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Sunday, May 18, 2003
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Arundhati Roy: Instant-Mix Imperial Democracy (Buy One, Get One Free), presented in New York City at The Riverside Church May 13, 2003
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Old Memos Detail Link of Money to Influence: "piles of documents unearthed in the ongoing lawsuit over the nation's campaign finance law, widely known as McCain-Feingold ... the documents, many of which were subpoenaed over the past year and made public for the first time this month, provide an unusually detailed look at how the Washington money culture operates. In them, political operatives privately worried that their political attack ads might skirt the edge of legality. Senators shamelessly courted campaign contributors. And corporate executives plotted how to pursue their legislative goals by answering the parties' never-ending call for campaign funds."
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In town for protest, cyclists are arrested : "Police told the cyclists that anyone older than 12 needed a license to ride a bicycle in St. Louis, the cyclists said. The eight men and one woman in the group were handcuffed, taken to a St. Louis police station and processed. Eventually, they were given tickets for impeding the flow of traffic and released after about six hours in police custody. City Counselor Patricia Hageman said a rarely enforced law requiring bicycle licenses was on the books until about two years ago. She called the incident Friday a "misunderstanding." But members of the group said it was part of what they called a pre-emptive strike on World Agriculture Forum protesters. "
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Iraqi children face death through malnutrition: "More than 300,000 Iraqi children face death from acute malnutrition, twice as many as before US and British forces invaded the country in March, the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) warned on Wednesday. Many of these -- nearly eight per cent of all Iraqi children under five -- could be saved if the occupation forces ensured that aid convoys could move around freely and kept looters away from water plants and pipelines, it said. The agency, charged with protecting children around the globe, said a survey taken in Baghdad indicated that 7.7 per cent of children under five in urban centres were suffering from acute malnutrition, nearly twice as many as one year ago."
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Odyssey of Frustration (washingtonpost.com) long account of the frustrations of a US Army WMD inspector team in Iraq - false leads, abandoned hazardous radioactive materials, looted sites, lack of Arabic capacity. Never mentions the UN, but the implicit comparison to the UN WMD inspections is damning.
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Saturday, May 17, 2003
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Arrests and weapons allegations spark [St Louis BioDevastation] activists' anger: Brian Tokar, one of the organizers of Biodevastation 7, said police overreacted. "We've been doing these events for years," he said. "Every year in the U.S. we've gotten these insane, inflammatory issues from the police. It's to inflame public passion and to prevent public discussion of the dangers of agribusiness."
Matt LeMieux, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri, said, "I think if the police are going to conduct searches and arrest people, it ought to be based on the conduct of what a person is doing now. But what they're doing is pre-emptively trying to arrest people. It's a bad and unconstitutional policy."
He called the housing inspections "a trick" to get in without a warrant and suggested police should have worked with protesters instead of antagonizing them.
J. Justin Meehan, a lawyer called by some of the jailed activists, complained that police would not release detainees' names, charges or amounts of their bails.
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Friday, May 16, 2003
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Whatever Happened to Bin Laden?: Springmann complained himself right out of a job. Now a lawyer, he has obtained more information on the questionable "engineers" with no engineering knowledge whom he was ordered to permit into the United States. "What I was protesting was, in reality, an effort to bring recruits, rounded up by Osama bin Laden, to the United States for terrorist training by the CIA. They would then be returned to Afghanistan to fight against the then-Soviets." But then they turned their talents against the post-Soviet power: us. In the parlance of spook-world, this is called "blowback." Bin Laden and his bloody brethren were created in America's own Frankenstein factory. It would not do for the current president nor agency officials to dig back to find that some of the terrorists we are hunting today were trained and armed by the Reagan-Bush administration. And that's one of the problems for agents seeking to investigate groups like WAMY, or Abdullah bin Laden. WAMY literature that talks about that "compassionate young man Osama bin Laden" is likely to have been disseminated, if not written, by our very own government.
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Statement From UK Minister Charges Illegal Conduct: "The situation in Iraq under international law is that the coalition are occupying powers in occupied territory. Under the Geneva Convention of 1949 and the Hague regulations of 1907, the coalition has clear responsibilities and clear limits to its authority. It is obliged to attend to the humanitarian needs of the population, to keep order and keep civil administration operating. The coalition is legally entitled to modify the operation of the administration as much as is necessary to fulfil these obligations but is not entitled to make major political, economic and constitutional changes. The coalition does not have sovereign authority and has no authority to bring into being an interim Iraqi government with such authority, or to create a constitutional process leading to the election of a sovereign government. The only body that has the legal authority to do this is the UN Security Council."
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I. Wallerstein, 113, "Empire and the Capitalists": "No doubt, George W. Bush thinks he is in the forefront of those sustaining the world capitalist system. No doubt, a large part of the world left thinks that too. But do the great capitalists think so? That is far less clear. A major warning signal has been launched by Morgan Stanley, one of the world's leading financial investor firms, in their Global Economic Forum. Stephen Roach writes there that a "US-centric world" is unsustainable for the world-economy and bad in particular for the United States."
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Saving Private Lynch story 'flawed': "There was no [sign of] shooting, no bullet inside her body, no stab wound - only road traffic accident. They want to distort the picture. I don't know why they think there is some benefit in saying she has a bullet injury."
Witnesses told us that the special forces knew that the Iraqi military had fled a day before they swooped on the hospital. Dr Uday was surprised by the manner of the rescue "We were surprised. Why do this? There was no military, there were no soldiers in the hospital," said Dr Anmar Uday, who worked at the hospital. "It was like a Hollywood film. They cried 'go, go, go', with guns and blanks without bullets, blanks and the sound of explosions. They made a show for the American attack on the hospital - action movies like Sylvester Stallone or Jackie Chan."
... There was one more twist. Two days before the snatch squad arrived, Harith had arranged to deliver Jessica to the Americans in an ambulance.
But as the ambulance, with Private Lynch inside, approached a checkpoint American troops opened fire, forcing it to flee back to the hospital. The Americans had almost killed their prize catch.
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Wednesday, April 30, 2003
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A Bit of Self-Mockery, a Lot of Stamina: "durability is a Wagnerian virtue, and in middle age this "Meistersinger" has by general agreement all its moving parts still in workable shape. I can think of no other performing challenge in which the comedic heart and sheer physical endurance are so inseparable. Friday's cast was admirable for its quality, depth and staying power. How many tenors have we heard using their talents in the early scenes only to be caught desperate and panting at Walther's defining moment before the final curtain? Johan Botha's voice rang with as much life and beauty at the end as at the beginning.
... The nice thing about the Met's "Meistersinger" (staged this season by Peter McClintock) is a certain self-mockery. Beckmesser is by definition made fun of to his face, but we can also smile at Eva (dumb blonde) and Walther (woozy swain) behind their backs. Mr. Morris's Sachs presides over them all with a quiet, forbearing irony.
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Tuesday, April 29, 2003
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Chicks against the machine: Offered the chance to take it all back and make nice, the Dixie Chicks instead chose to turn the interview around. Sawyer wanted answers; the Chicks offered questions, hard questions. Sawyer wanted to talk about the damage they may have done to their career; the Chicks talked about the damage being done to America in an era where Vice President Dick Cheney has proclaimed "You're either with us or against us." The band may have gotten more attention posing nude for the cover of the current Entertainment Weekly, with phrases like "Dixie Sluts," "Saddam's Angels" and "Traitors" stamped on their bodies. But it was the stubborn refusal they showed Sawyer that cut deepest.
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Monday, April 28, 2003
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Cutbacks Imperil Health Coverage for States' Poor: Millions of low-income Americans face the loss of health insurance or sharp cuts in benefits, like coverage for prescription drugs and dental care, under proposals now moving through state legislatures around the country. State officials and health policy experts say the cuts will increase the number of uninsured, threaten recent progress in covering children and impose severe strains on hospitals, doctors and nursing homes. But those officials, confronting a third straight year of fiscal crisis, say they have no choice but to rein in Medicaid, the fast-growing program that provides health insurance for 50 million people. Many state officials are pleading for federal help as they face an array of painful trade-offs, often pitting the needs of impoverished elderly people for prescription drugs and long-term care against those of low-income families seeking basic health coverage.
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Bush's Boomerang:[Useful capsule history of British/US involvement in Iraq.] With the monarchists now discredited, the US began cultivating a rival--and bitterly anti-communist--Arab nationalist group, the Baath Party, in a bid to destabilize Qasim. In 1959, the young Saddam Hussein was part of a CIA-backed Baathist hit squad that attempted to assassinate Qasim. In February 1963, the Baathists took power in a bloody coup, and unleashed a reign of terror on Iraq's left, as well as the long-suffering Kurds in the north. The CIA, which had been monitoring the Iraqi left, provided the names of who to round up--as it would later do in Indonesia and Chile. The CIA director at the time was John McCone, a longtime Bechtel executive.
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Saturday, April 26, 2003
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Golden State Museum Sacramento "The Whole World's Watching: Peace and Social Justice Movements of the 1960s and 1970s" Exhibit April 22 through June 15, 2003
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Urban war in plain sight: With the conventional war in Iraq all but over, U.S. forces are working to clear pockets of resistance in Baghdad and other cities where, as U.S. ground forces advanced three weeks ago, thousands of Iraqi soldiers and other loyalists simply removed their uniforms and went home. The battle is now being waged from rooftops and other vantage points against isolated attacks on U.S. troops. The enemy is no longer a conventional Iraqi soldier. It's one who has chosen to strike under cover of darkness. U.S. officials here say some are former Baath Party members or the Fedayeen Saddam paramilitary force. American forces have responded by deploying dozens of sniper teams--such as Osborne and Field--to thwart those attacks. Their standing order: Shoot to kill anyone who fires on U.S. troops or equipment. In the last two weeks, this team alone has recorded more than 20 enemy kills. "All day, you build up for the moment when you fire the shot," Field, 23, says as he and his partner take positions in a hostile zone. "Then there's a feeling of exhilaration, and you feel like you've really done something for your country. You've taken someone out." .... Both men said they were raised in religious homes. Both said they have learned to separate their feelings from their duties.
[Reassuring to know that these folks will be back in the US before long, trained to snipe and to override their consciences.]
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Reports Of Weapons 'Greatly Exaggerated': There is no question that Saddam's regime produced, and used, terrible weapons. The odds are that forces will uncover evidence of them. But this is a long way from the claims made in the run-up to war, or the accounts now offered about why the weapons remain so hard to find.
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Bush Shows 'Pattern of Hostility' Toward Civil Rights: The administration of President George W. Bush is steadily and systematically working to reverse longstanding civil rights policies and impede the enforcement of U.S. civil rights laws, according to a new report released Thursday by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund (LCCREF).
... "the combination of below-the-radar regulations, little-noticed litigation, and severe budget cuts illustrates a pattern of hostility toward core civil rights values and signals a diminished commitment to the idea of non-discrimination"
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The Headache of Black Gold Ownership: At the UN, the struggle promises to be merciless. Those principally affected, Russia, China, and France, permanent Security Council Members with veto rights, have no intention of clearing out for the Americans and the British. "Those are legally our reserves. If all else fails, we'll go to the Arbitrage Court in Geneva, which will lead to an immediate freeze on those reserves": as the premiere Russian oil producer, Lukoil, specified, Moscow is determined to fight to secure the contracts it signed with the former regime.
...the Republican Administration would like to hew a new legal framework. The acknowledged objective is to support American companies- the Mastodon ExxonMobil and the Texan and Californian "juniors"- who were shut out of the Iraqi oil sector before the war. The future oil authorities could offer some kind of legal immunity, protecting companies from lawsuits before the courts. New dispositions could, in addition, interdict the bribes that Russian and Chinese companies readily practice.
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Friday, April 25, 2003
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Bush Goes AWOL: "Bush has inspired new terrorist threats to the United States--according to the official testimony of his own CIA--where none existed. At the same time, he purposely starves those localities and institutions on which the complex and expensive task of terrorist protection ultimately falls. "
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I.R.S. to Ask Working Poor for Proof on Tax Credits: Internal Revenue Service is planning to ask more than four million of the working poor who now claim a special tax credit to provide the most exhaustive proof of eligibility ever demanded of any class of taxpayers.
... But some tax experts criticize the higher burden of proof as unfair and a wasteful allocation of scarce I.R.S. enforcement dollars. They say that corporations, business owners, investors and partnerships deprive the government of many times what the working poor ever could — through both illegal means and legal shelters — yet these taxpayers face no demands to prove the validity of their claims in advance with certified records and sworn affidavits.
Others warn that the proposed I.R.S. rules will set a standard of proof so high that it will be difficult, and in some cases impossible, for honest taxpayers to meet it. As a result, some people entitled to the tax credit will no longer receive it. And those who do manage to file successful claims will almost certainly have to pay commercial tax preparers more for helping them with the extra paperwork.
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Wednesday, April 23, 2003
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No war for whose oil?: By YAHYA SADOWSKI - The slogan 'No war for oil' rightly presumes that the Bush administration had plans for post-war profits from Iraq's substantial oil reserves. But those plans were based on the Bush cabal's relationships not with the major oil internationals, but with smaller independent firms. Everybody has now done the maths on Iraqi oil and found that their sums don't add up. [Very interesting and challenging analysis.]
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Iraq: misreading the vital signs: A paucity of original sources, a repetition of misinformation, and plain wishful thinking in the West have led to dangerous errors in interpreting the nature and behaviour of the Iraqi regime through the past decade. by DAVID BARAN
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Tuesday, April 22, 2003
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Tim Robbins: Speech to National Press Club: "A chill wind is blowing in this nation. A message is being sent through the White House and its allies in talk radio and Clear Channel and Cooperstown. If you oppose this administration, there can and will be ramifications. Every day, the air waves are filled with warnings, veiled and unveiled threats, spewed invective and hatred directed at any voice of dissent. And the public, like so many relatives and friends that I saw this weekend, sit in mute opposition and fear. "
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Monday, April 21, 2003
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Nina Simone, 70, Soulful Diva and Voice of Civil Rights, Dies
Although she was most often characterized as a jazz singer, Ms. Simone, who usually performed with a rhythm section and always accompanied herself on piano, was almost impossible to classify.
"If I had to be called something," she wrote in 1991 in her autobiography, "I Put a Spell on You," "it should have been a folk singer because there was more folk and blues than jazz in my playing."
But her piano playing also revealed her classical training more clearly than most jazz pianists', and her singing — at times rough and raw, at other times sweet and pure — owed an unmistakable debt to black gospel music.
... Ms. Simone was as famous for her social consciousness as she was for her music. In the 1960's no musical performer was more closely identified with the civil rights movement. Though she was best known as an interpreter of other people's music, she eloquently expressed her feelings about racism and black pride in those years in a number of memorable songs she wrote herself.
"Mississippi Goddam" was an angry response to the killing of the civil rights advocate Medgar Evers. "Young, Gifted and Black," written with the keyboardist Weldon Irvine Jr., became something of an anthem, recorded by Aretha Franklin and many others. "Four Women" painted a subtle but stinging picture of the suffering and the strength of African-American women.
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April 16, 2003 - Why The Anti-War Movement Was Right - A Huffington: far from being on the verge of destroying Western civilization, Saddam and his 21st century Gestapo couldn't even muster a half-hearted defense of their own capital. The hawks' cakewalk disproves their own dire warnings. They can't have it both ways. The invasion has proved wildly successful in one other regard: It has unified most of the world -- especially the Arab world -- against us.
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Today Show Goes Dark on Tim Robbins: A conversation about free speech. An anchor asking reasonable questions. A guest responding in equally reasonable tones. No attempt to close out the discussion - to say "Well thank you Tim". This was not a filibuster. Robbins was not hogging the spotlight. Someone in the control room simply decided that it was time to pull the plug. And without grace or ceremony, or even the face saving of letting Lauer say "We're out of time" as morning shows do on so many occasions. A conversation about free speech and free expression was cut off mid sentence as the network went to black.
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How to Wage the Peace - [A liberal pro-war view.] Improving on Saddam’s rule will be easy. But democracy will take hard work. Don’t believe oil riches will make it easier. And above all, don’t rush it.
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Powell, State differ on '73 coup -- The Washington Times: "It is not a part of American history that we're proud of," Mr. Powell said, quickly adding that reforms instituted since then make it unlikely that the policies of that time will be repeated.
