' guitar.) by the time i was showered, sipping a cup of coffee and back with the gang, dona was asleep and we worked hard on finishing the edition. dona woke up near the end (in time for the editorial and to add input to other things) but she still looked a little shaky. she didn't want to drink anything - because of the natural fear that if you eat or consume liquids, you'll start throwing up again. but c.i. and elaine insisted that she drink a lot of water. as she did, she started looking a lot better.
no 1 will ever convince me that it wasn't the spraying that made her sick.
and the point to be made there is that the police assaulted protestors. they can say 'people were climbing barricades.' i wasn't close enough to see. i could see dona and c.i. and i knew they weren't climbing. when they started spraying, c.i. pushed tracey hard.
that's ruth's granddaughter. i thought tracey was going to fall to the ground! she was right next to c.i. and c.i. was trying to get her away from the spraying. (tracey said c.i. yelled 'go' and pushed.) tracey didn't get sick and she also didn't get sprayed and wasn't near it (she said, 'when c.i. shoved me and said 'go' i got!')
that was just police brutality and nothing will ever convince me it was anything else.
it's interesting that carlos can be attacked and his attackers not only do not get sprayed, they don't get arrested but the police can spray demonstrators.
if - IF - any 1 was climbing barricades, that was no reason to attack a crowd. the fact that people who weren't doing what the police claimed prompted the spraying demonstrates how indiscrimately force was used. spraying a crowd of people is force.
i imagine we'll see more attacks like that on the people. it's really the only hope there is to continue the illegal war.
let's close with c.i.'s 'Iraq snapshot' (which kat says she's talking about in her post tonight):
Monday, September 17, 2007. Chaos and violence continue, Ian Williams examines war resistance, Phyllis Bennis and the hosts of CounterSpin stage a contest to determine who can be the most useless/uninformed, NBC's Matt Lauer uses his outdoor voice on Alan Greenspan, Blackwater shoots up more Iraqi citizens, and more.
Starting with war resistance. Nation contributor Ian Williams explores the topic of war resistance and, to no surprise, does so elsewhere. Williams (OpEdNews) addresses both the contemporary history of this illegal war as well as exploring the resistance during the Vietnam era. With war resister Pablo Paredes, Williams explores the issue of the numbers and the US military's refusal to release a full count as well as the fact that though the system is supposed to list a service member as AWOL automatically after 30 days, that is still not the case. (Which goes to the system problems and also benefits the US military by allowing for an undercount.) Williams speaks with war resister Camilo Mejia (now the chair of Iraq Veterans Against the War) about Mejia's continued efforts to get his conviction overturned. (Mejia tells his story in which was released in May of this year. Briefly, Mejia had completed his contract with the US military. He was 'stop-lossed' and his contract was extended; however, Mejia was not a US citizen and the military's stop-loss/backdoor draft could not be used on non-citizens. The US military knew this and, in fact, confirmed to Mejia that he should be discharged immediately. He was not discharged.) Williams also speaks to war resister Kyle Snyder who, after serving in Iraq, self-checked out and went to Canada. Snyder explains his decision, "I saw a lot of things that were changing my mind about this war. I made a conscious choice that I couldn't live with myself if I stayed in Iraq. I felt it was evil, the things that were happening. We were not doing anything positive for the Iraqi people." Williams covers Snyder's attempt to return to the US and turn himself in at Fort Knox in October of last year and, when the US military screwed him over again, Snyder once again checking out. Snyder is back in Canada, married to a Canadian citizen (despite the attempts of the US military to prevent the marriage by having him arrested on his wedding day) and out of the reach of the US military. Snyder is not the only war resister in Canada are attempting to remain in Canada via being official recognized as refugees and granted. (Snyder's marriage should mean he is at no risk of being deported.) Williams explores the case of Jeremy Hinzman who, along with Brandon Hughey, became the first war resisters to go public about moving to Canada during this illegal war. Hinzman explains his decision to resist the Iraq War, "It was an illegal war. We did the right thing by deciding to fight it. Canada refused to fight in the war. To me that said they thought the war was illegal and immoral. When we came here, we knew that the chances were we may not be able to go back to America." Hinzman and Hughey have appealed their case to Canada's Supreme Court and a decision is expected to be handed down this month.
There is a growing movement of resistance within the US military which includes Derek Hess, Justin Cliburn, Timothy Richard, Robert Weiss, Phil McDowell, Steve Yoczik, Ross Spears, Zamesha Dominique, Jared Hood, James Burmeister, Eli Israel, Joshua Key, Ehren Watada, Terri Johnson, Carla Gomez, Luke Kamunen, Leif Kamunen, Leo Kamunen, Camilo Mejia, Kimberly Rivera, Dean Walcott, Linjamin Mull, Agustin Aguayo, Justin Colby, Marc Train, Abdullah Webster, Robert Zabala, Darrell Anderson, Kyle Snyder, Corey Glass, Jeremy Hinzman, Kevin Lee, Mark Wilkerson, Patrick Hart, Ricky Clousing, Ivan Brobeck, Aidan Delgado, Pablo Paredes, Carl Webb, Stephen Funk, Clifton Hicks, David Sanders, Dan Felushko,Brandon Hughey, Clifford Cornell, Joshua Despain, Joshua Casteel, Katherine Jashinski, Dale Bartell, Chris Teske, Matt Lowell, Jimmy Massey, Chris Capps, Tim Richard, Hart Viges, Michael Blake, Christopher Mogwai, Christian Kjar, Kyle Huwer, Vincent La Volpa, DeShawn Reed and Kevin Benderman. In total, forty-one US war resisters in Canada have applied for asylum.Information on war resistance within the military can be found at The Objector, The G.I. Rights Hotline [(877) 447-4487], Iraq Veterans Against the War and the War Resisters Support Campaign. Courage to Resist offers information on all public war resisters. Tom Joad maintains a list of known war resisters.
In the United States, Alan Greenspan has a new book coming out. As Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!) notes, the book is receiving attention for contents such as, "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." Greenspan was the chair of the US Federal Reserve until recently. He is also married to Andrea Mitchell of the network NBC which explains why the Today show (NBC) pimped his book like crazy this morning. Following an overly long soft and gauzy profile, Greenspan sat down across from Matt Lauer for an interview that consisted primarily of Lauer attempting to "emote" and suggesting Lauer needs his hearing -- if not his meds -- checked. In what passes for "news" on NBC, Lauer felt the need to raise the issue of the elderly Greenspan in a bathtub taking a bath. To make sure the point got across, Lauer then had to belabor it by insisting he did not want a mental image of that. Obviously Lauer did need such an image because he immediately brought up Andrea Mitchell being in the bathtub with Greenspan while still insisting he didn't want a mental image of that. When not wallowing in his own filth (or blaming the victims of the housing scandal), Lauer asked Greenspan about the Iraq statement or led him through what someone felt Greenspan needed to say. Lauer insisted Greenspan wasn't saying the illegal war was based on lies and Greenspan quickly agreed. In a court of law, it would have been termed "leading the witness." When Greenspan mentioned that he felt stability in the region was important, Lauer seized on that, cut off the discussion and stated it was about "stability." Prior to that, Lauer had led Greenspan to agree that the price of oil per barrell could be even higher were it not for the illegal war. Putting aside Lauer's need to shout loudly and emote as well as the fact that future Today show guests should be warned Lauer wants to dominate all interviews and guest should just say "yes" or "no" while Lauer tells them what they mean to say, the issue of "stability" is worth exploring -- so naturally Lauer didn't do that. "Stability" for who? "Stability" how? "Stability" defined?