... In a highly unusual move, the State Department issued a statement that put distance between the department and its top official. The statement asserted that the U.S. government "did not instigate the coup that ended Allende's government in 1973."
Mr. Rogers was concerned that Mr. Powell's comment was reinforcing what he called "the legend" that the Chile coup was a creation of a Kissinger-led cabal working in league with Chilean military officers opposed to then-President Salvador Allende.
Mr. Rogers called the department legal office to point out that there was a pending lawsuit against the government involving the episode, and Mr. Powell's comment was not helpful.
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The New York Review of Books: Anti-Americans Abroad - Tony Judt: "Europeans want a more interventionist state at home than Americans do, and they expect to pay for it. Even in post-Thatcher Britain, 62 percent of adults polled in December 2002 would favor higher taxes in return for improved public services. The figure for the US was under 1 percent. This is less surprising when one considers that in America (where the disparities between rich and poor are greater than anywhere else in the developed world) fully 19 percent of the adult population claims to be in the richest 1 percent of the nation--and a further 20 percent believe they will enter that 1 percent in their lifetime!" [first half of this review is not very interesting.]
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Sunday, April 20, 2003
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4/3/2003 -- Mugging the Needy - Bob Herbert: "The House plan offers the well-to-do $1.4 trillion in tax cuts, while demanding billions of dollars in cuts from programs that provide food stamps, school lunches, health care for the poor and the disabled, temporary assistance to needy families -- even veterans' benefits and student loans. An analysis of the House budget by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that its proposed cuts in child nutrition programs threaten to eliminate school lunches for 2.4 million low-income children. "
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The Press and the Myths of War: "War itself is venal, dirty, confusing and perhaps the most potent narcotic invented by humankind. Modern industrial warfare means that most of those who are killed never see their attackers. There is nothing glorious or gallant about it. If we saw what wounds did to bodies, how killing is far more like butchering an animal than the clean and neat Hollywood deaths on the screen, it would turn our stomachs.
... War as myth begins with blind patriotism, which is always thinly veiled self-glorification. We exalt ourselves, our goodness, our decency, our humanity, and in that self-exaltation we denigrate the other. The flip side of nationalism is racism--look at the jokes we tell about the French.
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Argument: Robert Fisk: For the people on the streets, this is not liberation but a new colonial oppression America's war of 'liberation' may be over. But Iraq's war of liberation from the Americans is just about to begin
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"All our lives we have blamed our parents and our parents' generation for allowing Hitler to gain control. Now we're beginning to see how powerless they must have felt to stop what was happening all around them." ---An elderly Jewish couple, quoted by Richard L. Clinton in the Oregonian, 8 April 2003
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Saturday, April 19, 2003
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India File: The other Saddam - Mani Shankar Aiyar: It was Saddam's revolution that ended Iraqi backwardness. Education, including higher and technological education, became the top priority. More important, centuries of vicious discrimination against girls and women was ended by one stroke of the modernizing dictator's pen.
... Iraq under Saddam had everything going for it -- except democracy. And it was, of course, the absence of democracy that accounted for Saddam brushing aside all vested interests: his instant liberation of women, his instant dismantling of feudalism, his instant caging of the priesthood, and, therefore, his instant -- and, yes, brutal -- exclusion from Iraq of all forms of religious fundamentalism and religion-based terrorism. Which is, one thing at least that Osama bin Laden and Bush III share: they hate Saddam equally.
If Saddam goes, the brutality of the Baath party will finally be ended.
But other things not wonderful either will take its place. There will be a takeover of civil society by the elements sidelined over four decades of Baath rule. Therefore, along with democracy, fundamentalism and terrorism will rear their heads.
[Very interesting piece. It does show the hypocrisy of US policy toward Saddam. This story leaves out, though, that Saddam was not the only would-be modernizer at the time he took power. There were also the leftists, whom Saddam slaughtered, with help from the US government. This is also what happened in Iran... because the US had helped the Shah exterminate the Iranian left, there was no one left to replace the Shah, when he fell, except the fundamentalists.]
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Wednesday, April 16, 2003
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Carving Up The New Iraq: "In a special Sunday Herald investigation, we have charted the network of financial kickbacks, political pay-backs, cronyism, self-interest and ferocious ideology that underpins the entire reconstruction scheme. " - [long annotated catalog of interconnected persons and companies; not sure how well informed it is, though, since it lists (Pashtun) Afghan-American Zalmay Khalilzad under "The Arabs".]
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Tuesday, April 15, 2003
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News: "After days of arson and pillage, here's a short but revealing scorecard. US troops have sat back and allowed mobs to wreck and then burn the Ministry of Planning, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Irrigation, the Ministry of Trade, the Ministry of Industry, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Information. They did nothing to prevent looters from destroying priceless treasures of Iraq's history in the Baghdad Archaeological Museum and in the museum in the northern city of Mosul, or from looting three hospitals.
The Americans have, though, put hundreds of troops inside two Iraqi ministries that remain untouched -- and untouchable -- because tanks and armoured personnel carriers and Humvees have been placed inside and outside both institutions. And which ministries proved to be so important for the Americans? Why, the Ministry of Interior, of course -- with its vast wealth of intelligence information on Iraq -- and the Ministry of Oil. "
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What About Private Lori?: "Lori Piestewa, 23, was killed, with the gruesome distinction of being the first native American in the US army to be killed in combat and the only American servicewoman to die in this war. "
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'Fearless' Dean Wins Converts: "Dean, 54, a doctor who served as governor of Vermont for 11 years, gets his biggest applause when he starts his closing choruses of, "We want our country back." It is now as much a part of his stump speech as was the line borrowed and paraphrased from the late Sen. Paul Wellstone that he used repeatedly in February and March: "I am Howard Dean, and I'm here to represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party." Dean said he believes that line -- "We want our country back" -- generates such a visceral response among Democratic activists because "people are in despair about what is going on. "
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US Troops Encouraged Ransacking Khaled Bayomi looks surprised when the American officer on TV complains that they don't have the resources to stop the plundering in Baghdad. "I happened to be right there just as the American troops encouraged people to begin the plundering."
Khaled Bayomi traveled from Europe to Baghdad to be a human shield and arrived on the same day that the war began. About this he can tell many stories but the most interesting is certainly his eyewitness account of the wave of plundering.
"I had gone to see some friends who live near a dilapidated area just past Haifa Avenue on the west bank of the Tigris. It was the 8th of April and the fighting was so intense that I was unable to return to the other side of the river. In the afternoon it became perfectly quiet and four American tanks took places on the edge of the slum area. The soldiers shot two Sudanese guards who stood at their posts outside a local administration building on the other side of Haifa Avenue. Then they blasted apart the doors to the building and from the tanks came eager calls in Arabic encouraging people to come close to them. "
"The entire morning, everyone who had tried to cross the road had been shot. But in the strange silence after all the shooting, people gradually became curious. After 45 minutes, the first Baghdad citizens dared to come out. Arab interpreters in the tanks told the people to go and take what they wanted in the building."
"The word spread quickly and the building was ransacked. I was standing only 300 yards from there when the guards were murdered. Afterwards the tank crushed the entrance to the Justice Department, which was in a neighboring building, and the plundering continued there".
"I stood in a large crowd and watched this together with them. They did not partake in the plundering but dared not to interfere. Many had tears of shame in their eyes. The next morning the plundering spread to the Modern Museum, which lies a quarter mile farther north. There were also two crowds there, one that plundered and one with watched with disgust."
"Are you saying that it was US troops who initiated the plundering?'
"Absolutely. The lack of jubilant scenes meant that the American troops needed pictures of Iraqis who in different ways demonstrated hatred for Saddam's regime."
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Bomb Before You Buy: Rather than rebuilding, the country is being treated as a blank slate on which the most ideological Washington neo-liberals can design their dream economy: fully privatised, foreign-owned and open for business.
...Some argue that it's too simplistic to say this war is about oil. They're right. It's about oil, water, roads, trains, phones, ports and drugs. And if this process isn't halted, "free Iraq" will be the most sold country on earth.
It's no surprise that so many multinationals are lunging for Iraq's untapped market. It's not just that the reconstruction will be worth as much as $100bn; it's also that "free trade" by less violent means hasn't been going that well lately. More and more developing countries are rejecting privatisation, while the Free Trade Area of the Americas, Bush's top trade priority, is wildly unpopular across Latin America.
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Swiss to keep Iraqi funds until UN backs leadership: "Switzerland will not hand over frozen Iraqi assets to a post-Saddam Hussein government backed by the United States without a United Nations resolution, the Swiss government announced Wednesday in an apparent rebuff of the Bush administration."
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30-year tax resister will refuse to pay again, protesting war in Iraq
By JIM GETZ Post-Dispatch
Thirty years ago, St. Louis peace activist Bill Ramsey withheld his federal income taxes to protest the Christmas 1972 bombing of Haiphong in the war in Vietnam.
Nothing has changed for him, 30 years later, except the bombing has shifted to Iraq.
Today, with about 30 others in the St. Louis area, Ramsey will again refuse to pay the taxes and instead will direct the amount to local humanitarian causes.
"I believe all the resources that come to me come as a trust," he said, "and I can't turn them over to somebody who uses them to kill people, and that's what the Pentagon does."
This infuriates some people who believe Americans should be willing to pay the tax bill that enables the benefits of living in the United States.
They also are annoyed that the federal government seems to be more willing to prosecute tax resisters such as anti-government radical groups Posse Comitatus and the Freemen than protesters such as the anti-war St. Louis Covenant Community of War Tax Resisters.
Janine Meriweather investigated such cases for nine years for the Internal Revenue Service before becoming a spokeswoman for the agency last August. She has heard most of the claims, and many are found within the Department of Justice Tax Division's 56 pages of legal guidelines on tax resisters.
"They're basically the type of people who say, 'I'm not going to pay taxes because the Constitution doesn't say I have to pay taxes,'" she recalled. "Sometimes they put a religious angle on it or say that the type of income they receive isn't taxable."
Ramsey served 30 days in prison in 1993 for failing to pay taxes. Since then, though, Meriweather has not heard of any cases referred to the U.S. attorney in St. Louis, Ray Gruender.
"I would just say that we don't set criteria on the type of people we investigate," she added. "Each case is looked at evenly. There's no different standards for different types of people."
But Meriweather and Gruender say they can't comment on whether Ramsey or any other protester is being investigated - or why they haven't been in the past.
Gruender's office prosecutes based on evidence received from the IRS. Meriweather said the criminal division, when made aware of a case, tries to determine how much money is involved and how much "willfulness" there is to not pay.
The IRS investigation can take up to two years and another year after that before a charge is filed.
Nationwide, from October 2001 through March 2003, 346 people were convicted for failing to pay their income taxes. About 80 percent of them went to prison.
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Sunday, April 13, 2003
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War, Politics, Culture Intervention Magazine / Mission Statement:
In response to this vastly changed world, Intervention Magazine online has expanded its forum. Beyond military affairs and foreign policy, the magazine will present insightful and clear discussion on the domestic and international political environment, the media, which is increasingly concentrated, global and local environmental issues, as well as the literature of witness. The major themes of the new Intervention, then, are war and its aftermath, politics and democracy, as well as culture and literature.
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Nationwide Inquiry at Veterans' Hospitals: "The Bush administration has ordered a nationwide review of medical research at 115 veterans' hospitals and has halted some studies after investigators found serious violations of federal rules, including some that may have contributed to the deaths of patients. The Department of Veterans Affairs said it was investigating the deaths of patients in research projects at hospitals in Detroit, Albany and Fargo, N.D. The department also said it had found "serious noncompliance" with federal rules at its hospitals in Pittsburgh; Providence, R.I.; Martinez, Calif.; and Long Beach, Calif, and detected problems at hospitals in Northampton, Mass., and Portland, Ore."
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A civilisation torn to pieces - Fisk: "They lie across the floor in tens of thousands of pieces, the priceless antiquities of Iraq's history. The looters had gone from shelf to shelf, systematically pulling down the statues and pots and amphorae of the Assyrians and the Babylonians, the Sumerians, the Medes, the Persians and the Greeks and hurling them on to the concrete. Our feet crunched on the wreckage of 5,000-year-old marble plinths and stone statuary and pots that had endured every siege of Baghdad, every invasion of Iraq throughout history only to be destroyed when America came to "liberate" the city. The Iraqis did it. They did it to their own history, physically destroying the evidence of their own nation's thousands of years of civilisation. Not since the Taliban embarked on their orgy of destruction against the Buddhas of Bamiyan and the statues in the museum of Kabul perhaps not since the Second World War or earlier have so many archaeological treasures been wantonly and systematically smashed to pieces. "
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Saturday, April 12, 2003
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Friday, April 11, 2003
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Susan Davis: The New York Times and the Peace Movement
While the patriotism of pacifists has always been an argument, it really got wheeled out in the big demonstrations after Christmas, and as groups like Win without War, and Moveon.org, which the New York Times especially approves of, stepped to the forefront to help organize the enormous national demonstrations of January and February and March. These were very useful and very threatening demonstrations. But in Win without War's formulations, and I think arguably MoveOn.org's approach, the United States policy towards Iraq before the war was fundamentally acceptable. That's a problem. Groups like Voices in the Wilderness have worked for years to undermine the acceptability of so-called containment, which Jeff Gunsel of Voices points out, is really just another word for sanctions -- but sanctions were becoming politically unacceptable. If you look today at Moveon.org's call for letters to the editor about the management of postwar Iraq there isn't a single critical connection made -- the argument is simply back to the status quo of European nations managing what will be Middle Eastern occupied territory.
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Spoils of War: Bob Herbert - "The war against Iraq has become one of the clearest examples ever of the influence of the military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned against so eloquently in his farewell address in 1961. This iron web of relationships among powerful individuals inside and outside the government operates with very little public scrutiny and is saturated with conflicts of interest."
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Is There Some Element in the US Military that Wants to take Out Journalists?: Fisk - "First the Americans killed the correspondent of al-Jazeera yesterday and wounded his cameraman. Then, within four hours, they attacked the Reuters television bureau in Baghdad, killing one of its cameramen and a cameraman for Spain's Tele 5 channel and wounding four other members of the Reuters staff. Was it possible to believe this was an accident? Or was it possible that the right word for these killings - the first with a jet aircraft, the second with an M1A1 Abrams tank - was murder? "
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Hans Blix: War Planned 'Long in Advance': By attacking Iraq, Washington had sent the wrong message - that if a country did not possess biological, chemical or nuclear weapons, it risked being attacked. "The United States maintains that the war on Iraq is designed to send a signal to other countries to keep away from weapons of mass destruction. But people are getting a different message. Take the announcement North Korea has just made. It's tantamount to saying 'if you let in the inspectors, like Iraq did, you get attacked'.
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Muslim Groups Protest Bush Peace Nominee: "Muslim groups were stunned last week when President Bush nominated Daniel Pipes to the board of the United States Institute of Peace, a federal think tank. For years, the outspoken director of the Middle East Forum in Philadelphia has called for a war on Islamic extremism, declaring in one post-Sept. 11 interview: "What we need to do is inspire fear, not affection." The Harvard-trained scholar has declared Islamic extremists are conspiring to replace the U.S. Constitution with the Koran, that one in 10 American Muslims are militants and suggested the government needs to monitor Muslims and mosques across the country. "
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Thursday, April 10, 2003
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Robert Fisk visits a Baghdad hospital: The Iraqi civilians and soldiers brought to the Adnan Khairallah Martyr Hospital in the last hours of Saddam Hussein's regime yesterday sometimes still clinging to severed limbs are the dark side of victory and defeat; final proof, like the dead who are buried within hours, that war is about the total failure of the human spirit. As I wandered amid the beds and the groaning men and women lying on them Dante's visit to the circles of hell should have included these visions the same old questions recurred. Was this for 11 September? For human rights? For weapons of mass destruction?
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Institute for Public Accuracy - IPA: "As a nationwide consortium of policy researchers, the Institute for Public Accuracy seeks to broaden public discourse by gaining media access for those whose perspectives are commonly drowned out by corporate-backed think tanks and other influential institutions. "
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House Democrats Want Halliburton Probe: "Questioning whether Vice President Dick Cheney's former company has received favored treatment from the Pentagon, senior House Democrats asked Congress' investigative agency Tuesday to delve into contracts awarded Halliburton Co. over the past two years.