Greenspan is an economist -- a bad one, but an economist none the less. What was the region being stabilized for? The answer can be found in Naomi Klein's new book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise Of Disaster Capitalism. Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!) explains the book as Klein's argument that, "The history of the contemporary free market was written in shocks. Some of the most infamous human rights violations of the past thirty-five years, which have tended to be viewed as sadistic acts carried out by anti-democratic regimes, were in fact either committed with the deliberate intent of terrorizing the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground for the introduction of radical free-market reforms." Today Amy Goodman interviewed Klein:
AMY GOODMAN: It's very good to have you with us. Why don't you start off by talking about exactly what you consider to be the shock doctrine?
NAOMI KLEIN: Well, the shock doctrine, like all doctrines, is a philosophy of power. It's a philosophy about how to achieve your political and economic goals. And this is a philosophy that holds that the best way, the best time, to push through radical free-market ideas is in the aftermath of a major shock. Now, that shock could be an economic meltdown. It could be a natural disaster. It could be a terrorist attack. It could be a war. But the idea, as you just saw in the film, is that these crises, these disasters, these shocks soften up whole societies. They discombobulate them. People lose their bearings. And a window opens up, just like the window in the interrogation chamber. And in that window, you can push through what economists call "economic shock therapy." That's sort of extreme country makeovers. It's everything all at once. It's not, you know, one reform here, one reform there, but the kind of radical change that we saw in Russia in the 1990s, that Paul Bremer tried to push through in Iraq after the invasion. So that's the shock doctrine.
And it's not claiming that right-wingers in a contemporary age are the only people who have ever exploited crisis, because this idea of exploiting a crisis is not unique to this particular ideology. Fascists have done it. State communists have done it. But this is an attempt to better understand the ideology that we live with, the dominant ideology of our time, which is unfettered market economics.
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise Of Disaster Capitalism is ambitious and compelling study of exactly what it takes to 'create' so-called 'free' markets (hint, a lot of violence) and is released tomorrow in the United States. In the book, Klein makes very clear that this is not a right-wing issue by exploring neoliberals and necons use of the shock doctrine to advance the interests of big business. That would be the "stability" Greenspan and Lauer kind-of-sort-of addressed on Today this morning. Another excerpt from Goodman's interview with Klein:
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about, Naomi Klein, the destruction of Iraq. Talk about "Shock and Awe," the shock economic therapy of Paul Bremer, the shock of torture, as well, putting them all together in Iraq.
NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah, well, as I said, you know, in Chile we see this triple-shock formula and torture as an enforcement of these policies. And I think we see the same triple-shock formula in Iraq. The first was the invasion, the shock-and-awe military invasion of Iraq. And if you read the manual, the military manual that explained the theory of shock and awe -- a lot of people think of it as just like a lot of bombs, a lot of missiles, but it's really a psychological doctrine, which in itself is a war crime, because it says very bluntly that during the first Gulf War the goal was to attack Saddam's military infrastructure, but under a shock-and-awe campaign, the target is the society writ large. That's a quote from the shock-and-awe doctrine.
Now, targeting societies writ large is collective punishment, which is a war crime. Militaries are not allowed to target societies writ large; they're only allowed to target military. So this was -- the doctrine is actually quite amazing, because it talks about -- it talks about sensory deprivation on a mass scale. It talks about a blinding, cutting off the senses, of a whole population. And we saw that during the invasion, the lights going out, cutting off of all communication, and the phones going out, and then the looting, which I don't actually believe was part of the strategy, but I think doing nothing in some ways was part of the strategy, because, of course, we know that there were all kinds of warnings that the museums and libraries needed to be protected and no action was taken. And then you had the famous statement from Donald Rumsfeld when he was confronted with this: "Stuff happens."
So, it was, I think -- it was this idea that because the goal was, in New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman's famous phrase, not nation-building, but "nation-creating," you know, which is an extraordinarily violent idea, if you stop and think about what it means to create a nation in a nation that already exists, something has to happen to the nation that was already there, and we're talking about a culture as old as civilization. So I think that because there was this idea that we were starting from scratch and this idea that is often portrayed, you know, in the US media as idealistic, of wanting to build a model nation in the heart of the Arab world that would spread to neighboring countries and lead to an opening up, this idea of building a model nation is -- you know, it has all kinds of colonial echoes. It really can't be done without some kind of a cleansing. And so, I think that the ease, the comfort level with the looting, with the erasing of Iraq's history, has to be seen within that vision of, OK, well, we're starting over from scratch. So anything that's already there is really just getting in the way. So if it's loaded onto trucks and it's sold in Syria and Jordan, that sort of just makes the job easier. And so, I think we saw that on many, many levels.
In The Shock Doctrine: The Rise Of Disaster Capitalism, Klein explains the effect the attacks on phone systems had:
On the night of March 28, 2003, as U.S. troops drew closer to Baghdad, the ministry of communication was bombed and set ablaze, as were four Baghdad telephone exchanges, with massive bunker-busters, cutting off millions of phone across the city. The targeting of the phone exchanges continued -- twelve in total -- until by April 2, there was barely a phone working in all of Baghdad. During the same assault, television and radio transmitters were also hit, making it impossible for families in Baghdad, huddling in their homes, to pick up even a weak signal carrying news of what was going on outside their doors.
Many Iraqis say that the shredding of their phone system was the most psychologically wrenching part of the air attack. The combination of hearing and feeling bombs going off everywhere while being unable to call a few blocks away to find out if loved ones were alive, or to reassure terrified relatives living abroad, was pure torment. Journalists based in Baghdad were swarmed by desperate local residents begging for a few moments with their satellite phones or pressing numbers into the reporters' hands along with pleas to call a brother or an uncle in London or Baltimore.
Again, the book comes out tomorrow. NYC residents can purchase it tonight at a book launching Klein will be attending with Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!) acting as moderator at the New York Soceity for Ethical Culture, 2 West 64th Street." (The book is discussed at The Third Estate Sunday Review.)