Halliburton's KBR subsidiary has a record of gouging the government in contracts awarded without competition, Reps. Henry Waxman of California and John Dingell of Michigan contended in a letter to the General Accounting Office.
Halliburton spokeswoman Wendy Hall said the lawmakers have ignored the exemplary record of the Houston-based firm that employed Cheney as chief executive officer from 1995 to 2000 and still pays him deferred compensation for his services during that period.
.... -A GAO finding in 1997 that the company billed the Army for questionable expenses for work in the Balkans, including charges of $85.98 per sheet of plywood that cost $14.06.
-A year 2000 follow-up report on the Balkans work that found inflated costs, including charges for cleaning some offices up to four times a day.
-$2 million in fines paid in February, 2002, to resolve fraud claims involving work at Fort Ord, Calif. The Defense Department inspector general and a federal grand jury had investigated allegations by a former employee that KBR defrauded the government of millions of dollars by inflating prices for repairs and maintenance.
The Securities and Exchange Commission already is investigating Halliburton's accounting practices, looking into an accounting change made in 1998, during Cheney's tenure as CEO
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The Pentagon's "Trainee," Ahmad Chalabi (INC), Claims to be epresentative of a New Iraq: "Descendant of a rich Shiite family, Ahmad Chalabi, 54 years old, never enjoyed any political position in Iraq. A banker by profession, he has always had a complex relationship with money: condemned in absentia to twenty-two years in prison in the beginning of the eighties for bank fraud and misappropriation of funds in Jordan, he became the subject of suspicion again in the mid-nineties, this time with regard to the use of CIA funds furnished to the Iraqi National Congress (INC); and again only a few months ago, his good faith seemed to have been put in doubt with regard to the use he made of almost half of the 4.3 million dollars of new American financial aid granted to this same INC, a coalition of the Iraqi opposition created in 1992 at the instigation of the United States and of which Chalabi claims to be a central figure."
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Republicans Want Patriot Act Made Permanent: "Working with the Bush administration, Congressional Republicans are maneuvering to make permanent the sweeping antiterrorism powers granted to federal law enforcement agents after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, officials said today. The move is likely to touch off strong objections from many Democrats and even some Republicans in Congress who believe that the Patriot Act, as the legislation that grew out of the attacks is known, has already given the government too much power to spy on Americans. The landmark legislation expanded the government's power to use eavesdropping, surveillance, access to financial and computer records and other tools to track terrorist suspects."
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On Getting Along By Howard Zinn: You ask how I manage to stay involved and remain seemingly happy and adjusted to this awful world where the efforts of caring people pale in comparison to those who have power?
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When Democracy Failed: The Warnings of History: February 27, 2003, was the 70th anniversary of Dutch terrorist Marinus van der Lubbe's successful firebombing of the German Parliament (Reichstag) building, the terrorist act that catapulted Hitler to legitimacy and reshaped the German constitution. By the time of his successful and brief action to seize Austria, in which almost no German blood was shed, Hitler was the most beloved and popular leader in the history of his nation.
... Through the 1930s, however, Hitler and Roosevelt chose very different courses to bring their nations back to power and prosperity. Germany's response was to use government to empower corporations and reward the society's richest individuals, privatize much of the commons, stifle dissent, strip people of constitutional rights, and create an illusion of prosperity through continual and ever-expanding war. America passed minimum wage laws to raise the middle class, enforced anti-trust laws to diminish the power of corporations, increased taxes on corporations and the wealthiest individuals, created Social Security, and became the employer of last resort through programs to build national infrastructure, promote the arts, and replant forests. To the extent that our Constitution is still intact, the choice is again ours.
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Wednesday, April 09, 2003
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ZNet - No Ribbons, No Flags, No Fireworks: "Don't misunderstand. I guess one could say that I too support the troops, but surely not in the way that you and other flag-wavers intend.
I support them being able to make a living and get an education without having first to subordinate their consciences to a military establishment that vitiates critical thought, reflection and free will, so as to create more efficient killing machines. How about you?
I support them not being lied to about the chemicals and depleted uranium to which they will likely be exposed. How about you?"
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George Monbiot - US preparing to use chemical weapons in Iraq: In February, the defence secretary, Donald , told Congress's armed services committee that "there are times when the use of non-lethal riot agents is perfectly appropriate." He revealed that he and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Richard Myers, had been "trying to fashion rules of engagement" for the use of chemical weapons in Iraq. Rumsfeld, formerly the chief executive of GD Searle, one of the biggest drugs firms in the US, has never been an enthusiast for the Chemical Weapons Convention. In 1997, as the senate was preparing to ratify the treaty, he told its committee on foreign relations that the convention "will impose a costly and complex regulatory burden on US industry". Enlisting the kind of self-fulfilling prophecy with which we have since become familiar, he maintained that it was not "realistic", as global disarmament "is not a likely prospect". Dick Cheney, now vice-president, asked the committee to record his "strong opposition" to ratification
.... You cannot use chemical weapons to wage war against chemical weapons. They are, as the convention makes clear, the instruments of terrorists. By deploying them, the US government would erase one of the remaining moral distinctions between its own behaviour and that of the man it asks us to abominate.
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Tuesday, April 08, 2003
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Guardian - Russian spy reports online: There is a surfeit of war news, but reliable intelligence is hard to come by. The canny trader in these parlous days has a first port of call - GRU (Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye), the espionage arm of the Russian military.
GRU is the most sophisticated agency of its kind in the world. And, since Glasnost, the most transparent. GRU has thousands of agents worldwide (especially in countries such as Iraq, where Russia has traditional trade links). Intelligence has always been a top priority for Ivan. The number of agents operated by the GRU during the Soviet era was six times the number of agents operated by the KGB.
Russia, superpower that it was, still has spy satellites, state-of-the-art interception technology and (unlike the CIA) men on the ground. The beauty of GRU is that it does not (like the CIA) report directly to the leadership but to the Russian ministry of defence. In its wisdom, it makes its analyses publicly available. These are digested as daily bulletins on www.iraqwar.ru.
The Russians have a contrarian view on the current conflict. What was it Kissinger said about the Iran-Iraq war - "Ideally we'd like both sides to lose"? That's what the Kremlin thinks about Operation Free Iraq.
From its neutral stance, GRU offers detailed, top-grade, and wholly unspun analysis. The bulletins are in Russian (bilingualism is suddenly in demand on Wall Street). You can get English translations a day later on Venik's Aviation website (www.aeronautics.ru).
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Russian intelligence report: War in Iraq - situation at the Saddam airport: April 6 "All the claims made by aviation commander of the coalition, general Michael Mosley, about "Iraqi army, as an organized structure consisting of large units, exists no longer" are contrary to fact and, according to analytics, are probably connected with severe pressure put on the military command by American financial groups that desperately needed good news from the US-Iraqi front by the end of the financial week. In fact, the Republican Guards defending Baghdad have not lost even 5% of their numerical strength and military equipment. Most of those losses were due to bombardments and not land combats. The total losses of Iraqi army since the beginning of the war have not exceeded 5-8% of their defensive potential. This means the main battles are still to be seen. "
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US Arms Group Heads for Lisbon: Top of the meeting's agenda is expected to be the company's involvement in the rebuilding of Baghdad's infrastructure after the cessation of current hostilities. Along with several other US companies, the Carlyle Group is expected to be awarded a billion dollar contract by the US Government to help in the redevelopment of airfields and urban areas destroyed by Coalition aerial bombardments. The Group is managed by a team of former US Government personnel including its president Frank Carlucci, former deputy director of the CIA before becoming Defence Secretary. His deputy is James Baker II, who was Secretary of State under George Bush senior. Several high profile former politicians are employed to represent the company overseas, among them John Major, former British Prime Minister, along with George Bush senior, one time CIA director before becoming US President.
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Area Surgeon Aids Troops Boulder neurosurgeon Gene Bolles.
Bolles spent Thursday hunched over an operating table at Germany's Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, repairing the broken back of Army Pfc. Jessica Lynch, who was rescued from an Iraqi hospital this week. The 19-year-old soldier will require aggressive rehabilitation, Bolles said, but is expected to recover well — one success story in a war full of tragedy.
"It really is disgustingly sanitized on television," said Bolles, who has spent the last 16 months as chief of neurosurgery at Landstuhl, the destination for the war's most wounded soldiers.
As of Friday, 281 patients had been brought to Landstuhl since Operation Iraqi Freedom started, and plane-loads are arriving regularly.
"We have had a number of really horrific injuries now from the war. They have lost arms, legs, hands, they have been burned, they have had significant brain injuries and peripheral nerve damage. These are young kids that are going to be, in some regards, changed for life. I don't feel that people realize that."
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Monday, April 07, 2003
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Mossback: The Empire Falls Down by Knute Berger The Brits in the coalition force should have some understanding of the Iraqi irregulars who are fighting for their country against all odds. They have a history of glorious speeches urging on the underdogs of war, or inspiring a fight to the death for an honored people. Think of Winston Churchill promising to fight on the beaches; think of Shakespeare’s Henry V and his “band of brothers” on St. Crispin’s Day. Reaching back further, one finds in Tacitus’ Agricola the inspiring speech of the Scottish warrior Calgacus, who resisted the conquering Roman legions poised before him.
His speech is worth remembering. Part of it goes: “But there are no more nations beyond us; nothing is there but waves and rocks and the Romans, more deadly still than these—for in them is arrogance which no submission or good behavior can escape. Pillagers of the world, they have exhausted the land by their indiscriminate plunder, and now they ransack the sea. A rich enemy excites their cupidity; a poor one, their lust for power. East and West alike have failed to satisfy them. They are the only people on the earth to whose covetousness both riches and poverty are equally tempting. To robbery, butchery, and rapine, they give the lying name of ‘government’; they create a desolation and call it peace.”
Shortly thereafter, Calgacus got his butt kicked by superior Roman numbers, technology, and tactics. But, as you know, the story doesn’t stop there. One day, the people of Rome reaped the consequences of their actions and appetites. One day, they got to experience “peace” in their own land, and finally came to know what Calgacus was talking about.
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Mossback: Conservative Crybabies by Knute Berger not only have so-called conservatives taken the country and consolidated their power, they are also wowing—or at least (shall we be generous?) snowing—the public. This won’t be good news to your typical Seattle peacenik, but here’s a disturbing message: Polls don’t lie. Yes, I wish we could ignore them, too, but the messenger, while not perfect, is close enough when it comes to measuring attitude trends. What do the polls say?
They say 70 percent of the American public supports the war—and that support has been growing. They say 70 percent of the public approves of the way Bush is doing his job. And more broadly, they say that more than half (53 percent) of the country thinks America is on the right track.
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Sunday, April 06, 2003
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How the peace movement blew it | csmonitor.com: "how can the peace be won? First, articulate a holistic critique of, and alternative to, Bush's postwar vision. Second, demand significant representation in the postwar "reconstruction regime," and if refused, infiltrate it with the coordinated efforts of international humanitarian and relief organizations. Third, force public scrutiny of companies that will be awarded billions of dollars of "reconstruction" contracts, especially those with close ties to the White House. More broadly, engage in unprecedented levels of education and protest to help the public understand how the coalition of arms and oil companies behind this war is reaping profits at the expense of America's healthcare, education, retirement, and criminal-justice systems - in short, our future."
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The Rural Opposition: Protesting Where Everybody Knows Your Name: It is one thing to speak up in a large crowd in a big city and quite another to do it amid the farm fields. The antiwar movement here has already learned that politics are intensely personal in communities where people do not pass each other without waving and the woman at Harmony's Village Square restaurant recognizes the voice of the caller ordering a pizza.
The anonymity of chanting among several hundred thousand in New York or San Francisco is unavailable on Lanesboro's Parkway Avenue, where Lydia O'Connor, whose son-in-law is in the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq, stood silently writing down names as the protesters passed. Some small-business people who say they oppose the war have not joined the marches, they say, for fear of alienating customers; others who have protested report receiving nasty looks and letters.
... In New York and San Francisco, rallies supporting and opposing the war compete for crowds and scream at each other across police cordons. Not in Lanesboro. Mr. Redalen, carrying his flag, and Mr Wright, with a "Wage Peace" sign, walked arm in arm at the head of the line, down Parkway Avenue and to the Lutheran church, where Mr. Redalen led those gathered for the potluck in a prayer.
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Statute Becomes Justice Department's Weapon of Choice
The Justice Department, buoyed by a series of court victories, appears to be gaining traction in prosecuting Americans linked to terrorism by using a once-obscure law that predates the Sept. 11 attacks.
Federal prosecutors in recent weeks have secured their first convictions under the 1996 law, which makes it a crime to offer "material support" to any group designated by the United States as a terrorist organization. The statute has become so useful that the Justice Department is exploring ways to cast an even wider legal net, despite objections from civil rights groups.
In several dozen cases both high profile and little noticed, the law has become the Justice Department's main weapon in pursuing people it contends are linked to terrorists. Part of the appeal for prosecutors is that they do not have to prove that the defendants actually supported terrorist attacks, only that they helped a group tied to terrorism.
Civil libertarians and defense lawyers, however, are increasing their criticism of the law and the department's aggressive use of it, saying the prosecutions smack of a McCarthylike notion of guilt by association. Critics say the law is so overly broad that people with no intention of helping terrorists are being prosecuted. Moreover, they accuse authorities of using strong-arm tactics to force pleas.
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Support the Warrior Not the War: Give Them Their Benefits!: "The House of Representatives have recently voted on the 2004 budget which will cut funding for veteran's health care and benefit programs by nearly $25 billion over the next ten years. It narrowly passed by a vote of 215 to 212, and came just a day after Congress passed a resolution to "Support Our Troops." How exactly does this vote support our troops? Does leaving our current and future veterans veterans without access to health care and compensation qualify as supporting them? The Veteran's Administration, plagued by recent budget cuts, has had to resort to charging new veterans entering into its system a yearly fee of $250 in order for them to receive treatment. It is a sad irony that the very people being sent to fight the war are going to have to pay to treat the effects of it. "
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UK troops told: Be just and strong: Lieutenant Colonel Tim Collins, 1st Battalion of the Royal Irish: "Iraq is steeped in history. It is the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood and the birthplace of Abraham. Tread lightly there. You will see things that no man could pay to see and you will have to go a long way to find a more decent, generous and upright people than the Iraqis. You will be embarrassed by their hospitality even though they have nothing. Don't treat them as refugees for they are in their own country. Their children will be poor, in years to come they will know that the light of liberation in their lives was brought by you."
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Wired News: Fears About DNA Testing Proposal
A Justice Department proposal to create a database containing the DNA of suspected terrorists has raised fears that the measure would lead to so-called DNA dragnets. The concern is that police could round up people of Middle Eastern origin and other targeted groups to force them to contribute genetic samples to the database.
The Terrorist Identification Database Act of 2003 is buried deep within the department's secretly drafted Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003 -- known colloquially as Patriot Act II. It would empower the attorney general to collect DNA samples for the purpose of "detecting, investigating, prosecuting, preventing or responding to terrorist activities."
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Justice Scalia says rights excessive, can be scaled down in wartime: "U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had this to say on Tuesday: "The Constitution just sets minimums ... Most of the rights that you enjoy go way beyond what the Constitution requires." According to Scalia, during wartime, "the protections will be ratcheted right down to the constitutional minimum." "
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Saturday, April 05, 2003
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Professors Protest as Students Debate
It is not easy being an old lefty on campus in this war.
At the University of Wisconsin at Madison, awash in antiwar protests in the Vietnam era, a columnist for a student newspaper took a professor to task for canceling classes to protest the war in Iraq, saying the university should reprimand her and refund tuition for the missed periods.
Irvine Valley College in Southern California sent faculty members a memo that warned them not to discuss the war unless it was specifically related to the course material. When professors cried censorship, the administration explained that the request had come from students.
Here at Amherst College, many students were vocally annoyed this semester when 40 professors paraded into the dining hall with antiwar signs. One student confronted a protesting professor and shoved him.
Some students here accuse professors of behaving inappropriately, of not knowing their place.
... The students' attitudes have many possible explanations. There is no draft this time. Students on small liberal arts campuses like this one are more diverse than those of the 60's and 70's. More receive financial aid, and many are more concerned about their careers than about protesting. But the students have also been pulled toward a more conservative mainstream than their parents.