The shock of violence is not limited to outside the United States. Saturday a demonstration took place in DC and police arrested a number of peace demonstrators. However, a man was attacked by a right-wing mob and there were no arrests. Carlos Arrendo's son Alex died in the illegal war August 25, 2004. Among the demonstrations he has taken place in is traveling with a flag draped coffin bearing photos of his son around the country. He was in DC to take part in the peace demonstration. As Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!) explained today, "a pro-war supporter tried to rip a photo of Carlos' son from the coffin. When Carlos tried to save the photograph, he said a group of pro-war activists attacked him." Arrendondo explains, "I was assaulted by a group of pro-war people. They come into the ground, and they kicked me and punched me. As a citizen of this country, it's my duty and my responsibility to participate. As a father, who I lost my son in Iraq, I got to honor my son." Joe Tresh (Joe Tresh's Washington ) reports, "Arredondo was subsequently attacked by counter-demonstrators until the scene was disbursed by the police." Though war lovers who physically attack a person aren't arrested, a number of peace demonstrators were. (Which recalls the Crawford, Texas incident where the crosses placed at Camp Casey were run over.) Amy Branham (Amy's head) notes that peace activists numbered 100,000 and that 160 to 200 of them were reported arrested. A.N.S.W.E.R. notes the sponsors of the action included: "The ANSWER Coalition; Ramsey Clark; Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation; USLAW; Mounzer Sleiman, Vice Chair, National Council of Arab Americans; Cindy Sheehan; Camp Casey Peace Institute; Cynthia McKinney; Veterans for Peace (National); Garett Reppenhagen, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Chair of Board of Directors; Tina Richards, CEO of Grassroots America; Rev. Lenox Yearwood, CEO of Hip Hop Caucus; Code Pink; Father Roy Bourgeois and Eric LeCompte, School of Americas Watch; Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition; Kevin Zeese, Democracy Rising; Navy Petty Officer Jonathan Hutto, co-founder Appeal for Redress; Liam Madden, Pres., Boston Chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War and co-founder of Appeal for Redress; Malik Rahim, founder of Common Ground Collective, New Orleans; Howard Zinn, Author and Historian; Carlos & Melida Arredondo, Gold Star Families for Peace; Rev. Graylan Hagler, Ministers for Racial, Social and Economic Justice; Latino Movement USA; Hermandad Mexicana Nacional; Ron Kovic, Vietnam Veteran, author, Born on the 4th of July; Leonard Weinglass, Cuban 5 attorney; Michael Berg; National Lawyers Guild; Father Luis Barrios, Iglesia de San Romero de las Americas - UCC; World Can't Wait; Frank Velgara, ProLibertad Freedom Campaign; Pam Africa, International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal." Tina Marie Macias and Jordy Yager (Los Angeles Times) report that among the speakers were Cindy Sheehan, Ramsey Clark and Ralph Nader, that Iraq Veterans Against the War staged the die-in (which the paper estimates contained 5,000 participants), that the police used pepper spray on demonstrators (but not on the attackers of Carlos) and quote San Gabriel UCLA student Jessica Ramirez explaining why she traveled to DC to participate, "It's about doing something that you believe in." Michelle Boortstein, V. Dion Haynes and Allison Klein (Washington Post) report that "chemical spray" was used against the activists and quote IVAW's Geoff Millard (who was among those arrested) declaring, "It's time for the peace movement to take the next step past protest and to resistance." Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!) explained, "The arrests occurred when protesters started climbing over a barricade at the foot of the steps to the Capitol. Police sprayed at least two people with chemicals. Estimates that nearly 100,000 people attended the rally and march. Student protester Jacob Berger said he traveled to Washington from New York where he attends Columbia University: 'The large problem today is apathy. Most people feel like they can't make a change in this world. They feel like its too big and we are here to prove that we can change and we need to get that sort of rallying together like the people did back in Vietnam and that's what got us out of Vietnam and that's what we are trying to do to get out of Iraq'." The Los Angeles Times quotes IVAW's Garett Reppenhagen explaining, "The Iraqi people do not see us as peacemakers. They see us as occupiers and murderers."
Turning to the issue of violence, Sahar Issa (McClatchy Newspapers) reported Sunday that a Baghdad shooting (by private contractors) killed 9 Iraqi civilians and left fifteen more wounded. Later on Sunday, CNN reported, "In the Baghdad gun battle, which was between security forces and unidentified gunmen, eight people were killed and 14 wounded, most of them civilians, an Interior Ministry official said. Details were sketchy, but the official said witnesses told police that the security forces involved appeared to be Westerners driving sport utility vehicles, which are usually used by Western companies. The clash occurred near Nisoor square, in western Baghdad. CBS and AP report that Abdul-Karim Khalaf, spokesperson for the Interior Ministry, announced "it was pulling the license of an American security firm allegedly involved in the fatal shooting of civilians during an attack on a U.S. State Department motorcade in Baghdad," that "it would prosecute any foreign contractors found to have used excessive force" in the slaughter (eight dead, 13 wounded) and they "have canceled the liscense of Blcakwater and prevented them from working all over Iraqi territory." The news was addressed today on Democracy Now!:
AMY GOODMAN: We have this breaking news out of Iraq today: The Iraqi government says it's pulling the license of the US security company Blackwater over its involvement in a fatal shooting in Baghdad on Sunday. Interior Ministry spokesperson Abdul-Karim Khalaf said eight civilians were killed and thirteen wounded, when security contractors believed to be working for Blackwater USA opened fire in a predominantly Sunni neighborhood of western Baghdad. Khalaf said, "We have canceled the license of Blackwater and prevented them from working all over Iraqi territory. We will also refer those involved to Iraqi judicial authorities." It was not immediately clear if the measure against Blackwater is intended to be temporary or permanent. Naomi Klein, take it from there.
NAOMI KLEIN: Well, that's an extraordinary piece of news. I mean, this is really the first time that one of these mercenary firms may actually be held accountable. You know, as Jeremy Scahill has written in his incredible book Blackwater: The Rise of the [World's] Most Powerful Mercenary Army, the real problem is, there haven't been prosecutions. These companies work in this absolute gray zone, and, you know, they're either boy scouts and nothing has going wrong, which completely doesn't mesh with what we know about the way they're behaving in Iraq and all of the sort of videos that we've seen online of just target practice on Iraqi civilians, or the lawlessness and the immunity in which they work has protected them. So, you know, if this is -- if the Iraqi government is actually going to kick Blackwater out of Iraq, it could really be a turning point in terms of pulling these companies into the law and questioning the whole premise of why this level of privatization and lawlessness has been allowed to take place.
The mercenary corportation Blackwater has not only made a lot of money in Iraq, it's had a lot of friends in the US White House (and members of Congress who looked the other way). So it's little surprise that Aseel Kami (Reuters) reports US Secretary of State and Anger Condi Rice plans a firm phone call to puppet of the occupation Nouri al-Maliki in which she will "make it clear" that the US is "investigating this incident" -- no doubt in the usual look-the-other-way manner the US government has "investigated" other incidents. No word on whether she plans to use haul her favorite false line out of mothballs, "No one could have guessed . . ."
In some of today's reported violence . . .
Bombings?
Laith Hammoudi (McClatchy Newspapers) reports five (two of which were police officers) Iraqis were wounded in a Baghdad bombing earlier this morning, while a noon Baghdad bombing injured three more and a Baghdad car bombing claimed 3 lives (eight more wounded). Reuters notes, "Ikhlas al-Shimari, a female member of the Kut governing council, escaped unhurt from a bomb attack on her house overnight in the city of Kut, 170 km (100 miles) southeast of Baghdad, police said" and that 10 Iraqi soldiers were wounded in a Hilla bombing of their base "overnight."
Shootings?
Laith Hammoudi (McClatchy Newspapers) reports assailants wounded a person in Hawaija, shot dead Monther Saad Elyan who was enroute to Hawija, shot dead "a Kurdish citizen" in Mosul, and that Iraqi police officer, Brig. Gen. Edan Jaber Kareem was targeted by snipers today but survived in Basra.
Corpses?
Laith Hammoudi (McClatchy Newspapers) reports 11 corpses were discovered in Baghdad today.
Staying with the issue of the deaths, Friday (in most markets), FAIR's Counterspin began airing and one of the guests was Phyllis Bennis who is receiving criticism for a report co-authored with Eric Leaver on behalf of United for Peace and Justice that undercounts the Iraqi dead: the authors present a range for the number of deaths -- their "low" is the Iraqi Body Count figure from this month and their "high" is "600,000 plus" based on the lower of two figures from last year's Lancet study which ended their tally in July 2006, over 14 months prior to when Bennis and Leaver wrote their so-called "Iraq: People's Report". This being CounterSpin, naturally the issue of the undercount was not addressed because, while CounterSpin feels there are standards for mainstream media, they regularly look the other way when 'big' independent media has no standards. This is how they could infamously praise an article in The Nation magazine that consisted solely of the testimonies of US service members who had been stationed in Iraq as telling the story of "the impact on Iraqis". It takes a lot of stupidity and xenophobia to declare a story told by foreigners as being the story of the people of Iraq. It's the sort of thing that, had the mainstream media pulled such a stunt, FAIR, Extra! and CounterSpin would have cried foul over loudly. Despite the fact that while reviewing mainstream coverage at the start of the show, co-hosts Janine Jackson and Steve Rendall castigated the US mainstream media's coverage noting that the New York Times appears to send the message that some "deaths matter more than other" and taking to task a columnist at The Washington Post because he "can't even get the numbers right". This was the preface to the Phyllis Bennis interview and, again, both she and the hosts of the program avoided the very real criticism of Bennis' undercounting the Iraqi dead which did not begin with the report she co-authored for United for Peace and Justice. Mainstream media is now having a good laugh at CounterSpin which brought it upon itself by deciding to lease a glass house last Friday (the show was taped on Thursday). Had the show been taped on Friday, they might have had to deal with the undercount since (as noted in Friday's snapshot), not only does Just Foreign Policy place the estimate of Iraqis killed in the illegal war at well over a million (not "600,000 plus"), so does a new study by England's Opinion Research Business which Tina Susman (Los Angeles Times) reported on Friday.
Whether because the hosts themselves didn't know or because they are uncomfortably correcting their own, they allowed Phyllis Bennis to note that Tommy Franks said the US doesn't do body counts (Rendall supplised the name Tommy Franks for Bennis) and then muse publicly over where the numbers Gen. David Petraeus provided to Congress (in charts) throughout last week came from? Bennis mused, "Now apparently they're making body counts. So nobody has asked them, 'Excuse me, general, when did you start doing body counts?' From the beginning you told us 'We don't do bodycounts.' When did that begin? When do these figures start from?" Apparently not content to have students chanting "Get your facts right or get off the stage!" over her undercounting, Bennis now needed to underscore how uninformed she actually is as to the illegal war. If the hosts knew any better, they weren't assisting. So everyone had ass on their face.
Like most of independent media, Bennis and FAIR (in all it's variations) dumped Iraq like a hot potato (or left over mashed potatoes) in the summer of 2006. They were geared up (as were most independent media outlets and voices) for the two big topics (there was no planning meeting that determined this -- it's just the incestuous nature of most independent media that they all ended up on the same page): the elections in Mexico and Israel in wack-mode again. While they churned out page after page and broadcast after broadcast on those two topics they missed out on reality. Sabrina Tavernise had already co-written an article (for the New York Times) at the end of 2005 that mentioned the US military was keeping track of some Iraq deaths.
While the hosts sat silent (or didn't know any better), Bennis mused as to why no one in the press had asked about this count and why they hadn't asked when the count was started?
From the June 26, 2006 Iraq snapshot: "In what might get the most attention today, reporting from Baghdad, Nancy A. Youssef (Knight Ritter) breaks the news that the United States now admits to keeping some figures on Iraqis who have died during the illegal war. Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli tells Youssef that 'the number of civilian dead and wounded' via US troops 'is an important measurement.' Chiarelli reveals that "he reviews the figures daily.' The US government has denied that any figures were being kept." Well, obviously I was wrong. While we cited that report repeatedly in other snapshots, independent media couldn't make the time for it because Iraq was off the media radar (as Molly Ivins and Jimmy Breslin would note). Knight-Ridder is, of course, now McClatchyNewspapers. In the article, Youssef demonstrated that she asked the question Bennis alleges the press has refused to ask. The US military maintained to Youssef they began keeping a body count in July of 2005. The link to the article no longer works (not a surprise with any daily paper); however, the story can be found here. From Youssef's June 21, 2006 article:
U.S. officials previously have said they don't keep track of civilian causalities, and Iraqi officials stopped releasing numbers of U.S.-caused casualties after Knight Ridder reported in September 2004 that the Iraqi Ministry of Health had attributed more than twice as many civilian deaths to the actions of U.S. forces than to "terrorist" attacks during the period from June 2004 to September 2004.
Chiarelli declined to release the numbers, but he said that U.S. soldiers are killing and injuring fewer Iraqi civilians this year in so-called "escalation of force" incidents at checkpoints and near convoys than they did in July of last year, when officials first started tracking the statistic.
If the 'media analysts' at FAIR want to continue to trash their own reputations, have at it. Laughter is the key characteristic today in the offices of many they've taken to task in the past over news of the Friday broadcast. If Phyllis Bennis wants to make sport of Alexander Cockburn (in a heavily reposted, snide commentary that was posed at various sites -- none of which bothered to post Cockburn's original column or his own response to Bennis), possibly she should work on getting her facts right. That is, after all, the job of an analyst. Before she next corrects another person -- be it Cockburn or anyone else -- she needs to hunker down with all the Iraqi coverage she missed while she joined others in the alternative landscape in dropping Iraq and traveloguing to other regions. She and the hosts of CounterSpin made asses of themselves on Friday and, yes, Phyllis, the mainstream press has asked that question, has published the answer and anyone who cares seriously about ending the illegal war is damn well aware of that. Bennis was wrong, CounterSpin included misinformation in the program. It is now incumbent upon CounterSpin to issue a correction to the error they broadcast on Friday. (But as one friend at ABC News pointed out, "They never do. It's always do as I say not as I do with them.")
Finally, Sally Field won the best actress Emmy last night (in the drama category) and the ceremonies were broadcast on Fox . . . although Field was among the censored. The broadcast was on tape delay which enabled them to censor other words but include the rest of the remarks. So, for example, TV audiences heard Ray Romano exclaim that "Fraiser is [bleeped] my wife." The verb in the sentence was pulled. As Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!) noted today, Fox viewers heard Sally Field declare, 'If mothers ruled the world, there would be no ____." Were this not a case of political censorship, the Fox network would have done as they did with Romano and removed the word they found objectionable allowing viewers to hear Field declare, "Let's face it, If mothers ruled the world there would be no [bleeped] wars in the first place." AP reports Field's take on the censorship, "Oh well. I've been there before. Well, good. I don't care. I have no comment other than, oh well. I said what I wanted to say. I wanted to pay homage to the mothers of the world, and let their work be seen and valued."
Thousands of protesters marched from the White House to the Capitol on Saturday to demand an end to the war in Iraq. Several women’s groups, including CODEPINK and the National Congress of Black Women, sponsored a women’s convergence earlier in the day before joining the larger rally at the White House before the march. Addressing the very large crowd were Medea Benjamin of CODEPINK, Cindy Sheehan, Ralph Nader, and many others.
The march was mostly peaceful, but protestors were arrested after hundreds laid on the ground in a "die in." The Washington Post reports 189 protestors were arrested, including 10 who, according to the march’s organizers, were veterans of the war.
now i'm not big on online activism and don't push most of that stuff. i will note Free Sami Al-Haj because (a) i do think it will have an impact, (b) i do think he needs to be freed and (c) elaine mentioned this saturday morning and all she has to do is ask. c.i. wrote about the petition and sami al-haji much better than i can so read c.i.'s thing on it from saturday.
i'm so tired. kat said 'be lazy like me' (she's not lazy) 'and just take links from the third estate.' but i grabbed from mike.
The Third Estate Sunday Review's Dona, Jess, Ty, Ava and Jim,
Betty of Thomas Friedman Is a Great Man,
C.I. of The Common Ills and The Third Estate Sunday Review,
Kat of Kat's Korner (of The Common Ills),
Cedric of Cedric's Big Mix,
Mike of Mikey Likes It!,
Elaine of Like Maria Said Paz,
Trina's Trina's Kitchen,
and Wally of The Daily Jot
all were in d.c. and i may not mention all (because i'm tired!) but the sentiment and spirit inclues all.
let me talk a little about saturday. due to the crackdown by the d.c. police, we left the baby with a relative of flyboy's for the demonstration and boy was i glad we did. i didn't get sprayed but i swear that is what made dona so sick. she thinks it was a virus. i disagree. she felt sick after the demonstration and it only got worse. she was rubbing her eyes throughout saturday and by late night was throwing up. she's fine now, but i do believe that's why she's sick. both she and c.i. were near the spraying and c.i. had a killer headache. c.i. gets migraines - has for years - they are at the base of the back of the head. this was a top of the head all the way down thing and i kept pointing out, 'that is not 1 of your migraines.' i don't know what the police were using. some reports say pepper spray some say chemical spray. i think it was uncalled for regardless and that a lot of people who weren't even doing anything related to the supposed 'reason' for spraying got sprayed.