....A nationwide survey of freshmen by the University of California at Los Angeles over the last 37 years reflected other shifts from Sept. 11. This year, more students called themselves conservative than in other recent surveys, and 45 percent supported an increase in military spending, more than double the percentage in 1993.
... My job is not to get my students to agree with me," Professor O'Connell insisted.
Still, he conceded, `There is a second when I hear them, and my heart just falls."
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Friday, April 04, 2003
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DaveNet : NY Times pulls back: "All my links into the NY Times archive that are older than 30 days are broken. I suspected this day would come, eventually. Advertising doesn't pay for Web publications. It probably doesn't pay for print pubs either anymore. The business model for news is gyrating wildly. So much uncertainty. But one thing is certain, the Times will be missed on the Web."
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Sober Replies to Speculative Questions: "His father, Leo Brooks Sr., is a former Army major general, who after his retirement in 1984 was named Philadelphia's managing director, the city's top appointed position. He held that job during the confrontation with the radical group Move in May 1985, which ended when the police dropped a bomb on a rowhouse, causing a fire that killed 11 people. Mr. Brooks announced his resignation 10 days after the incident, and he was cleared of all criminal liability by a Philadelphia grand jury three years later. General Brooks's brother Leo Brooks Jr. is also a brigadier general and commandant of cadets at West Point, the academy's No. 2 position. At West Point, Vince Brooks stood out among a group of standouts. In his senior year in 1979-80, he was elected first captain, the leader of the 4,338-member corps of cadets, a title held before him by John J. Pershing, Douglas MacArthur and William Westmoreland, among others. He was the first black cadet in the academy's 177-year history to hold the position. Twenty-two years later he was the first member of his class to be nominated for flag rank. He was confirmed by the Senate last year as a brigadier general, the third member of his family to wear a star on his shoulders."
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Tuesday, April 01, 2003
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THIS WAR IS NOT WORKING by Peter Arnett. "I am still in shock and awe at being fired. There is enormous sensitivity within the US government to reports coming out from Baghdad. They don't want credible news organisations reporting from here because it presents them with enormous problems."
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Sunday, March 30, 2003
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Ritter says US will lose in Iraq: "We do not have the military means to take over Baghdad and for this reason I believe the defeat of the United States in this war is inevitable," he said. "Every time we confront Iraqi troops we may win some tactical battles, as we did for ten years in Vietnam but we will not be able to win this war, which in my opinion is already lost," Ritter added. "We find ourselves... facing a nation of 23 million, with armed elements numbering around 7 million --who are concentrated at urban areas. We will not win this fight. America will lose this war," said Mr. Ritter.
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Saturday, March 29, 2003
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Friday, March 28, 2003
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US Department of Laughs: The US government has a new website, http://www.ready.gov/. It's another attempt at scare mongering in the style of the old "duck and cover" advice after WWII. The fun thing is that these pictures are so ambiguous they could mean anything! Here are a few interpretations...
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Power tool: ... Tomahawk missiles. Since they were first used in the 1991 conflict, they have become the ultimate symbol of US military power. Oliver Burkeman reveals how a hi-tech weapon that promised blood-free combat changed the way America thinks about war
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Ladies' Tea Boils Over as Saudis Rail at U.S.: RIYADH, Saudi Arabia -- The invitation one afternoon this week was for a ladies' tea -- a social event at the home of the U.S. ambassador's wife, Ann Jordan...
... the Americans needed to hear what they had to say. The other Saudi women nodded in agreement. Jordan looked vaguely alarmed.
"This war is making people pro-Saddam, because it's not fair that you come from outside and remove a president, even if he is a dictator," she declared. "You thought the Iraqis would join you and fight for their freedom, but people instead of fighting for their freedom are standing behind him. And this isn't what anyone wanted to see!"
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Uniting for Peace - Why The U.N. General Assembly Has Authority To Speak on the War on Iraq In the Event of Security Council Stalemate By MARJORIE COHN
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We Work for Peace and Justice Building a movement powerful enough to stop the war in Iraq or to successfully curb a next war in Syria or Iran or Venezuela, involves many factors. Among these, and perhaps the most fundamental, is sufficient numbers. Statement signed by Roy, Martinez, Zinn, Chomsky, etc.."
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Haunting Thoughts After a Fierce Battle: "I have my wife and kids to go back home to... I don't want them to think I'm a killer."
... Many of the Iraqis, he said, attacked headlong into the cutting fire of tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles.
"I wouldn't call it bravery," he said. "I'd call it stupidity. We value a soldier's life so much more than they do. I mean, an AK-47 isn't going to do nothing against a Bradley. I'd love to know what Saddam is telling his people.
"When I go home, people will want to treat me like a hero, but I'm not," he went on. "I'm a Christian man. If I have to kill the other guy, I will, but it doesn't make me a hero. I just want to go home to my wife and kids."
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Antiwar Movement Morphs From Wild-Eyed to Civil: "With the war against Iraq in its second week, the most influential antiwar coalitions have shifted away from large-scale disruptive tactics and stepped up efforts to appeal to mainstream Americans" [long article]
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Thursday, March 27, 2003
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Crude Vision: How Oil Interests Obscured US Government Focus On Chemical Weapons Use by Saddam Hussein: Key figures associated with the Bush Administration, in particular Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, pressed Saddam Hussein during the mid '80's to approve the Aqaba pipeline project from Iraq to Jordan.
...the break in US-Iraq relations occurred not after Iraq used chemical weapons on the Iranians, nor after Iraq gassed its own Kurdish people, nor even after Iraq invaded Kuwait, but rather, followed Saddam's rejection of the Aqaba pipeline deal.
"In their own words, we now see that for Administration officials, a dictator is a friend of the United States when he is willing to make an oily deal, and a mortal enemy when he is not" said Vallette
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Wednesday, March 26, 2003
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Baghdad Empties, but Fills With Foreboding: "they feared what might befall Iraqis like themselves if, faced with continued stiff resistance by Mr. Hussein's troops, Mr. Bush did what his father did at the end of the Persian Gulf war in 1991, and decided that a settlement was preferable to a long and grisly campaign to topple Mr. Hussein."
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Monday, March 24, 2003
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sunspot.net - maryland's online community: "Michelle Waters, the oldest of the dead Marine's four sisters, criticized the U.S. government for starting the hostilities. "It's all for nothing, that war could have been prevented," she said last night in the living room of the family home, tears running down her cheeks. "Now, we're out of a brother. [President] Bush is not out of a brother. We are.""
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Saturday, March 22, 2003
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American Politics Journal -- Big Babies: "God Damn You by Alan Bisbort Mar. 20, 2003 -- HARTFORD (apj.us) -- ...and I mean that sincerely, George W. Bush. Far be it for me, a sinful man who has backslid more times than Robert Downey Jr., to personally single you and your murderous cohorts out. I gladly defer to Bishop Tutu and the Dalai Lama and Jimmy Carter and the Pope, more conversant in things scriptural or theological than I, or any of your unenlightened inner circle, will ever be. I will let them speak the truth, as far as any of us can know it here on this earth. To a person, they condemn your most unholy and unjust of wars in Iraq."
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Innocents in Uniform: "Should not the proper minimum in any war be loss of human life, period -- which in this case includes Iraqi soldiers, too?"
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Marching Forward: "It may be, however, that the greater significance of the protests lies in what they portend for politics here at home. While antiwar movements are rarely successful in their immediate goal, they are often prescient indicators of the national mood. Historically, antiwar movements have nearly always put forth larger critiques of how American society is organized, and have often been entwined with powerful social movements focused on domestic problems. "
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Iraq marshes vanishing: "The United Nations has warned of a growing ecological catastrophe in southern Iraq. Satellite images show that less than 7% of the Mesopotamian marshes remain intact, the UN revealed at the World Water Forum in Kyoto, Japan. The area where the rivers Tigris and Euphrates join in southern Iraq is thought by some to be the original site of the Garden of Eden. By 2000, it was estimated that 90% of the natural wetland had disappeared, through drainage works and dams upstream which restrict the flow of the rivers.
...Iraq says its engineering programmes were for reclaiming agricultural land and that it was running a relocation programme for the benefit of the marsh dwellers. But human rights groups and western governments accuse Baghdad of draining the marshes as a tactic of political repression. Tens of thousands of army deserters, political opponents and others sought shelter there in the 1990s, Human Rights Watch says.
The Iraqi regime began large-scale hydro-engineering projects in the marshes, building dams, canals and embankments. Water levels began to drop. In 1992 and 1993 reports emerged of a military campaign to flush out the wetlands. Refugees fleeing to Iran described artillery and aerial attacks on civilian areas, arrests and executions, mine-laying and the destruction of homes and properties.
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Thursday, March 20, 2003
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Red alert? Stay home, await word: "If the nation escalates to "red alert," which is the highest in the color-coded readiness against terror, you will be assumed by authorities to be the enemy if you so much as venture outside your home, the state [New Jersey]'s anti-terror czar says."
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Arrogance of Power: Today, I Weep for my Country. by US Senator Robert Byrd Speech delivered on the floor of the US Senate:
... We flaunt our superpower status with arrogance. We treat UN Security Council members like ingrates who offend our princely dignity by lifting their heads from the carpet. Valuable alliances are split.
After war has ended, the United States will have to rebuild much more than the country of Iraq. We will have to rebuild America's image around the globe.
The case this Administration tries to make to justify its fixation with war is tainted by charges of falsified documents and circumstantial evidence. We cannot convince the world of the necessity of this war for one simple reason. This is a war of choice.
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Wednesday, March 19, 2003
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Doomsday Predictions, By Frederick Vreeland, former US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for the Near East and Ambassador to Morocco. Prior to that he served for 35 years in foreign service posts including anti-terrorist assignments for both the State Department and CIA.
"Yes, there is a clear link between Saddam's Iraq and Muslim terrorism" said several friends during a recent month spent in the Arab world. "The link is that an American attack against Iraq will immediately create a massive increase in terrorist volunteers throughout the Arab-Islamic region.".
These words came from highly sophisticated Moroccans who have devoted their energies and assets to forging links with the United States, where they have their children educated and their economic interests invested. Morocco is the Arab country closest to America, obviously geographically but arguably also psychologically. Its conservative, secular-oriented, democracy-aspiring elite, have increasingly looked to New York and Washington for ties that would be at least as important as those with Paris and the European Union. And part of their over-all aspiration is to undercut any growth in the Islamic fundamentalism that they fear for their own country and for the entire Muslim arc from Casablanca to Jakarta.
Many progressive, moderate, Westernized Arabs consider themselves more antiterrorist than their friends in the US because they are closer to it and have more to fear from it. They have been barring the door against fundamentalism in their own countries, and trumpeting the advantages of modern democracy, as well as desperately seeking entry into the Western global economy. But they are fearful of American insensitivity to the realities of the Islamic world.
They define Washington's current foreign policy as the most effective possible formula for fortifying and galvanizing the fundamentalism that they have so far been successfully curbing. "America attacking Saddam -- which we condoned when he invaded sovereign Kuwait -- will put Washington in exactly the same category of public-enemy into which Iraq placed itself by that invasion in 1990,"they maintain. "The big difference is that while we Arabs were divided in our attitude toward the Gulf War, we will be totally united against America, if it at aggresses Iraq."
"Do your leaders understand that a US-British attack on one Arab country will devastate the delicate balance that has kept our countries tranquil, and will sew pandemonium and murderous anti-Western actions. That would be totally contrary to the US stated aim of bringing Democracy to the Arab world; it would deprive us of Democracy for decades."
They also say that Iran's failure as a fully Islamized state is just now starting to turn young Muslims against the allure of fundamentalism. This tendency would be reversed by an attack on Iraq, according to their belief that "Bombing Baghdad today will spawn a million Bin Ladens tomorrow." They cheered our hunt for Bin Laden last year but see war against Iraq as playing into his hands this year. Similarly, they firmly oppose Saddam Hussein, but warn that our attack will increase his popularity among the Muslim masses.
In Rome these Arab fears were immediately brushed aside when I discussed them with a senior foreign policy advisor to Italy's Prime Minister, one of those who guides Silvio Berlusconi on his pro-US stance. My Italian friend, who also maintains good contacts on the other side of the Mediterranean, acknowledged that these are widely held Arab positions, but dismissed them. "The war will be short" he replied, "and once Saddam is gone, all these attitudes will change, as the Muslims hurry to join the victorious side."
This man's experience in international affairs runs deep and he speaks with authority. But I remember him assuring me 15 years ago that the Europeans alone would rapidly solve the problems of ex-Yugoslavia, and he promised that the action would be lightening-quick. As one of the actors on the scene at the time he had believed that the comportment of others was predictable. He had been proven wrong in all three predictions.
For America's leaders to assure us they will have the situation in the Middle East under control after a short, containable war is equally unconvincing and unrealistic. When taking decisions regarding the fate of this volatile region, Washington must listen to, and take properly into consideration, the doomsday predictions coming from the Arab world.
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Media giant's [pro-war] rally sponsorship raises questions: Some of the biggest rallies this month have endorsed President Bush's strategy against Saddam Hussein, and the common thread linking most of them is Clear Channel Worldwide Inc., the nation's largest owner of radio stations.
In a move that has raised eyebrows in some legal and journalistic circles, Clear Channel radio stations in Atlanta, Cleveland, San Antonio, Cincinnati and other cities have sponsored rallies attended by up to 20,000 people. The events have served as a loud rebuttal to the more numerous but generally smaller anti-war rallies....
...In 1987 the FCC repealed the Fairness Doctrine, which required broadcasters to cover controversial issues in their community and to do so by offering balancing views. With that obligation gone, Morris said, "radio can behave more like newspapers, with opinion pages and editorials." "They've just begun stretching their legs, being more politically active," Morris said. "
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BBC NEWS - Robin Cook's resignation speech: "Ironically, it is only because Iraq's military forces are so weak that we can even contemplate its invasion. Some advocates of conflict claim that Saddam's forces are so weak, so demoralised and so badly equipped that the war will be over in a few days. We cannot base our military strategy on the assumption that Saddam is weak and at the same time justify pre-emptive action on the claim that he is a threat. "
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Tuesday, March 18, 2003
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Michael Moore letter to Bush : "Dear Governor Bush: So today is what you call "the moment of truth," the day that "France and the rest of world have to show their cards on the table." I'm glad to hear that this day has finally arrived. Because, I gotta tell ya, having survived 440 days of your lying and conniving, I wasn't sure if I could take much more. So I'm glad to hear that today is Truth Day, 'cause I got a few truths I would like to share with you:"
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The New York Review of Books: Bush's Tax Plan--The Dangers: Joseph E.Stiglitz - "By now, it is well known how Bush's tax package favors the rich, but the degree to which it does so is not well appreciated. While 50 percent of all tax filers would receive $100 or less, and two thirds $500 or less, Bush himself, according to Bloomberg News, would have saved $44,500 on his 2001 tax returns, and Cheney $326,555. According to an estimate in the Financial Times, John Snow, Bush's secretary of the Treasury, would save some $600,000. The calculations of the Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center show that more than half of the benefits of exempting corporate dividends from the individual income tax would flow to the top 5 percent of the population. All the taxpayers in that group earn more than $140,000 and they have an average income of $350,000. The 226,000 richest tax filers, those with incomes over $1 million, will receive a benefit roughly equal in size to the 120 million tax filers with incomes below $100,000"
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The New York Review of Books: The Wrong War: Avishai Margalit : "If you were to ask American officials after September 11 what the enemy is, you would hear three different answers: world terrorism, weapons of mass destruction in the hands of evildoers like Saddam Hussein, and radical Islam of the sort promoted by Osama bin Laden. I believe that the muddleheadedness in the American thinking about the war against Iraq comes from conflating these three answers as if somehow they were one and the same. In fact they are very different, with very different and incompatible practical implications. In my view radical Islam of the sort promoted by bin Laden is and should be regarded as the enemy. And fighting Saddam Hussein will greatly help this enemy rather than set him back. This will be true even if the war is successful, let alone if it turns out to be unsuccessful."
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The New York Review of Books: The Right Way: Michael Walzer "The right way to oppose the war is to argue that the present system of containment and control is working and can be made to work better. This means that we should acknowledge the awfulness of the Iraqi regime and the dangers it poses, and then aim to deal with those dangers through coercive measures short of war. But this isn't a policy easy to defend, for we know exactly what coercive measures are necessary, and we also know how costly they are."
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UN Resolution 1441 Does Not Authorize Force: "According to the UN charter, there are only two possible situations in which one country can take military action against another. The first is in individual or collective self-defence - a right under customary international law which is expressly preserved by Article 51 of the UN charter. The second is where, under Article 42 of the charter, the security council decides that force is necessary "to maintain or restore international peace and security" where its decisions have not been complied with. In other words, where a UN resolution clearly authorises military action. "
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Monday, March 17, 2003
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The Man Who Would Be President: "When the regime finally changes in Baghdad, and Saddam Hussein is dead, in custody or in exile, 70 years of Iraqi independence will end, political authority will pass into the hands of George W. Bush and Western rule will be planted on Arab soil for the first time since the French and British left the region in the middle of the last century. What then happens to Iraq's 23 million people, its oil and its relations with its neighbors will remain the personal responsibility of Mr. Bush and his successors in the White House until one of them chooses to surrender it."
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Why The U.S. Inspires Scorn: " for a growing number of observers outside the United States, the central issue in the crisis is no longer Iraq or Hussein. It is America and how to deal with its disproportionate strength as a world power."
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Sunday, March 16, 2003
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2003 State of the Universe Address - By Swami Beyondananda: "I have to be blunt here -- the folks we have in charge are fossils fueled by fossil fuels. And in the reptilian brain, problems aren't solved, they're attacked. Like the War on Poverty. Remember that? I'm happy to report that it's finally over. The poor people have all surrendered. And take the War on Drugs -- please! How many billions have they spent? My solution is cheaper and more effective ... improve reality!
Now we have the War on Terrorism. We're going to terrorize those terrorists into giving up terrorism if it's the last thing we do! And it just might be. The good news is -- and I have it on the Highest Authority -- there will indeed be peace on Earth. Whether we humans are around to enjoy it, that is up to us...
... the folks we have in charge are fossils fueled by fossil fuels. And in the reptilian brain, problems aren't solved, they're attacked. Like the War on Poverty. Remember that? I'm happy to report that it's finally over. The poor people have all urrendered. And take the War on Drugs -- please! How many billions have they spent? My solution is cheaper and more effective ... improve reality!
Now we have the War on Terrorism. We're going to terrorize those terrorists into giving up terrorism if it's the last thing we do! And it just might be. The good news is -- and I have it on the Highest Authority -- there will indeed be peace on Earth. Whether we humans are around to enjoy it, that is up to us.
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t r u t h o u t - Massive Human Slaughter: "Civilian Iraq is utterly defenseless and totally unprepared for the carnage that is about to be visited upon them. It is murder plain and simple, murder on an unimaginable scale. There is no "war" looming, no "conflict" with Iraq, and no "standoff." What exists is a vast military force poised to inflict death and destruction on a major population center...
... We hear day after day that "Time is running out." Running out on what, on who? On Saddam Hussein? On a five thousand year old city? On 24 million men, women and children? Or is time running out on the spirit of America? On the soul of our people? Why is it that the world no longer cherishes American values? Could it be because we no longer cherish them ourselves? "
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Audacious Mission, Awesome Risks Bold War Plan Emphasizes Lightning Attacks and Complex Logistics "The plan is probably one of the most risky in our history as it launches us off into terra incognita for the U.S.: our first preemptive or preventive war; our first attempt to democratize an Islamic state; and establishment of a very narrow beachhead in the midst of a billion undefeated Muslims"
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Saturday, March 15, 2003
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A Chorus Against War | Howard Zinn: "The anti-war movement will not likely surrender to the martial atmosphere. The hundreds of thousands who marched in Washington and San Francisco and New York and Boston--and in villages, towns, and cities all over the country from Georgia to Montana--will not meekly withdraw. Unlike the shallow support for the war, the opposition to the war is deep and cannot be easily dislodged or frightened into silence. Indeed, the anti-war feelings are bound to become more intense"
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Anger on Iraq Seen as New Qaeda Recruiting Tool: " On three continents, Al Qaeda and other terror organizations have intensified their efforts to recruit young Muslim men, tapping into rising anger about the American campaign for war in Iraq, according to intelligence and law enforcement officials. "
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Friday, March 14, 2003
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Germans Revisit War's Agony, Ending a Taboo: " the new awareness of the Allied bombings and the devastation they wrought has become an important element in German opposition to the expected American war on Iraq. What people like Ms. Lang and Ms. John, both antiwar activists in Dresden, have been saying is something like this: We have direct knowledge of the gruesome effects of war and we don't want anybody else to experience what we have experienced."
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'Bush Wins': The Left's Nightmare Scenario: the antiwar movement would be well advised to plan for a third scenario: "Bush Wins." In this third scenario, the war is over quickly with relatively low U.S. casualties, some sort of mechanism for transitional rule is put in place, and President Bush and his policies gain unprecedented power and prestige. From my recent conversations with organizers and their latest pronouncements, it is clear that this possibility has yet to be addressed. Waiting much longer could spell disaster for the antiwar movement....
.... Interestingly, while the organizers of the antiwar movement are not paying enough attention to the ramifications of a war that follows President Bush's script, their constituents, the thousands of students whose energy and devotion are driving the movement, are full of ideas on how to proceed in such an eventuality.
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George W. Queeg: Krugma - What really has the insiders panicked, however, is the irresponsibility of Mr. Bush and his team, their almost childish unwillingness to face up to problems that they don't feel like dealing with right now. I've talked in this column about the administration's eerie passivity in the face of a stalling economy and an exploding budget deficit: reality isn't allowed to intrude on the obsession with long-run tax cuts. That same "don't bother me, I'm busy" attitude is driving foreign policy experts, inside and outside the government, to despair.
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Torture, Beyond Saddam: - Nicholas Kristof - The world has turned its back on the Kurds more times than I can count, and there are signs that we're planning to betray them again. The U.S. was so desperate to bribe Turkey into our coalition that it was willing to allow tens of thousands of Turkish troops into Iraq's Kurdish areas...
... "The Turkish government has been far worse to the Kurds than Saddam has," one well-educated Kurd said bitterly. His comment stunned me, for Turkey never used poison gas or conducted mass executions as Saddam did, but one Kurd after another said the same thing. They described past Turkish military techniques like raping wives in front of husbands, or assembling villagers to watch men being tied and dragged to their death behind tanks, and they noted that Turkey had been less tolerant of Kurdish language and culture than Saddam.
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Bombs and Blood: Bob Herbert - "We should outlaw the term collateral damage. Above all else, the damage done by the weapons of war is to the flesh, muscle, bone and psyches of real people, some of them children. If we're willing to inflict such terrible damage, we should acknowledge it and not hide behind euphemisms."
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"Many Thousands" of US Troops Could Die in Iraq: "A consensus appears to be emerging that U.S. deaths during an operation in Iraq will likely run into the thousands. The two concerns most often cited to account for significant U.S. fatality rates are the likelihood of urban combat and of Saddam Hussein's use of chemical and biological weapons."
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Ex-U.N. Inspector Warns of War Consequences: The United States could face decades of worldwide political and economic turmoil should it take military action against Iraq without United Nations consent, a former chief U.N. arms inspector warned a Las Vegas audience Wednesday. "If the United States acts without such approval, then I frankly fear the consequences of such action," said Richard Butler, who from 1997 to 1999 worked to disarm Iraq as executive chairman of the United Nations Special Commission. "It will be a terrible business and its consequences incalculable in terms of the number of lives lost and the cost....
..."(Iraq) has come to be seen as much more about ... the question of what will the U.S. do with its great power than about the disarmament of Saddam Hussein," Butler said. "If you listen to the French, the Germans and the Russians, you could be given to thinking that they've decided the bigger problem in the world right now is the uses to which (President Bush) will put American power.
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Thursday, March 13, 2003
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China introduces execution vans "The introduction of mobile execution vans, in which condemned prisoners are put to death by lethal injection, has been hailed in Chinese media as "a more humane method of dispatch".
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Bill Moyers on Patriotism and the American Flag : "I put it on to take it back. The flag's been hijacked and turned into a logo -- the trademark of a monopoly on patriotism. On those Sunday morning talk shows, official chests appear adorned with the flag as if it is the good housekeeping seal of approval. During the State of the Union, did you notice Bush and Cheney wearing the flag? How come? No administration's patriotism is ever in doubt, only its policies. And the flag bestows no immunity from error. When I see flags sprouting on official lapels, I think of the time in China when I saw Mao's little red book on every official's desk, omnipresent and unread. But more galling than anything are all those moralistic ideologues in Washington sporting the flag in their lapels while writing books and running Web sites and publishing magazines attacking dissenters as un-American."
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The New Yorker: Seymour Hersh: "Khashoggi is still brokering. In January of this year, he arranged a private lunch, in France, to bring together Harb Saleh al-Zuhair, a Saudi industrialist whose family fortune includes extensive holdings in construction, electronics, and engineering companies throughout the Middle East, and Richard N. Perle, the chairman of the Defense Policy Board, who is one of the most outspoken and influential American advocates of war with Iraq....
Perle, in crisscrossing between the public and the private sectors, has put himself in a difficult position—one not uncommon to public men. He is credited with being the intellectual force behind a war that not everyone wants and that many suspect, however unfairly, of being driven by American business interests. There is no question that Perle believes that removing Saddam from power is the right thing to do. At the same time, he has set up a company that may gain from a war. "
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The Lie Of The U.S. Military -- Tough gritty American soldiers protect freedom of liberal S.F. columnist? Or the other way around?
More than ever before in recent history, the otherwise worthy U.S. military is right now in service not of the people, not of the national security, but of the current government regime and its corporate interests. Has it always been this way? Of course. But this time, with our smirky Enron president and cash-hungry CEO administration, it's never been so flagrant, or insulting, or invidious.
Our soldiers are not protecting our freedoms. They are not preventing more terrorism. They are not guaranteeing continued free speech. Because the only true threat to such freedoms is coming from within.
There is every indication that our own government, more than any other in the Western world, is the one that would like our free speech quelled, dissenting voices silenced, proofs of wrongdoing or proofs of corporate greedmongering that are used as a cheap excuse to massacre an estimated half-million Iraqis, eliminated....
What is keeping America free is not the military -- it is independent thought. It is the progressive provocative evil "hippie vibe" that refuses to let Bush completely molest the nation.
Because BushCo would love nothing more than for everyone to shut the hell up so it can bomb in peace. And they are trying. E-mail snooping, Homeland Security, the draconian Patriot Act, new wiretap..."
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George Monbiot: Out of the wreckage: "The men who run the world are democrats at home and dictators abroad. They came to power by means of national elections which possess, at least, the potential to represent the will of their people. Their citizens can dismiss them without bloodshed, and challenge their policies in the expectation that, if enough people join in, they will be obliged to listen. Internationally, they rule by brute force.
They and the global institutions they run exercise greater economic and political control over the people of the poor world than its own governments do. But those people can no sooner challenge or replace them than the citizens of the Soviet Union could vote Stalin out of office. Their global governance is, by all the classic political definitions, tyrannical.
But while citizens' means of overthrowing this tyranny are limited, it seems to be creating some of the conditions for its own destruction. Over the past week, the US government has threatened to dismantle two of the institutions which have, until recently, best served its global interests. "
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The United States of America has gone mad - John le Carré "America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War. The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything Osama bin Laden could have hoped for in his nastiest dreams. As in McCarthy times, the freedoms that have made America the envy of the world are being systematically eroded...
How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America’s anger from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history. But they swung it. A recent poll tells us that one in two Americans now believe Saddam was responsible for the attack on the World Trade Centre. But the American public is not merely being misled. It is being browbeaten and kept in a state of ignorance and fear. The carefully orchestrated neurosis should carry Bush and his fellow conspirators nicely into the next election."
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New Scientist - artificial hippocampus: "The world's first brain prosthesis - an artificial hippocampus - is about to be tested in California. Unlike devices like cochlear implants, which merely stimulate brain activity, this silicon chip implant will perform the same processes as the damaged part of the brain it is replacing."
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Tuesday, March 11, 2003
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VIETNAM 2 PREFLIGHT CHECK
1. Cabal of oldsters who won't listen to outside advice? Check.
2. No understanding of ethnicities of the many locals? Check.
3. Imposing country boundaries drawn in Europe, not by the locals? Check.
4. Unshakeable faith in our superior technology? Check
5. France secretly hoping we fall on our asses? Check.
6. Russia secretly hoping we fall on our asses? Check.
7. China secretly hoping we fall on our asses? Check.
8. SecDef pushing a conflict the JCS never wanted? Check.
9. Fear we'll look bad if we back down now? Check.
10. Corrupt Texan in the WH? Check.
11. Land war in Asia? Check.
12. Right unhappy with outcome of previous war? Check.
13. Enemy easily moves in/out of neighboring countries? Check.
14. Soldiers about to be dosed with *our own* chemicals? Check.
15. Friendly fire problem ignored instead of solved? Check.
16. Anti-Americanism up sharply in Europe? Check.
17. B-52 bombers? Check.
18. Helicopters that clog up on the local dust? Check.
19. In-fighting among the branches of the military? Check.
20. Locals that cheer us by day, hate us by night? Check.
21. Local experts ignored? Check.
22. Local politicians ignored? Check.
23. Locals used to conflicts lasting longer than the USA has been a country? Check.
24. Against advice, Prez won't raise taxes to pay for war? Check.
25. Blue water navy ships operating in brown water? Check.
26. Use of nukes hinted at if things don't go our way? Check.
27. Unpopular war? Check.
VIETNAM 2 YOU ARE CLEARED TO TAXI
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Monday, February 24, 2003
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U.S. on Diplomatic Warpath: "Senior U.S. officials have been quietly dispatched in recent days to the capitals of key Security Council countries where they are warning leaders to vote with the United States on Iraq or risk "paying a heavy price.""
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Allies hushed up weapons' destruction: "THE highest-ranking defector ever to turn informant on Saddam Hussein's government told United Nations weapons inspectors in 1995 that Iraq had destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks after the Gulf war. But UN inspectors hushed up that part of Hussein Kamel's story - which he also told to debriefers from British and United States intelligence - because they wanted to keep the pressure on Iraq to tell more. The revelation, reported in the US magazine Newsweek, raises new questions over claims by the US and Britain that Iraq has failed to account for vast stores of chemical and biological weapons. "
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Saturday, February 22, 2003
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Iran sues U.S. in world court for helping Saddam kill Iranians - SPIEGEL ONLINE A strange spectacle in court: As the USA prepares for a war against Iraq, it is being sued by Iran for its previous close relationship to Saddam Hussein. At the International Court of Justice, Teheran is accusing the United States of delivering dangerous chemicals and deadly viruses to Baghdad during the eighties.
The Hague - The oral deposition in Iran's suit against the United States in the matter of the destruction of Iranian oil platforms in 1987/88 began on Monday. The suit was presented to the highest court of the United Nations in 1992 and has been handled in writing ever since.
Teheran accuses Washington of the destruction of three oil platforms in the Persial Gulf. The US argues that the attack was in retaliation of Iranian attacks of ships sailing under the American flag. The court has scheduled three weeks to hear arguments from both sides.
The Iranian representatives accuse the USA of having provided Iraq with raw materials for chemical and biological weapons at the end of the 80's. The US government had delivered dangerous chemicals and deadly viruses to the Iraqi government for its war.
Washington had provided aid to Iraq in this, and other ways, in its war against Iran, said Iran's representative at the start of the oral depositions.
Mohamat Zahedin-Labbaf, as the spokesman of the Iranian delegation, emphasized that the US could not dispute the destruction of the platforms. The US version, that it had been a matter of defense against Iranian missile attacks of ships under the US flag doesn't hold water, he said.
In any case, the USA had violated the Friendship Treaty which both countries had signed in 1955. It is this Treaty which constitutes the legal basis for these proceedings, according to a 1996 decision by the highest court of the United Nations. Both delegations will be able to argue their positions in detail during the next three weeks.
Professor Bruno Summa, a German expert on international law, was sworn in as the new judge at the beginning of the proceedings on Monday. The longtime University Professor at the University of Munich was elected as one of the 15 regular judges of the Supreme Court in the Hague Peace Palace.