c.i. threw up once right after the demonstration and that's the other reason i think it was the spraying. stuff cycles through c.i. quickly. a 24 hour flu is a 6 hour 1. and c.i.'s always bash on through regardless. but i think both of them - c.i. and dona - were sick because of the spraying. (and no pills took away the migraine. c.i. had it until late tonight - non-stop from the demonstration.)
i was really impressed with the huge turnout. as you probably noticed, some organizations elected to sit out and not promote the action.
even so, even without them, the turnout was huge. i would go with 100,000 but note that it could have been more. it was packed.
i thought the 'die-in' made the point beautifully. in the snapshot, c.i. talks about what happened to carlos (beat up by right-wingers attempting to desecrate his son's coffin). i didn't even know about that at the time. the 1st i heard about it was early sunday morning, when c.i. got off the phone and mentioned it while we were working on the edition for third. we were all shocked.
cindy sheehan spoke beautifully and i also loved medea benjamin's speech. i couldn't hear many of the other speakers that well. (including nader. i'm sure he spoke brilliantly but i couldn't hear him, he cut in an out where i was standing.) in my area, i didn't even realize it was ramsey clark speaking. i couldn't hear the intro or the speech. afterward, kat would tell me about ramsey's speech and that was when i realized he was 1 of the 1s i couldn't hear. (i did recognize nader.)
maria did a great job editing down the interviews. i believe francisco and miguel helped but i know maria worked hard on it. (their newsletter, el espirito.) we were so far behind and so tired (before dona even got sick) that we decided to pull together the comments we got from others participating and just hand it over raw to maria and let her shape it while we focused on trying to get out the edition of the third estate sunday review. in the middle of a feature, dona started throwing up. i wasn't grossed out - please i deal with spit up and dirty diapers all day these days - but i was shocked. she was looking sick progressively as the day ran on. after people got that taken care of and got her into bed, c.i. declared a two-hour break. jim either co-declared it or went along with it, i don't remember. i was too busy insisting to every 1, 'dona's sick because of the spraying.' but jim wrote a quick note and every 1 went to sleep.
except jim and c.i. who stayed up taking care of dona. i didn't realize she wasn't asleep or i would've helped them. mike woke me up after the nap and goes 'listen'. jim and c.i. were singing to dona to help her finally fall to sleep. (they sang so well together! and c.i. was playing jess' guitar.) by the time i was showered, sipping a cup of coffee and back with the gang, dona was asleep and we worked hard on finishing the edition. dona woke up near the end (in time for the editorial and to add input to other things) but she still looked a little shaky. she didn't want to drink anything - because of the natural fear that if you eat or consume liquids, you'll start throwing up again. but c.i. and elaine insisted that she drink a lot of water. as she did, she started looking a lot better.
no 1 will ever convince me that it wasn't the spraying that made her sick.
and the point to be made there is that the police assaulted protestors. they can say 'people were climbing barricades.' i wasn't close enough to see. i could see dona and c.i. and i knew they weren't climbing. when they started spraying, c.i. pushed tracey hard.
that's ruth's granddaughter. i thought tracey was going to fall to the ground! she was right next to c.i. and c.i. was trying to get her away from the spraying. (tracey said c.i. yelled 'go' and pushed.) tracey didn't get sick and she also didn't get sprayed and wasn't near it (she said, 'when c.i. shoved me and said 'go' i got!')
that was just police brutality and nothing will ever convince me it was anything else.
it's interesting that carlos can be attacked and his attackers not only do not get sprayed, they don't get arrested but the police can spray demonstrators.
if - IF - any 1 was climbing barricades, that was no reason to attack a crowd. the fact that people who weren't doing what the police claimed prompted the spraying demonstrates how indiscrimately force was used. spraying a crowd of people is force.
i imagine we'll see more attacks like that on the people. it's really the only hope there is to continue the illegal war.
let's close with c.i.'s 'Iraq snapshot' (which kat says she's talking about in her post tonight):
Monday, September 17, 2007. Chaos and violence continue, Ian Williams examines war resistance, Phyllis Bennis and the hosts of CounterSpin stage a contest to determine who can be the most useless/uninformed, NBC's Matt Lauer uses his outdoor voice on Alan Greenspan, Blackwater shoots up more Iraqi citizens, and more.
Starting with war resistance. Nation contributor Ian Williams explores the topic of war resistance and, to no surprise, does so elsewhere. Williams (OpEdNews) addresses both the contemporary history of this illegal war as well as exploring the resistance during the Vietnam era. With war resister Pablo Paredes, Williams explores the issue of the numbers and the US military's refusal to release a full count as well as the fact that though the system is supposed to list a service member as AWOL automatically after 30 days, that is still not the case. (Which goes to the system problems and also benefits the US military by allowing for an undercount.) Williams speaks with war resister Camilo Mejia (now the chair of Iraq Veterans Against the War) about Mejia's continued efforts to get his conviction overturned. (Mejia tells his story in which was released in May of this year. Briefly, Mejia had completed his contract with the US military. He was 'stop-lossed' and his contract was extended; however, Mejia was not a US citizen and the military's stop-loss/backdoor draft could not be used on non-citizens. The US military knew this and, in fact, confirmed to Mejia that he should be discharged immediately. He was not discharged.) Williams also speaks to war resister Kyle Snyder who, after serving in Iraq, self-checked out and went to Canada. Snyder explains his decision, "I saw a lot of things that were changing my mind about this war. I made a conscious choice that I couldn't live with myself if I stayed in Iraq. I felt it was evil, the things that were happening. We were not doing anything positive for the Iraqi people." Williams covers Snyder's attempt to return to the US and turn himself in at Fort Knox in October of last year and, when the US military screwed him over again, Snyder once again checking out. Snyder is back in Canada, married to a Canadian citizen (despite the attempts of the US military to prevent the marriage by having him arrested on his wedding day) and out of the reach of the US military. Snyder is not the only war resister in Canada are attempting to remain in Canada via being official recognized as refugees and granted. (Snyder's marriage should mean he is at no risk of being deported.) Williams explores the case of Jeremy Hinzman who, along with Brandon Hughey, became the first war resisters to go public about moving to Canada during this illegal war. Hinzman explains his decision to resist the Iraq War, "It was an illegal war. We did the right thing by deciding to fight it. Canada refused to fight in the war. To me that said they thought the war was illegal and immoral. When we came here, we knew that the chances were we may not be able to go back to America." Hinzman and Hughey have appealed their case to Canada's Supreme Court and a decision is expected to be handed down this month.
There is a growing movement of resistance within the US military which includes Derek Hess, Justin Cliburn, Timothy Richard, Robert Weiss, Phil McDowell, Steve Yoczik, Ross Spears, Zamesha Dominique, Jared Hood, James Burmeister, Eli Israel, Joshua Key, Ehren Watada, Terri Johnson, Carla Gomez, Luke Kamunen, Leif Kamunen, Leo Kamunen, Camilo Mejia, Kimberly Rivera, Dean Walcott, Linjamin Mull, Agustin Aguayo, Justin Colby, Marc Train, Abdullah Webster, Robert Zabala, Darrell Anderson, Kyle Snyder, Corey Glass, Jeremy Hinzman, Kevin Lee, Mark Wilkerson, Patrick Hart, Ricky Clousing, Ivan Brobeck, Aidan Delgado, Pablo Paredes, Carl Webb, Stephen Funk, Clifton Hicks, David Sanders, Dan Felushko,Brandon Hughey, Clifford Cornell, Joshua Despain, Joshua Casteel, Katherine Jashinski, Dale Bartell, Chris Teske, Matt Lowell, Jimmy Massey, Chris Capps, Tim Richard, Hart Viges, Michael Blake, Christopher Mogwai, Christian Kjar, Kyle Huwer, Vincent La Volpa, DeShawn Reed and Kevin Benderman. In total, forty-one US war resisters in Canada have applied for asylum.Information on war resistance within the military can be found at The Objector, The G.I. Rights Hotline [(877) 447-4487], Iraq Veterans Against the War and the War Resisters Support Campaign. Courage to Resist offers information on all public war resisters. Tom Joad maintains a list of known war resisters.