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Wednesday, February 19, 2003
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Behind the Great Divide: "much speculation why Europe and the U.S. are suddenly at such odds. Is it about culture? About history? But I haven't seen much discussion of an obvious point: We have different views partly because we see different news....
some U.S. media outlets — operating in an environment in which anyone who questions the administration's foreign policy is accused of being unpatriotic — have taken it as their assignment to sell the war, not to present a mix of information that might call the justification for war into question."
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NewsWeek: Turkey Wants Northern Iraq. Period.: "Turkey is demanding that it send 60,000 to 80,000 of its own troops into northern Iraq to establish "strategic positions'' across a "security arc'' as much as 140 to 170 miles deep in Iraq. That would take Turkish troops almost halfway to Baghdad. "
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This is the presentation Sr. Joan Chittister gave at the UN Conference, in Geneva: "It is time for religious women to put the world on notice that we will not go on silently supporting war-either its victims or its executioners, not only to make safe the world but to make real the religions we revere, so that life before death can come, as God wants, for us all. Say yes to life. Yes to life. Always, always yes to life."
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Tuesday, February 18, 2003
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The Weapon We Gave Iraq - Depleted Uranium: "Iraqi researchers say that the epicentre ("Ground Zero") for DU effects is around the city of Basra, in southern Iraq. It was here, in 1991, that U.S. and coalition jets ravaged the retreating Iraqi army, leaving behind the smoldering hulks of thousands of vehicles. The U.S. and British air forces expended an estimated 300 tonnes of depleted-uranium ammunition in and around this area; it has since been dubbed the "Highway of Death."
The preponderance of birth defects among children born in the Basra region over the past decade defies explanation....
Should U.S.-led forces again invade Iraq, and should Canadians join them (something that has not been ruled out by Defence Minister John McCallum), they would probably move from Kuwait straight up the Highway of Death to Basra. The aerosol from the depleted-uranium-coated shells has long since dissipated from the hulks of Iraqi vehicles along the road. But Iraqi scientists believe the particles remain in the desert sands. Uranium possesses a radioactive half-life of 200 million years; it would still pose a serious risk.
Despite increasing evidence linking DU to degenerative health disorders, the British and U.S. militaries steadfastly refuse to suspend their use of such weapons."
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Clinton on media bias': "there are five people in America with more than two hours on radio. Who are they? Howard Stern. Near as I can tell, old Howard's not political. If he is, he's done a great job of hiding it. Don Imus, who's more Republican than Democrat. And the other three are Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, and Sean Hannity. Who are very outspoken, and -- on the right wing of the Republican Party " [but not a very interesting interview overall]
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Friday, February 14, 2003
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Reckless Administration May Reap Disastrous Consequences
By US Senator Robert Byrd, February 12, 2003
To contemplate war is to think about the most horrible of human experiences. On this February day, as this nation stands at the brink of battle, every American on some level must be contemplating the horrors of war.
Yet, this Chamber is, for the most part, silent -- ominously, dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing.
We stand passively mute in the United States Senate, paralyzed by our own uncertainty, seemingly stunned by the sheer turmoil of events. Only on the editorial pages of our newspapers is there much substantive discussion of the prudence or imprudence of engaging in this particular war.
And this is no small conflagration we contemplate. This is no simple attempt to defang a villain. No. This coming battle, if it materializes, represents a turning point in U.S. foreign policy and possibly a turning point in the recent history of the world.
This nation is about to embark upon the first test of a revolutionary doctrine applied in an extraordinary way at an unfortunate time. The doctrine of preemption -- the idea that the United States or any other nation can legitimately attack a nation that is not imminently threatening but may be threatening in the future -- is a radical new twist on the traditional idea of self defense. It appears to be in contravention of international law and the UN Charter.
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Wednesday, February 12, 2003
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David Corn - the banning of Rabbi Lerner: "He has been a leading Jewish voice against the hawks of Israel and a supporter of Palestinian rights, while calling himself a Zionist. So it was natural that his name was floated as a speaker for the protest. Not In Our Name and United for Peace & Justice were two of the four coalitions behind the event. ... But International ANSWER, another of the organizers, said no. Lerner's crime: he had dared to criticize ANSWER, an outfit run by members of the Workers World Party, for using antiwar demonstrations to put forward what he considers to be anti-Israel propaganda. "
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Principles of the Nuremberg Tribunal: "We sentenced Nazi leaders to death for waging a war of aggression," says International Law Professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. By contrast, Prof. Boyle wants merely to impeach George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft for their plans to invade Iraq and create a police state in America.
[But the alternative looks pretty grim too. See: Order of Presidential Succession]
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Students, faculty express opinions on war: "The 4th floor of Lucas Hall displays a bulletin board of anti-war sentiments. Patriots for Peace, as this montage of anti-war cartoons, information on patriotism, and upcoming events is titled, is maintained by Gerda Ray, associate professor of UMSL's History Department."
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Tuesday, February 11, 2003
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Nachman' for Jan. 29: SPENCER: Oh they can protest whatever they want. And what's upsetting to me is that the United States, our people, the reason we're such a great country is because we hold dear the right to protest, to question our government. And I really feel like a lot of this movement has hijacked that right to advance their own political agenda.
When you strip away the communists and the socialists, the environmentalists, the anarchists, and those who are just there for the beer and the babes, the skeleton of actual antiwar protesters really isn't that big. So I think we have to take it with a grain of salt what this movement actually is.
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Daniel Ellsberg's comments.. on Bush's reasons for first-use nuclear threats against Iraq:
... Bush administration has prepared us to the idea of responding to chemical or biological weapons with nuclear weapons. That turns out to have been the function of this new category, which at first puzzled me, of "weapons of mass destruction." I've been in the arms control field for nearly forty years now, and I'd never heard of this "weapons of mass destruction" category, which lumps together biological, chemical, and nuclear. Between chemical and nuclear there's an enormous difference of destructiveness, by a factor of at least a thousand. So what's the purpose of lumping them together in this new category, "WMD"?
... A whole lot of strategists of the ilk of Wolfowitz and Perle and so forth, since the Cold War ended, think, "Well, now, the gloves are off. The big stick is going to be nuclear. They've been looking for a chance to show that when we threaten nuclear weapons, believe the threat."
But this is what they cannot conceive. They don't understand Vietnam at all, even just from a military point of view. We couldn't get people to risk their lives to inform us about the Vietcong, but they would risk their lives to inform the Vietcong about us, so they knew every move we were making, and we didn't know any moves they were making. That didn't mean they could beat us from one year to the next, but it meant that we couldn't possibly beat them. We couldn't find them unless they wanted us to find them.
Well, that's going to be the same with al Qaeda. After Iraq, we are not going to be able to get any degree of cooperation from governments with large Muslim populations. Al Qaeda can grow and do what they want—they're safe, essentially. That doesn't mean they're going to beat the U.S., and it doesn't mean they're going to drive us out of the Middle East. But it does mean they're going to be able to kill a huge number of American civilians, much more than if we had the police and intelligence cooperation of Arab and Muslim states, which the Iraq war will destroy.
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Sunday, February 09, 2003
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Ralph Nader on Oil and the War Against Iraq: "The connections between the Bush administration and the oil industry are clear and pervasive. A remarkable 41 members of the administration have ties to the industry, and both the President and the Vice President are both former oil executives. National Security Adviser Condaleeza Rice is a former director of Chevron. President Bush took more than $1.8 million in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industries in the 2000 election. The Bush people and the oil moguls do agree with one another in part because they are one another...
The American people have a right to know what is being discussed in these meetings about the oil industry's designs on this gigantic pool of petroleum and what, if any, assurances they are being given by what is supposed to be our government.
Clearly, there is a better means of achieving U.S. energy security. Instead of relying on costly military ventures in unstable countries to ensure a steady source of oil, we need a national energy security strategy that is expeditious, self-sufficient and environmentally sustainable. "
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France-Germany Hatching a Plan: "Germany and France are working on a new plan to try to avert war in Iraq that would compel Baghdad to admit thousands of U.N. troops to enforce disarmament and tighter sanctions, a magazine said on Saturday. A German government spokesman confirmed Berlin and Paris were working together to find a peaceful alternative to war with Iraq, but would not provide any details of the efforts. "
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Saturday, February 08, 2003
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Justice Dept. Drafts Sweeping Expansion of Anti-Terrorism Act: by The Center for Public Integrity - "The Bush Administration is preparing a bold, comprehensive sequel to the USA Patriot Act passed in the wake of September 11, 2001, which will give the government broad, sweeping new powers to increase domestic intelligence-gathering, surveillance and law enforcement prerogatives, and simultaneously decrease judicial review and public access to information."
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Wednesday, February 05, 2003
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Monty Python's Terry Jones on pre-emptive strikes: "For some time now I've been really pissed off with Mr Johnson, who lives a couple of doors down the street. Well, him and Mr Patel, who runs the health food shop. They both give me queer looks, and I'm sure Mr Johnson is planning something nasty for me, but so far I haven't been able to discover what. I've been round to his place a few times to see what he's up to, but he's got everything well hidden. That's how devious he is.
As for Mr Patel, don't ask me how I know, I just know - from very good sources - that he is, in reality, a Mass Murderer. I have leafleted the street telling them that if we don't act first, he'll pick us off one by one. Some of my neighbours say, if I've got proof, why don't I go to the police? But that's simply ridiculous. The police will say that they need evidence of a crime with which to charge my neighbours. They'll come up with endless red tape and quibbling about the rights and wrongs of a pre-emptive strike and all the while Mr Johnson will be finalising his plans to do terrible things to me, while Mr Patel will be secretly murdering people.
Since I'm the only one in the street with a decent range of automatic firearms, I reckon it's up to me to keep the peace...."
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Tuesday, February 04, 2003
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Signs at anti-war marches:
Drunken frat boy drives country into ditch.
Bush/Cheney: Malice in Blunderland
Who would Jesus bomb?
War begins with 'Dubya'.
Bush is proof that empty warheads can be dangerous.
Let's bomb Texas, they have oil too.
How did our oil get under their sand?
Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity.
If you can't pronounce it, don't bomb it.
Daddy, can I start the war now?
1000 points of light and one dim bulb.
Sacrifice our SUV's, not our children.
Preemptive impeachment.
No George, I said Mac Attack.
Frodo has failed, Bush has the ring.
Look, I'll pay more for gas!
He is a moron and a bully.
It's the stupid economy.
Draft Richard Perle.
Draft dodgers shouldn't start wars.
War is sweet to those who haven't tasted it (Erasmus).
Pillow fights only.
Our grief [over 9/11] is not a cry for war.
Different Bush, same shit.
Stop the Bushit.
"Just war"/just oil.
You don't have to like Bush to love America.
Bushes are for pissing on.
Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld: the asses of evil.
$1 billion a day to kill people -- what a bargain.
Consume -- Consume -- Bomb -- Bomb -- Consume -- Consume
What's the difference between me & God? He might forgive Bush, but I won't.
Smush Bush.
America, get out of the Bushes.
It's time to trim the Bush.
Pro-lifers: Wake from Bush's propaganda spell -- war kills innocent children.
Don't make me come back here [to a peace rally] again.
Disarm Bush too.
Big brother isn't coming -- he's already here.
Empires fall.
An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind (Gandhi).
Impeach the squatters.Mainstream white guys for peace. (Sign held by three mainstream-looking white guys)
Hans Blix -- look over here.
Let Exxon send its own troops.
Curious, George? -- get a clue.
Destroy Florida. [It could happen again]
There's a terrorist behind every Bush.
How many bodies per mile?
SUV owners roll over for terrorism.
We can't afford to rule the world.
War is so 20th century!
9-11-01: 15 Saudis, 0 Iraqis.
While you were watching the war, Bush was raping America.
Don't waive your rights while waving your flag.
Leave Desert Storm to the desert.
Drop Bush not bombs.
Bush is to Christianity as Osama is to Islam.
I asked for universal health care and all I got was this lousy stealth bomber.
America's problems won't be solved in Iraq.
War is not a family value.
[2 sided poster] one side has a picture of a chubby feline, with the words: GOOD FAT CAT other side has a picture of Cheney, with the words: BAD FAT CAT
Colorfully dressed drag queen carrying a sign that says: I am the bomb.
[Picture of the peace symbol:] back by popular demand.
A picture of Bush with a red-stained upper lip: Got blood?
A picture of Bush saying "Why should I care what the American people think? They didn't vote for me."
A picture of Bush saying "Ask me about my lobotomy." Beneath a picture of Osama bin Laden dressed as Uncle Sam:
I want YOU to bomb Iraq.
Beneath a picture of a menacing soldier pointing his rifle/bayonet toward the viewer: "Say it! One Nation under God. Say it!"
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Saturday, February 01, 2003
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Free speech struggle in Antarctica: "On Jan. 18, workers at McMurdo Station in Antarctica joined with millions of others around the world in protesting the war drive on Iraq. In red jackets, they formed a giant human peace sign on the ice against the backdrop of the towering Trans-Antarctic Range. WW3 REPORT sources at McMurdo report that moves to censure anti-war activities at the research base have precipitated a free speech struggle. "
See photo: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0119-02.htm
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Friday, January 31, 2003
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Shock & Awe: Is Baghdad the Next Hiroshima?: "Have your heard of Harlan Ullman? Everyone in the White House and the Pentagon has. They may very well follow his plan for war in Iraq. He wants to do to Baghdad what we did to Hiroshima. "
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The Guardian : Speak for this nation War at this time is wrong because, given Iraq's currently unresolved, ambiguous circumstances, it is not a remotely justifiable or sensible way to conduct our affairs. Does anybody honestly believe that if Baghdad falls to US armour and Saddam is dethroned, that will be the end of the story? Those who enthusiastically support an attack may yet have their "victory day". But even as they turn away in tricked-out triumph, and turn away they surely will, as after the one-day wonder of Kabul's capitulation, the real problems will begin in earnest.
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Wednesday, January 29, 2003
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Anti-War Ads Rejected During Bush Speech: "The Comcast cable television company rejected ads that an anti-war group wanted to air during President Bush's State of the Union speech, saying they included unsubstantiated claims. Peace Action Education Fund had spent $5,000 to have six 30-second ads aired on CNN by Philadelphia-based Comcast beginning Tuesday night. "
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Tuesday, January 28, 2003
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An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life. "A fight is going on inside me," he said to the boy. "It is a terrible fight between two wolves. One wolf is evil. He is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego." "The other wolf is good. He is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. This same fight is going on inside you, and inside every other person, too." The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, "Which wolf will win?" The old Cherokee replied, "The one you feed."
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Israeli officer obstructs attack on Palestinians: " a lieutenant in an elite intelligence unit, delayed passing on information for an air raid planned against a Palestinian city after 22 people were killed on January 6 in a double suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. The officer... told a military tribunal he acted out of conscience, saying innocent people would have been killed and calling his orders illegal under international law, the newspaper reported... The court tribunal rejected his argument and transferred him to a less prestigious intelligence unit, Maariv said."
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Saturday, January 25, 2003
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Capitol Hill Blue - Role reversal: Bush wants war,Pentagon urges caution Intelligence sources say some Arab nations have told US diplomats they may side with Iraq if the U.S. attacks without the backing of the United Nations. Secretary of State Colin Powell agrees with his former colleagues at the Pentagon and has told the President he may be pursuing a "dangerous course."
An angry Rumsfeld, who backs Bush without question, is said to have told the Joint Chiefs to get in line or find other jobs. Bush is also said to be “extremely angry” at what he perceives as growing Pentagon opposition to his role as Commander in Chief.
“The President considers this nation to be at war,” a White House source says,” and, as such, considers any opposition to his policies to be no less than an act of treason.”
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Friday, January 24, 2003
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The Unseen Gulf War by Peter Turnley - The Digital Journalist: "War is at best a necessary evil, and I am certain that anyone that feels differently has never experienced or been in it. I have always hoped that true images of conflict give one the opportunity to witness and reflect more fully on the full realities of war. After covering many conflicts around the world in past 20 years and witnessing much human suffering, I feel a responsibility to try to contribute to making sure with my images that no one that sees the brutal realities of conflict, ever feels that war is comfortable and/or convenient."
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Thursday, January 23, 2003
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Wired 8.04: Why the future doesn't need us. By Bill Joy, April 2000 "Our most powerful 21st-century technologies - robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech - are threatening to make humans an endangered species."
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Tuesday, January 21, 2003
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Crowd Estimates: 30,000 to 500,000 (washingtonpost.com): "U.S. Capitol Police suggested yesterday's antiwar street march drew 30,000 to 50,000 people. Protest organizers said that the number was closer to 500,000. District police settled on "an awful lot of people." The truth might fall somewhere in between the guesses, or it might fall somewhere beyond the edges. That's because no one really knows how many people showed up."
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Sunday, January 19, 2003
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Thursday, January 16, 2003
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The Rise of the Fortress Continent: Naomi Klein - "the growing number of free-market economists, politicians and military strategists pushing for the creation of "Fortress NAFTA," a continental security perimeter stretching from Mexico's southern border to Canada's northern one. A fortress continent is a bloc of nations that joins forces to extract favorable trade terms from other countries--while patrolling their shared external borders to keep people from those countries out. But if a continent is serious about being a fortress, it also has to invite one or two poor countries within its walls, because somebody has to do the dirty work and heavy lifting.
It's a model being pioneered in Europe, where the European Union is currently expanding to include ten poor Eastern bloc countries at the same time that it uses increasingly aggressive security methods to deny entry to immigrants from even poorer countries, like Iraq and Nigeria. "
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Chicago Passes Anti-War Resolution 46-1 - Vote Follows Extensive and Personal Debate (Chicago, Jan. 16, 2003) (from yahoogroups portside group)
After one of the most mesmerizing, impassioned and personal debates ever to occur in Chicago's City Council Chamber, Chicago has become the largest and most prominent city in the nation to formally oppose a unilateral pre-emptive strike on Iraq.
One by one, black and white, Latino and Jewish, men and women, the Aldermen stood to draw attention to their own particular concerns with the current path of the Bush Administration. Many pointed out that the real dangers this nation faces today are the rising rates of unemployment and economic stagnation. Others were concerned about the double standard the administration is showing with respect to North Korea. And some drew attention to the prospect of young sons and daughters coming home in body bags from an ill-conceived war.
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Tuesday, January 14, 2003
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Bush Tax Cuts: "Fleischer... pushed the tax cuts as a package that would provide 92 million taxpayers with an average tax cut of $1,083 in 2003. This is about as disingenuous as it gets. The CTJ numbers show that most of the bottom 80 percent ($77,000 and less) receive much less than one thousand bucks. The average gain for taxpayers in the $46,000-to-$77,000 slice (the second quintile) is $657. Obviously, the people below will get less. According to the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, nearly 80 percent of income tax filers would receive a tax cut below $1083. Almost half of all tax filers would get a tax cut of less than $100"
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The National Youth & Student Peace Coalition "BOOKS NOT BOMBS!
National One-Day Student Strike - March 5th. The Bush administration is intent on plunging America into an illegitimate and pre-emptive war in Iraq that will only increase danger for Americans and the world. At the same time education, healthcare, and the economy are being neglected. Its time for youth and students to take a stand for America’s future! "
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Old Words on War Stirring a New Dispute at Berkeley: "In an unusual showdown over freedom of expression, university officials have refused to allow a fund-raising appeal for the Emma Goldman Papers Project to be mailed because it quoted Goldman on the subjects of suppression of free speech and her opposition to war. The university deemed the topics too political as the country prepares for possible military action against Iraq. In one of the quotations, from 1915, Goldman called on people "not yet overcome by war madness to raise their voice of protest, to call the attention of the people to the crime and outrage which are about to be perpetrated on them." In the other, from 1902, she warned that free-speech advocates "shall soon be obliged to meet in cellars, or in darkened rooms with closed doors, and speak in whispers lest our next-door neighbors should hear that free-born citizens dare not speak in the open." Berkeley officials said the quotations could be construed as a political statement by the university in opposition to United States policy toward Iraq. Candace S. Falk, the director of the project and author of the appeal, acknowledged that the excerpts were selected because of their present-day resonance. But Dr. Falk said they reflected Goldman's views, not the university's policies."
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Dick Cheney, chickenhawk (captimes.com): "Vice President Dick Cheney has never shown much interest in meeting his responsibilities as a citizen or an elected official. During the Vietnam War, Cheney avoided military service. Like so many of the current advocates for war with Iraq, he did not want to upset his career plans by wearing the uniform of his country. The political career that got a jump-start during the Vietnam era has been a successful - and lucrative - one for Cheney. But he has never gotten over his aversion to fulfilling his public responsibilities...
So when it was revealed Friday that Cheney would not be coming to Madison - because, his office said, "his calendar wouldn't allow" the visit - no one was surprised.
The prospect that Cheney might come to Madison inspired widespread organizing by religious, political and community groups that oppose war with Iraq. "
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Friday, January 10, 2003
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Thursday, January 09, 2003
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US shares blame for North Korea's bad behaviour "far from there being any progress towards normalising political and economic relations, President Bush, at the outset of his presidency, called North Korea part of the "axis of evil", and in place of formal assurances talked about pre-emptive attack and indicated a willingness to include nuclear weapons as part of it.
If Pyongyang has plainly departed from the Agreed Framework, therefore, it did so after the agreement had already been substantially voided by the US, in the reactor commitment, the failure to proceed with the promised normalisation, and the nuclear guarantee. "
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Wednesday, January 01, 2003
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GREG FREEMAN 1956-2002: "Gregory B. Freeman, a Post-Dispatch columnist, unabashedly proud son of St. Louis and a tireless champion for racial harmony, died Tuesday (Dec. 31, 2002) at his home in the Central West End.
Mr. Freeman, 46, joined the Post-Dispatch as a reporter on March 24, 1980, began writing columns in 1989 and became a full-time columnist in 1992. He attracted a large following for his column by writing about everyday life - his cats, his son's coming of age and his own struggle to control his weight - and time-honored virtues, such as courage, integrity and loyalty. He wrote frequently and passionately about civil rights and the need for St. Louisans of different races to look at the world through each others' eyes....
Mr. Freeman's visibility and impact extended well beyond the newspaper. Since November 1999, he had been host of the KWMU-FM's "St. Louis on the Air," a current events talk and call-in show, and had been a contributor to the National Public Radio affiliate for a decade.
Mr. Freeman also hosted a television show, "Mosaic with Greg Freeman," on KETC-TV (Channel 9), from 1997 to 2001. He was a leader in the National Association of Black Journalists and in several local journalism organizations, and took special pride in conducting workshops for black students who were interested in journalism. "
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Monday, December 30, 2002
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Chile Sect Thrives Despite Criminal Charges: "The group's reclusive leader is accused of sexually abusing scores of young boys. Former political prisoners say they were imprisoned and tortured in underground dungeons in the group's compound. An American who disappeared on a hiking vacation is reported to have been executed there. More than 50 other charges are pending against the group and its leaders, ranging from kidnapping and forced labor to fraud and tax evasion. Yet the paramilitary religious sect known as Colonia Dignidad continues to flourish here in a 70-square-mile enclave in the Andean foothills that remains, in the words of a recent Chilean congressional report, a heavily armed "state within a state....
"web of protection" supplied by sympathetic military and police officials nurtured by the group's leaders during the long dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet... those allies still hold powerful positions.
Colonia Dignidad has managed to fight... "a guerrilla war in the courts"
"They easily control properties and enterprises worth more than $100 million through their various holding companies... They are involved in real estate, mining, commerce and agriculture, just like any of several better-known business conglomerates in this country."
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Hijacking India's History: "India's Hindu nationalists have long had a quarrel with history. They are unhappy with the notion that the most ancient texts of Hinduism are associated with the arrival of the Vedic "Aryan" peoples from the Northwest. They don't like the dates of 1500 to 1000 B.C. ascribed by historians to the advent of the Vedic peoples, the forebears of Hinduism, or the idea that the Indus Valley civilization predates Vedic civilization. And they certainly can't stand the implication that Hinduism, like the other religious traditions of India, evolved through a mingling of cultures and peoples from different lands. Last month the National Council of Educational Research and Training, the central government body that sets the national curriculum and oversees education for students up to the 12th grade, released the first of its new school textbooks for social sciences and history. Teachers and academics protested loudly. The schoolbooks are notable for their elision of many awkward facts, like the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by a Hindu nationalist in 1948."
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Mwai Kibaki, Kenya's New Leader: "Mr. Kibaki helped draft KANU's constitution in the days before the break from British rule. He later served as finance minister to Mr. Kenyatta and as Mr. Moi's vice president, a position he was later fired from after a power struggle. Even then, he stuck by his leader and his party. Until his last days in KANU, Mr. Kibaki defended the party as the best way to develop Kenya. "
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Sunday, December 29, 2002
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Taming the Task of Checking for Terrorists' Names: ""Qaddafi," for example, can be spelled at least 60 ways in the Latin alphabet. To match a name on a watch list, the Basis system takes a Latinized name and compares it to the company's own transcription scheme, so that it will match with the one Arabic version of the name. The future of name-searching, according to the companies working on it, is not in watch lists, but in sifting through huge quantities of digital documents, like those that might be found on terrorists' computers or intercepted online. "
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Who's Afraid Like Virginia Woolf?: "Interweaving flashbacks from Woolf's life as she was writing "Mrs. Dalloway" with scenes from the lives of Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), a Southern California housewife and mother in 1951, and Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep), a New York book editor living in contemporary Greenwich Village, their stories blend into a lofty, mystical theme and variations on Woolf's novel... Clear eyed and austerely balanced... magnificently written and acted. "
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Saturday, December 28, 2002
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Rigorous Recycling: "Some 50.7 billion aluminum cans were tossed last year instead of being recycled... recycling of aluminum will dip below 50 percent this year, a rate not seen since 1986.... aluminum-can recycling is a bellwether for other kinds of recycling... because it's valuable, easy, and cheap to reuse."
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U.S. Confirms Reports of Mass Rapes by Burmese: "mass rapes of hundreds of girls and women have been carried out by the Burmese army in central Shan Province, where the military government has tried for years to suppress an ethnic rebellion, the State Department said today."
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More Schools Rely on Tests, but Study Raises Doubts: "Rigorous testing that decides whether students graduate, teachers win bonuses and schools are shuttered, an approach already in place in more than half the nation, does little to improve achievement and may actually worsen academic performance and dropout rates, according to the largest study ever on the issue."
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A Restive Kosovo, Officially Still Serbian, Squirms Under the Status Quo: "Ever since NATO bombed the Serbia of Slobodan Milosevic in 1999 to stop Serbian attempts to crush an armed rebellion by Kosovo's repressed Albanian majority, the international bureaucrats have tried to defer a decision on the ultimate status of what remains, officially, a Serbian province. It is an act increasingly hard to pull off -- largely because many of the Albanians of Kosovo are aware of the foreigners' desire, particularly palpable in conversation with American officials, to end their involvement here."
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Ranchers Bristle as Gas Wells Loom on the Range: "no one questions the need for new sources of this clean-burning fossil fuel. What alarms ranchers, along with environmental groups, is the hugely disruptive process of getting gas out of all those wells. It is a 15-year-old drilling technique called coal-bed methane extraction, which can turn ranches and prairies into sprawling industrial zones, laced with wells, access roads, power lines, compressor stations and wastewater pits."
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Automakers Block Crash Data Recorders: "Highway safety could be vastly improved if black boxes that record information about car crashes were standardized, experts say, but they contend that vehement objections from the automobile industry are thwarting efforts to set a standard."
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States of Alarm: "President Bush will have a heck of a time getting the national economy back on track while states from coast to coast are trying to balance their budgets by raising taxes, cutting spending and laying off employees. The National Governors Association, in a report last month, said states are facing "the most dire fiscal situation since World War II." Nearly every state "is in fiscal crisis," the governors said."
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Tuesday, December 24, 2002
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Bill Of Rights Pared Down To A Manageable Six: "We're not taking away personal rights; we're increasing personal security," Ashcroft said... thanks to several key additions, the Bill of Rights now offers protections that were previously lacking, including the right to be protected by soldiers quartered in one's home (Amendment III)"
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Saturday, December 21, 2002
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U.S. Jury Cites Unpaid Work at Wal-Mart: "federal jury in Portland, Ore., found Wal-Mart Stores, the world's largest retailer, guilty yesterday of forcing its employees to work unpaid overtime in the first of 40 such lawsuits to go to trial. In the four-week trial, dozens of Wal-Mart workers testified that under pressure from their managers they frequently clocked out after 40 hours and continued working."
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Gene Study Identifies 5 Main Human Populations: "Scientists studying the DNA of 52 human groups from around the world have concluded that people belong to five principal groups corresponding to the major geographical regions of the world: Africa, Europe, Asia, Melanesia and the Americas. The study, based on scans of the whole human genome, is the most thorough to look for patterns corresponding to major geographical regions. These regions broadly correspond with popular notions of race, the researchers said in interviews."
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Ex-Soldier, Now a Bishop, Deals With Blood on His Hands: "When he was in his 20's, before he went to seminary and became ordained, Bishop Packard was an Army lieutenant who led a platoon in Vietnam that set up ambushes. He and his men killed in each encounter anywhere from 12 to 15 North Vietnamese, Vietcong and perhaps Chinese mercenaries. They did it clinically and efficiently and then stacked up the bodies... He received the Silver Star and two Bronze Stars for valor. But he returned home disillusioned, "hating the war." He said he joined the seminary in 1971, not so sure that he wanted to be a priest, but "to study the ethical and moral issues that confronted me in Vietnam." It was in seminary that he found the solace and reassurance that he needed. "I violated the commandment, `Thou Shalt Not Kill,' " he said. "Nothing will be gained by intellectualizing this. I killed other people."
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Justice for Cambodia: "the General Assembly directed United Nations officials to resume negotiations with the Cambodian government to set up trials for surviving Khmer Rouge leaders. The vote was not easy to come by...
Mindful of concerns about the Nixon administration's secret aerial bombings of Cambodia during the Vietnam War and Cambodia's own human rights record of the last two decades, negotiators had reached a firm agreement that the court's focus would be limited to senior Khmer Rouge leaders and those who were most responsible for the crimes of the Pol Pot regime from 1975 to 1979. "
[Kissinger's defense lawyers must have been working overtime.]
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US blocks cheap drugs agreement: "The deal was agreed by 143 countries. The United States has blocked an international agreement to allow poor countries to buy cheap drugs. This means millions of poor people will still not have access to medicines for diseases such as HIV/Aids, malaria and tuberculosis. US negotiators say the deal would allow too many drugs patents to be ignored. "
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The Politics of Selling Tax Breaks for the Wealthiest: "Citizens for Tax Justice, a liberal research institute, found that the wealthiest 1 percent of taxpayers -- those with annual incomes over $356,000 -- would receive about half the revenue the government would lose next year if dividends went untaxed and 45 percent of all the money from accelerating the rate cuts. The 80 percent of households with incomes below $73,000 a year would get less than 10 percent of the new tax breaks. These findings are not surprising. After all, the richest 1 percent has 18 percent of all the pretax income and pays 36 percent of all personal income taxes. But studies like this reinforce the public perception that the Bush administration favors the rich."
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Friday, December 20, 2002
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Ashcroft's tough Sell: "Jan. 16, 2001 | [John Ashcroft's] ultraconservative record on such issues as abortion, affirmative action and civil rights has already stimulated intense controversy. And opponents of his nomination have sharply questioned the Missouri Republican's racial attitudes because of his opposition to a Federal judgeship for African-American jurist Ronnie White and his endorsement of the Southern Partisan, a racist, pro-Confederate magazine which has praised the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Now Ashcroft has been asked to explain why he met last fall with Thomas Bugel, the president of the militantly racist Council of Conservative Citizens and a veteran leader of segregationist groups in the St. Louis area. "
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Ali Moayedian: Creating a Secure America or Another History of Shame?: "Most of the arrested people have been living in the U.S. for many years now. They have families, jobs (with work authorizations), and are hard-working and peaceful people. Their only "crimes" are being born in the "wrong" countries and being out of status, that is not having a current visa. But this is nothing new. This has been a tolerated and accepted practice by INS to allow people who have applied for permanent residency to stay in the U.S. until they receive an interview date from INS and receive their permanent residency (green card). And these people have naturally been in regular contact with INS and have been here with the full knowledge of INS. These people in a way were given a virtual amnesty until their case is processed by INS."