In the United States, Alan Greenspan has a new book coming out. As Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!) notes, the book is receiving attention for contents such as, "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." Greenspan was the chair of the US Federal Reserve until recently. He is also married to Andrea Mitchell of the network NBC which explains why the Today show (NBC) pimped his book like crazy this morning. Following an overly long soft and gauzy profile, Greenspan sat down across from Matt Lauer for an interview that consisted primarily of Lauer attempting to "emote" and suggesting Lauer needs his hearing -- if not his meds -- checked. In what passes for "news" on NBC, Lauer felt the need to raise the issue of the elderly Greenspan in a bathtub taking a bath. To make sure the point got across, Lauer then had to belabor it by insisting he did not want a mental image of that. Obviously Lauer did need such an image because he immediately brought up Andrea Mitchell being in the bathtub with Greenspan while still insisting he didn't want a mental image of that. When not wallowing in his own filth (or blaming the victims of the housing scandal), Lauer asked Greenspan about the Iraq statement or led him through what someone felt Greenspan needed to say. Lauer insisted Greenspan wasn't saying the illegal war was based on lies and Greenspan quickly agreed. In a court of law, it would have been termed "leading the witness." When Greenspan mentioned that he felt stability in the region was important, Lauer seized on that, cut off the discussion and stated it was about "stability." Prior to that, Lauer had led Greenspan to agree that the price of oil per barrell could be even higher were it not for the illegal war. Putting aside Lauer's need to shout loudly and emote as well as the fact that future Today show guests should be warned Lauer wants to dominate all interviews and guest should just say "yes" or "no" while Lauer tells them what they mean to say, the issue of "stability" is worth exploring -- so naturally Lauer didn't do that. "Stability" for who? "Stability" how? "Stability" defined?
Greenspan is an economist -- a bad one, but an economist none the less. What was the region being stabilized for? The answer can be found in Naomi Klein's new book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise Of Disaster Capitalism. Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!) explains the book as Klein's argument that, "The history of the contemporary free market was written in shocks. Some of the most infamous human rights violations of the past thirty-five years, which have tended to be viewed as sadistic acts carried out by anti-democratic regimes, were in fact either committed with the deliberate intent of terrorizing the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground for the introduction of radical free-market reforms." Today Amy Goodman interviewed Klein:
AMY GOODMAN: It's very good to have you with us. Why don't you start off by talking about exactly what you consider to be the shock doctrine?
NAOMI KLEIN: Well, the shock doctrine, like all doctrines, is a philosophy of power. It's a philosophy about how to achieve your political and economic goals. And this is a philosophy that holds that the best way, the best time, to push through radical free-market ideas is in the aftermath of a major shock. Now, that shock could be an economic meltdown. It could be a natural disaster. It could be a terrorist attack. It could be a war. But the idea, as you just saw in the film, is that these crises, these disasters, these shocks soften up whole societies. They discombobulate them. People lose their bearings. And a window opens up, just like the window in the interrogation chamber. And in that window, you can push through what economists call "economic shock therapy." That's sort of extreme country makeovers. It's everything all at once. It's not, you know, one reform here, one reform there, but the kind of radical change that we saw in Russia in the 1990s, that Paul Bremer tried to push through in Iraq after the invasion. So that's the shock doctrine.
And it's not claiming that right-wingers in a contemporary age are the only people who have ever exploited crisis, because this idea of exploiting a crisis is not unique to this particular ideology. Fascists have done it. State communists have done it. But this is an attempt to better understand the ideology that we live with, the dominant ideology of our time, which is unfettered market economics.
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise Of Disaster Capitalism is ambitious and compelling study of exactly what it takes to 'create' so-called 'free' markets (hint, a lot of violence) and is released tomorrow in the United States. In the book, Klein makes very clear that this is not a right-wing issue by exploring neoliberals and necons use of the shock doctrine to advance the interests of big business. That would be the "stability" Greenspan and Lauer kind-of-sort-of addressed on Today this morning. Another excerpt from Goodman's interview with Klein:
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about, Naomi Klein, the destruction of Iraq. Talk about "Shock and Awe," the shock economic therapy of Paul Bremer, the shock of torture, as well, putting them all together in Iraq.
NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah, well, as I said, you know, in Chile we see this triple-shock formula and torture as an enforcement of these policies. And I think we see the same triple-shock formula in Iraq. The first was the invasion, the shock-and-awe military invasion of Iraq. And if you read the manual, the military manual that explained the theory of shock and awe -- a lot of people think of it as just like a lot of bombs, a lot of missiles, but it's really a psychological doctrine, which in itself is a war crime, because it says very bluntly that during the first Gulf War the goal was to attack Saddam's military infrastructure, but under a shock-and-awe campaign, the target is the society writ large. That's a quote from the shock-and-awe doctrine.
Now, targeting societies writ large is collective punishment, which is a war crime. Militaries are not allowed to target societies writ large; they're only allowed to target military. So this was -- the doctrine is actually quite amazing, because it talks about -- it talks about sensory deprivation on a mass scale. It talks about a blinding, cutting off the senses, of a whole population. And we saw that during the invasion, the lights going out, cutting off of all communication, and the phones going out, and then the looting, which I don't actually believe was part of the strategy, but I think doing nothing in some ways was part of the strategy, because, of course, we know that there were all kinds of warnings that the museums and libraries needed to be protected and no action was taken. And then you had the famous statement from Donald Rumsfeld when he was confronted with this: "Stuff happens."
So, it was, I think -- it was this idea that because the goal was, in New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman's famous phrase, not nation-building, but "nation-creating," you know, which is an extraordinarily violent idea, if you stop and think about what it means to create a nation in a nation that already exists, something has to happen to the nation that was already there, and we're talking about a culture as old as civilization. So I think that because there was this idea that we were starting from scratch and this idea that is often portrayed, you know, in the US media as idealistic, of wanting to build a model nation in the heart of the Arab world that would spread to neighboring countries and lead to an opening up, this idea of building a model nation is -- you know, it has all kinds of colonial echoes. It really can't be done without some kind of a cleansing. And so, I think that the ease, the comfort level with the looting, with the erasing of Iraq's history, has to be seen within that vision of, OK, well, we're starting over from scratch. So anything that's already there is really just getting in the way. So if it's loaded onto trucks and it's sold in Syria and Jordan, that sort of just makes the job easier. And so, I think we saw that on many, many levels.
In The Shock Doctrine: The Rise Of Disaster Capitalism, Klein explains the effect the attacks on phone systems had:
On the night of March 28, 2003, as U.S. troops drew closer to Baghdad, the ministry of communication was bombed and set ablaze, as were four Baghdad telephone exchanges, with massive bunker-busters, cutting off millions of phone across the city. The targeting of the phone exchanges continued -- twelve in total -- until by April 2, there was barely a phone working in all of Baghdad. During the same assault, television and radio transmitters were also hit, making it impossible for families in Baghdad, huddling in their homes, to pick up even a weak signal carrying news of what was going on outside their doors.
Many Iraqis say that the shredding of their phone system was the most psychologically wrenching part of the air attack. The combination of hearing and feeling bombs going off everywhere while being unable to call a few blocks away to find out if loved ones were alive, or to reassure terrified relatives living abroad, was pure torment. Journalists based in Baghdad were swarmed by desperate local residents begging for a few moments with their satellite phones or pressing numbers into the reporters' hands along with pleas to call a brother or an uncle in London or Baltimore.
Again, the book comes out tomorrow. NYC residents can purchase it tonight at a book launching Klein will be attending with Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!) acting as moderator at the New York Soceity for Ethical Culture, 2 West 64th Street." (The book is discussed at The Third Estate Sunday Review.)
The shock of violence is not limited to outside the United States. Saturday a demonstration took place in DC and police arrested a number of peace demonstrators. However, a man was attacked by a right-wing mob and there were no arrests. Carlos Arrendo's son Alex died in the illegal war August 25, 2004. Among the demonstrations he has taken place in is traveling with a flag draped coffin bearing photos of his son around the country. He was in DC to take part in the peace demonstration. As Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!) explained today, "a pro-war supporter tried to rip a photo of Carlos' son from the coffin. When Carlos tried to save the photograph, he said a group of pro-war activists attacked him." Arrendondo explains, "I was assaulted by a group of pro-war people. They come into the ground, and they kicked me and punched me. As a citizen of this country, it's my duty and my responsibility to participate. As a father, who I lost my son in Iraq, I got to honor my son." Joe Tresh (Joe Tresh's Washington ) reports, "Arredondo was subsequently attacked by counter-demonstrators until the scene was disbursed by the police." Though war lovers who physically attack a person aren't arrested, a number of peace demonstrators were. (Which recalls the Crawford, Texas incident where the crosses placed at Camp Casey were run over.) Amy Branham (Amy's head) notes that peace activists numbered 100,000 and that 160 to 200 of them were reported arrested. A.N.S.W.E.R. notes the sponsors of the action included: "The ANSWER Coalition; Ramsey Clark; Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation; USLAW; Mounzer Sleiman, Vice Chair, National Council of Arab Americans; Cindy Sheehan; Camp Casey Peace Institute; Cynthia McKinney; Veterans for Peace (National); Garett Reppenhagen, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Chair of Board of Directors; Tina Richards, CEO of Grassroots America; Rev. Lenox Yearwood, CEO of Hip Hop Caucus; Code Pink; Father Roy Bourgeois and Eric LeCompte, School of Americas Watch; Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition; Kevin Zeese, Democracy Rising; Navy Petty Officer Jonathan Hutto, co-founder Appeal for Redress; Liam Madden, Pres., Boston Chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War and co-founder of Appeal for Redress; Malik Rahim, founder of Common Ground Collective, New Orleans; Howard Zinn, Author and Historian; Carlos & Melida Arredondo, Gold Star Families for Peace; Rev. Graylan Hagler, Ministers for Racial, Social and Economic Justice; Latino Movement USA; Hermandad Mexicana Nacional; Ron Kovic, Vietnam Veteran, author, Born on the 4th of July; Leonard Weinglass, Cuban 5 attorney; Michael Berg; National Lawyers Guild; Father Luis Barrios, Iglesia de San Romero de las Americas - UCC; World Can't Wait; Frank Velgara, ProLibertad Freedom Campaign; Pam Africa, International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal." Tina Marie Macias and Jordy Yager (Los Angeles Times) report that among the speakers were Cindy Sheehan, Ramsey Clark and Ralph Nader, that Iraq Veterans Against the War staged the die-in (which the paper estimates contained 5,000 participants), that the police used pepper spray on demonstrators (but not on the attackers of Carlos) and quote San Gabriel UCLA student Jessica Ramirez explaining why she traveled to DC to participate, "It's about doing something that you believe in." Michelle Boortstein, V. Dion Haynes and Allison Klein (Washington Post) report that "chemical spray" was used against the activists and quote IVAW's Geoff Millard (who was among those arrested) declaring, "It's time for the peace movement to take the next step past protest and to resistance." Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!) explained, "The arrests occurred when protesters started climbing over a barricade at the foot of the steps to the Capitol. Police sprayed at least two people with chemicals. Estimates that nearly 100,000 people attended the rally and march. Student protester Jacob Berger said he traveled to Washington from New York where he attends Columbia University: 'The large problem today is apathy. Most people feel like they can't make a change in this world. They feel like its too big and we are here to prove that we can change and we need to get that sort of rallying together like the people did back in Vietnam and that's what got us out of Vietnam and that's what we are trying to do to get out of Iraq'." The Los Angeles Times quotes IVAW's Garett Reppenhagen explaining, "The Iraqi people do not see us as peacemakers. They see us as occupiers and murderers."
Turning to the issue of violence, Sahar Issa (McClatchy Newspapers) reported Sunday that a Baghdad shooting (by private contractors) killed 9 Iraqi civilians and left fifteen more wounded. Later on Sunday, CNN reported, "In the Baghdad gun battle, which was between security forces and unidentified gunmen, eight people were killed and 14 wounded, most of them civilians, an Interior Ministry official said. Details were sketchy, but the official said witnesses told police that the security forces involved appeared to be Westerners driving sport utility vehicles, which are usually used by Western companies. The clash occurred near Nisoor square, in western Baghdad. CBS and AP report that Abdul-Karim Khalaf, spokesperson for the Interior Ministry, announced "it was pulling the license of an American security firm allegedly involved in the fatal shooting of civilians during an attack on a U.S. State Department motorcade in Baghdad," that "it would prosecute any foreign contractors found to have used excessive force" in the slaughter (eight dead, 13 wounded) and they "have canceled the liscense of Blcakwater and prevented them from working all over Iraqi territory." The news was addressed today on Democracy Now!:
AMY GOODMAN: We have this breaking news out of Iraq today: The Iraqi government says it's pulling the license of the US security company Blackwater over its involvement in a fatal shooting in Baghdad on Sunday. Interior Ministry spokesperson Abdul-Karim Khalaf said eight civilians were killed and thirteen wounded, when security contractors believed to be working for Blackwater USA opened fire in a predominantly Sunni neighborhood of western Baghdad. Khalaf said, "We have canceled the license of Blackwater and prevented them from working all over Iraqi territory. We will also refer those involved to Iraqi judicial authorities." It was not immediately clear if the measure against Blackwater is intended to be temporary or permanent. Naomi Klein, take it from there.
NAOMI KLEIN: Well, that's an extraordinary piece of news. I mean, this is really the first time that one of these mercenary firms may actually be held accountable. You know, as Jeremy Scahill has written in his incredible book Blackwater: The Rise of the [World's] Most Powerful Mercenary Army, the real problem is, there haven't been prosecutions. These companies work in this absolute gray zone, and, you know, they're either boy scouts and nothing has going wrong, which completely doesn't mesh with what we know about the way they're behaving in Iraq and all of the sort of videos that we've seen online of just target practice on Iraqi civilians, or the lawlessness and the immunity in which they work has protected them. So, you know, if this is -- if the Iraqi government is actually going to kick Blackwater out of Iraq, it could really be a turning point in terms of pulling these companies into the law and questioning the whole premise of why this level of privatization and lawlessness has been allowed to take place.
The mercenary corportation Blackwater has not only made a lot of money in Iraq, it's had a lot of friends in the US White House (and members of Congress who looked the other way). So it's little surprise that Aseel Kami (Reuters) reports US Secretary of State and Anger Condi Rice plans a firm phone call to puppet of the occupation Nouri al-Maliki in which she will "make it clear" that the US is "investigating this incident" -- no doubt in the usual look-the-other-way manner the US government has "investigated" other incidents. No word on whether she plans to use haul her favorite false line out of mothballs, "No one could have guessed . . ."
In some of today's reported violence . . .
Bombings?
Laith Hammoudi (McClatchy Newspapers) reports five (two of which were police officers) Iraqis were wounded in a Baghdad bombing earlier this morning, while a noon Baghdad bombing injured three more and a Baghdad car bombing claimed 3 lives (eight more wounded). Reuters notes, "Ikhlas al-Shimari, a female member of the Kut governing council, escaped unhurt from a bomb attack on her house overnight in the city of Kut, 170 km (100 miles) southeast of Baghdad, police said" and that 10 Iraqi soldiers were wounded in a Hilla bombing of their base "overnight."
Shootings?
Laith Hammoudi (McClatchy Newspapers) reports assailants wounded a person in Hawaija, shot dead Monther Saad Elyan who was enroute to Hawija, shot dead "a Kurdish citizen" in Mosul, and that Iraqi police officer, Brig. Gen. Edan Jaber Kareem was targeted by snipers today but survived in Basra.
Corpses?
Laith Hammoudi (McClatchy Newspapers) reports 11 corpses were discovered in Baghdad today.
Staying with the issue of the deaths, Friday (in most markets), FAIR's Counterspin began airing and one of the guests was Phyllis Bennis who is receiving criticism for a report co-authored with Eric Leaver on behalf of United for Peace and Justice that undercounts the Iraqi dead: the authors present a range for the number of deaths -- their "low" is the Iraqi Body Count figure from this month and their "high" is "600,000 plus" based on the lower of two figures from last year's Lancet study which ended their tally in July 2006, over 14 months prior to when Bennis and Leaver wrote their so-called "Iraq: People's Report". This being CounterSpin, naturally the issue of the undercount was not addressed because, while CounterSpin feels there are standards for mainstream media, they regularly look the other way when 'big' independent media has no standards. This is how they could infamously praise an article in The Nation magazine that consisted solely of the testimonies of US service members who had been stationed in Iraq as telling the story of "the impact on Iraqis". It takes a lot of stupidity and xenophobia to declare a story told by foreigners as being the story of the people of Iraq. It's the sort of thing that, had the mainstream media pulled such a stunt, FAIR, Extra! and CounterSpin would have cried foul over loudly. Despite the fact that while reviewing mainstream coverage at the start of the show, co-hosts Janine Jackson and Steve Rendall castigated the US mainstream media's coverage noting that the New York Times appears to send the message that some "deaths matter more than other" and taking to task a columnist at The Washington Post because he "can't even get the numbers right". This was the preface to the Phyllis Bennis interview and, again, both she and the hosts of the program avoided the very real criticism of Bennis' undercounting the Iraqi dead which did not begin with the report she co-authored for United for Peace and Justice. Mainstream media is now having a good laugh at CounterSpin which brought it upon itself by deciding to lease a glass house last Friday (the show was taped on Thursday). Had the show been taped on Friday, they might have had to deal with the undercount since (as noted in Friday's snapshot), not only does Just Foreign Policy place the estimate of Iraqis killed in the illegal war at well over a million (not "600,000 plus"), so does a new study by England's Opinion Research Business which Tina Susman (Los Angeles Times) reported on Friday.
Whether because the hosts themselves didn't know or because they are uncomfortably correcting their own, they allowed Phyllis Bennis to note that Tommy Franks said the US doesn't do body counts (Rendall supplised the name Tommy Franks for Bennis) and then muse publicly over where the numbers Gen. David Petraeus provided to Congress (in charts) throughout last week came from? Bennis mused, "Now apparently they're making body counts. So nobody has asked them, 'Excuse me, general, when did you start doing body counts?' From the beginning you told us 'We don't do bodycounts.' When did that begin? When do these figures start from?" Apparently not content to have students chanting "Get your facts right or get off the stage!" over her undercounting, Bennis now needed to underscore how uninformed she actually is as to the illegal war. If the hosts knew any better, they weren't assisting. So everyone had ass on their face.
Like most of independent media, Bennis and FAIR (in all it's variations) dumped Iraq like a hot potato (or left over mashed potatoes) in the summer of 2006. They were geared up (as were most independent media outlets and voices) for the two big topics (there was no planning meeting that determined this -- it's just the incestuous nature of most independent media that they all ended up on the same page): the elections in Mexico and Israel in wack-mode again. While they churned out page after page and broadcast after broadcast on those two topics they missed out on reality. Sabrina Tavernise had already co-written an article (for the New York Times) at the end of 2005 that mentioned the US military was keeping track of some Iraq deaths.
While the hosts sat silent (or didn't know any better), Bennis mused as to why no one in the press had asked about this count and why they hadn't asked when the count was started?
From the June 26, 2006 Iraq snapshot: "In what might get the most attention today, reporting from Baghdad, Nancy A. Youssef (Knight Ritter) breaks the news that the United States now admits to keeping some figures on Iraqis who have died during the illegal war. Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli tells Youssef that 'the number of civilian dead and wounded' via US troops 'is an important measurement.' Chiarelli reveals that "he reviews the figures daily.' The US government has denied that any figures were being kept." Well, obviously I was wrong. While we cited that report repeatedly in other snapshots, independent media couldn't make the time for it because Iraq was off the media radar (as Molly Ivins and Jimmy Breslin would note). Knight-Ridder is, of course, now McClatchyNewspapers. In the article, Youssef demonstrated that she asked the question Bennis alleges the press has refused to ask. The US military maintained to Youssef they began keeping a body count in July of 2005. The link to the article no longer works (not a surprise with any daily paper); however, the story can be found here. From Youssef's June 21, 2006 article:
U.S. officials previously have said they don't keep track of civilian causalities, and Iraqi officials stopped releasing numbers of U.S.-caused casualties after Knight Ridder reported in September 2004 that the Iraqi Ministry of Health had attributed more than twice as many civilian deaths to the actions of U.S. forces than to "terrorist" attacks during the period from June 2004 to September 2004.
Chiarelli declined to release the numbers, but he said that U.S. soldiers are killing and injuring fewer Iraqi civilians this year in so-called "escalation of force" incidents at checkpoints and near convoys than they did in July of last year, when officials first started tracking the statistic.
If the 'media analysts' at FAIR want to continue to trash their own reputations, have at it. Laughter is the key characteristic today in the offices of many they've taken to task in the past over news of the Friday broadcast. If Phyllis Bennis wants to make sport of Alexander Cockburn (in a heavily reposted, snide commentary that was posed at various sites -- none of which bothered to post Cockburn's original column or his own response to Bennis), possibly she should work on getting her facts right. That is, after all, the job of an analyst. Before she next corrects another person -- be it Cockburn or anyone else -- she needs to hunker down with all the Iraqi coverage she missed while she joined others in the alternative landscape in dropping Iraq and traveloguing to other regions. She and the hosts of CounterSpin made asses of themselves on Friday and, yes, Phyllis, the mainstream press has asked that question, has published the answer and anyone who cares seriously about ending the illegal war is damn well aware of that. Bennis was wrong, CounterSpin included misinformation in the program. It is now incumbent upon CounterSpin to issue a correction to the error they broadcast on Friday. (But as one friend at ABC News pointed out, "They never do. It's always do as I say not as I do with them.")
Finally, Sally Field won the best actress Emmy last night (in the drama category) and the ceremonies were broadcast on Fox . . . although Field was among the censored. The broadcast was on tape delay which enabled them to censor other words but include the rest of the remarks. So, for example, TV audiences heard Ray Romano exclaim that "Fraiser is [bleeped] my wife." The verb in the sentence was pulled. As Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!) noted today, Fox viewers heard Sally Field declare, 'If mothers ruled the world, there would be no ____." Were this not a case of political censorship, the Fox network would have done as they did with Romano and removed the word they found objectionable allowing viewers to hear Field declare, "Let's face it, If mothers ruled the world there would be no [bleeped] wars in the first place." AP reports Field's take on the censorship, "Oh well. I've been there before. Well, good. I don't care. I have no comment other than, oh well. I said what I wanted to say. I wanted to pay homage to the mothers of the world, and let their work be seen and valued."
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