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Thursday, December 19, 2002
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Untypically, a Rockefeller Tells the Story of His Life: "David Rockefelle, at age 87, has become the first in three generations of Rockefellers to publish an autobiography, breaking a century-long habit of fierce privacy instilled in his clan by his grandfather. "Memoirs," a candid account of Mr. Rockefeller's life at the busy intersection of global banking, family business and unofficial diplomacy, made its debut from Random House yesterday."
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Jennifer Van Bergen | Bush's Gulag: "The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) wrote in its amicus brief for one of these detainees: "The executive seems to be proposing 'enemy combatant' as a permanent legal category, not limited by the scope of the hostilities or the scope of the authorization to use force." The brief notes news reports that the Department of Defense is considering creating detention camps"
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New Tax Plan May Bring Shift In Burden: "As the Bush administration draws up plans to simplify the tax system, it is also refining arguments for why it may be necessary to shift more of the tax load onto lower-income workers. Economists at the Treasury Department are drafting new ways to calculate the distribution of tax burdens among different income classes, which are expected to highlight what administration officials see as a rising tax burden on the rich and a declining burden on the poor."
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Harvard Advertises for People Abducted by Aliens "... Dr. Clancy, whose main interest is not outer space but the more mysterious question of whether children who are sexually molested can bury knowledge of their abuse, and yet later, as adults, recover true memories. Dr. Clancy says the answer to that question, one of the most fiercely disputed issues in psychology today, is no. Many psychiatrists, psychologists and victims of child sex abuse dispute her view. "
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Lawsuit Says Del Monte Sale Was Rigged: "A lawsuit filed in a Miami court yesterday by seven private and corporate minority investors includes allegations that may shed light on why Del Monte was sold for so much less than it seemed to be worth. The suit accuses Mohammad Abu-Ghazaleh and his company, the IAT Group, of bribing Eduardo R. Bours, a powerful Mexican politician who was chairman of the investment group and an important member of the country's ruling party, to rig the sale in their favor."
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A 'silver bullet's' toxic legacy : "As American forces prepare to take on Iraq in a possible Gulf War II, analysts agree that the bad publicity and popular fears about depleted uranium (DU) use in the first Gulf War, and later in Kosovo and Afghanistan, have not dented Pentagon enthusiasm for its "silver bullet." US forces in Iraq will again deploy DU as their most effective - and most controversial - tank-busting bullet...
Another report by the British Atomic Energy Agency used an estimate of 40 tons of DU to create a hypothetical danger level, and predicted that that amount of DU - one-eighth of what actually was fired - could cause "500,000 potential deaths."
"I don't think we know if DU can be used safely, and until we know that, we shouldn't use it," says Chris Hellman, a senior analyst with Washington's Center for Defense Information."
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Nestle claims £3.7m from famine-hit Ethiopia "The multinational coffee corporation, Nestle, is demanding a $6m (£3.7m) payment from the government of the world's poorest state, Ethiopia, as the country struggles to combat its worst famine for nearly 20 years. The money is compensation for an Ethiopian business which the previous military government nationalised in 1975. It could feed a million people for a month, according to Oxfam."
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Mass arrests of Muslims in LA: "US immigration officials in Southern California have detained hundreds of Iranians and other Muslim men who turned up to register under residence laws brought in as part of the anti-terror drive. Reports say between 500 and 700 men were arrested in and around Los Angeles after they complied with an order to register by 16 December. "
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Democracy Now!: "Hewlett Packard, Dupont, Honeywell and other major U.S. corporations, as well as governmental agencies including the Department of Defense and the nation's nuclear labs, all illegally helped Iraq to build its biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs."
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Military Seeking Ways to Skip Sleep: "To strive toward creating the no-sleep soldier, DARPA has funded a multi-tiered program from tinkering with a soldier's brain using magnetic resonance to analyzing the neural circuits of birds that stay awake for days during migration. The hope is to stump the body's need for sleep -- at least temporarily."
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t r u t h o u t - Group Says U.S. Broke Law in Use Of Cluster Bombs in Afghanistan: "The U.S. military violated international law in Afghanistan by indiscriminately dropping cluster bombs on populated areas, killing at least 25 civilians and injuring numerous others, Human Rights Watch said in a report scheduled for release today. The group also said that another 127 civilians have been killed or injured in Afghanistan by unexploded cluster "bomblets" that have become "de facto antipersonnel landmines" across large areas of the country. Sixty-nine percent of those killed or injured, the group said, were children. "
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I Stand with Israel: I Stand with the Jews: By Oriana Fallaci
"I have often had disagreements with the Israelis, ugly ones, and in the past I have defended the Palestinians a great deal. Maybe more than they deserved. But I stand with Israel, I stand with the Jews. I stand just as I stood as a young girl during the time when I fought with them" [Eloquent diatribe that claims but does not demonstrate any sympathy with the Palestinians.]
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Wednesday, December 18, 2002
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Egyptian justice: in whose court? | csmonitor.com: "The special court found him guilty. The supreme court set him free. And somewhere in between the country's two systems, Egyptian-American democracy advocate Saadeddin Ibrahim learned earlier this month, the story of Egyptian justice is being written, one case at a time. Mr. Ibrahim's High Security Court trial last May showed the country's justice system at its worst: The main charge against him - "defaming Egypt abroad" - was an embarrassment to many of his countrymen. His lawyers were denied access to prosecution documents until months into the trial, and several "witnesses" who supposedly accepted bribes from him testified that they had never met him. Still, after just 90 minutes of deliberation, judges delivered a guilty verdict"
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GOP right long frustrated with Lott: "Lott flounders - not just because of his words, but because his tenure has disappointed conservatives...
Should Lott lose the leadership job and opt to resign from the Senate, Mississippi's Gov. Ronnie Musgrove, a Democrat, would name his replacement, likely returning the Senate to a 50-50 split until a special election is held next November. A resignation before year end would trigger a special election in 90 days."
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Mugabe ratchets up the misery in Zimbabwe | csmonitor.com: "In the countryside, the prospect of starvation is real - 6 million or 7 million people are at risk, primarily because Mr. Mugabe's ruling Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriot Front (ZANU-PF) systematically denies even donated food to peasants or town dwellers who live in areas that voted against him."
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NAFTA to Open Foodgates, Engulfing Rural Mexico: "on Jan. 1 tariffs on almost all agricultural imports from the United States will end. The looming deadline has consumed the attention of a nation where a quarter of the population lives in rural areas, and produced warnings about the possibility of unrest and increased migration across the Mexican countryside and into the United States, as millions of peasants are forced to abandon their tiny fields. In recent weeks, hundreds of thousands of Mexican farmers and their supporters have blocked highways and border crossings. They have temporarily shut down gas and electricity installations, and even burst into Congress on horseback."
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The Quality of the President's Mercy: "Almost two years into his presidency, George Bush has yet to grant a single pardon or commute a single prison sentence. This unusual record may reflect a certain indifference to the value and purpose of executive clemency...
The framers of the Constitution understood the president's power to pardon not as a personal privilege but as an obligation of office. They understood that the president had a duty to be merciful, to mitigate the sometimes harsh results of the legal system. A president who uses his pardon power courageously and creatively can bolster public confidence in the overall morality of the criminal justice system. "
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The Evil of Access: Mark Green - "with President Bush loudly beating his war drums, who heard any discussion about the escalating cost of campaigns? Spending in the New York and Pennsylvania gubernatorial elections, for example, tripled within one election cycle. The evidence that money shouts is mountainous: Ninety-four percent of the time, the bigger-spending Congressional candidate wins--and 98 percent of House incumbents win. The average price of a House seat rose from $87,000 in 1976 to $840,000 in 2000. It cost Ken Livingstone 80 cents a vote to win the London mayoralty last year, compared with Michael Bloomberg's $100 a vote in New York City. As money metastasizes throughout our political process, the erosion of our democracy should be evident to left and right alike: "
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Tuesday, December 17, 2002
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Gotta Have Faith: Krugman - "years from now, when it becomes clear that much public policy has been driven by a hard-line fundamentalist agenda, people will say "But nobody told us." "
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Personal Truths and Legal Fictions: "There are two legal versions of what happened in the courtroom last week. The first is that what Justice Thomas did is unforgivable; by hijacking the argument into the murk of personal experience, he did violence to the disinterested, lucid distance necessary for justice to be achieved. The second version is that he recognized, and his colleagues chose to respect, that some questions cannot be answered dispassionately, especially ones as fraught as, "Can symbols constitute threats?" In this version, personal narrative in appellate decision-making is ignored only at the peril of true justice. The latter conclusion is troubling. It suggests that the Supreme Court will never do "true justice" until there's a Holocaust survivor, a gay abortionist and a blind monk on the bench. "
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New Premise in Science: Get the Word Out Quickly, Online: "A group of prominent scientists is mounting an electronic challenge to the leading scientific journals, accusing them of holding back the progress of science by restricting online access to their articles so they can reap higher profits. Supported by a $9 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the scientists say that this week they will announce the creation of two peer-reviewed online journals on biology and medicine, with the goal of cornering the best scientific papers and immediately depositing them in the public domain. "
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Where Israeli soldiers go to heal: "Where Israeli soldiers go to heal Kfar Izun, a retreat on the Mediterranean, helps veterans traumatized by the Palestinian-Israeli conflict"
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Few but proud: US antiwar activists in Iraq | csmonitor.com: "The 30 or so members of the self-declared "Iraq Peace Team," most of them Americans who have arrived in the past week, have heard it all before. Some critics charge them with treason. Some call them pawns of the Iraqi regime. But activists say their mission is neither pro- Hussein nor anti-American, but aims to avert war by showing the human face of Iraq - and what suffering a new war will bring."
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The Heavy Cost of Chronic Stress: "Prolonged or severe stress has been shown to weaken the immune system, strain the heart, damage memory cells in the brain and deposit fat at the waist rather than the hips and buttocks (a risk factor for heart disease, cancer and other illnesses), said Dr. Bruce S. McEwen, director of the neuroendocrinology laboratory at the Rockefeller University and the author of a new book, "The End of Stress as We Know It." Stress has been implicated in aging, depression, heart disease, rheumatoid arthritis and diabetes, among other illnesses." [detailed summary of recent research]
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Doctors Rethinking Treatments for Sick Sinuses: "The disillusionment with surgery occurs as recognition is increasing that other common remedies for chronic sinus disease like antibiotics, steroids, antihistamines and decongestants also are falling short of expectations. Researchers say they are beginning to suspect that they have to rethink the underlying causes. Instead of allergies and infections, long considered the primary culprits, doctors are asking why sinuses become sick in the first place. Increasingly, they are looking at inflammation or the responses of the immune system."
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Run or Walk by the Book:
Running: The Athlete Within, by Dr. David Costill and Dr. Scott Trappe.
The Complete Runner's Day-by-Day Log and Calendar, by John Jerome.
The Complete Walker IV, by Colin Fletcher and Chip Rawlins.
"These three books are excellent for anyone interested in running or walking. Taken as a whole, they cover every aspect of each activity "
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Black Republicans Speak of Their Outrage at Lott: "a fury has been building among black Republicans who believe that Mr. Lott has significantly damaged their standing within the party and among their fellow African-Americans, many of whom already view them with suspicion. Within the Bush administration and around the country, many black Republicans are privately urging the party to dump Mr. Lott from the leadership for its own good. "They've been fighting the good fight for the party, often enduring tremendous abuse that they are Uncle Toms or traitors," Robert A. George, a conservative black columnist, said of black Republicans. "Lott's statement seems to confirm what Democrats and many blacks have believed about Republicans all along.""
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Monday, December 16, 2002
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In Simple Pronouns, Clues to Shifting Latino Identity: "a team of linguists is studying the consequences of the collision of Spanish dialects in New York, looking not only at how that contact is affecting the Spanish spoken but also at what the outcome might suggest about the evolution of Latino identity in the city and beyond...
The use of subject pronouns in Spanish has long been of interest to linguists... In English, the subject of a sentence is always expressed; in Spanish it can be, and often is, left out.
For example, where an English speaker would say "We sing," a Spanish speaker could say either "Nosotros cantamos" or simply "Cantamos." Linguists say Spanish speakers from the Caribbean tend to use a lot of pronouns; people from Central and South American countries use them less."
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Hydrogen: Empowering the People: JEREMY RIFKIN "While the fossil-fuel era enters its sunset years, a new energy regime is being born that has the potential to remake civilization along radically new lines--hydrogen. Hydrogen is the most basic and ubiquitous element in the universe. It never runs out and produces no harmful CO2 emissions when burned; the only byproducts are heat and pure water. That is why it's been called "the forever fuel." Hydrogen has the potential to end the world's reliance on oil."
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Iraqi Report Named US Business Partners: " Iraq's 12,000-page declaration of its weapons programs lists American companies that provided materials used by Baghdad to develop chemical and biological weapons in the 1980s, according to a senior Iraqi official. The public release of such a list could prove embarrassing for the United States and highlight the extent to which the Reagan and first Bush administrations supported Iraq in its eight-year war with neighboring Iran in the 1980s. U.S. military and financial assistance to Iraq continued until Iraqi President Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990. "
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Chess Offers Young Students Life Lessons at a City School: "chess master and teacher at Mott Hall School, Jerald Times, has a thousand-watt gaze and skin the color of bitter chocolate. He radiates energy as he patrols the classroom, urging fourth and fifth graders to fight through chess problems that he has given them. Mr. Times is looking for potential prodigies who could join the Mott Hall Dark Knights, a mainly black and Latino chess team from a poor community that has won six national championships over the last decade. In addition to seeking out potential champions, Mr. Times wants to connect even average players to the history of the game and encourage them to view the world through its lens."
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Sacco and Vanzetti Memorial: "On August 23rd, 1927, the State of Massachusetts executed immigrant anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, after an international campaign to stop their execution. This page is a tribute to their memory. "
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The Never-Ending Wrong June 1977 - Katherine Anne Porter - "For several years in the early 1920s when I was living part of the time in Mexico, on each return to New York, I would follow again the strange history of the Italian emigrants Nicola Sacco a shoemaker, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti a fishmonger, who were accused of a most brutal holdup of a payroll truck, with murder, in South Braintree, Massachusetts, in the early afternoon of April 15, 1920. They were tried before a Boston court and condemned to death about eighteen months later."
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From schoolgirl Emma to Asma, the Syrian icon: "Asma Akhras was raised in London. Today she returns as wife of Syria's leader.... the woman who has become a symbol of President Bashar Assad's ambition to reform his country... what happened in the months after the wedding, when she seemed to disappear from view? In her first-ever interview, Mrs Assad told The Observer that she did not disappear. Instead, she spent the first weeks of her marriage in jeans and T-shirt, travelling incognito around the rural areas of Syria. After a wedding in which only the closest family members had been invited to a private service, she wanted to get a handle on the country. "
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US historian stripped of gun book prize: "A US historian whose book on the origins of gun culture caused a furore has been stripped of a prestigious prize after being accused of "unprofessional and misleading work". Columbia University announced that its trustees had voted to rescind the Bancroft prize awarded last year to Michael A Bellesiles for his book, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture. "
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Sunday, December 15, 2002
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3 Wise Woman: What would have happened if it had been three Wise Women instead of three Wise Men?
-they would have asked for directions.
-helped deliver the baby.
-clean the stable.
-brought practical gifts.
-and made a casserole.
But, what would they have said as they left....?
"Did you see the sandals Mary was wearing with that gown?"
"I hear Joseph isn't working right now."
"And that donkey they are riding has seen better days too!"
"Virgin my *%@$! I knew her in school."
"That baby doesn't look a bit like Joseph!"
"Want to bet on how long it will take before you get your casserole dish back?"
"Did you see that Drummer boy? He can beat my drum anytime!"
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Saturday, December 14, 2002
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'Dominion': The Most Compassionate Conservative: DOMINION The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy. By Matthew Scully. '''Dominion'' is important in large measure because the author, an avowed conservative Republican and former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, is an unexpected defender of animals against the depredations of profit-driven corporations, swaggering, gun-loving hunters, proponents of renewed ''harvesting'' of whales and elephants and others who insist that all of nature is humanity's romper room, to play with, rearrange and plunder at will.'
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What kind of antiwar movement is this? | csmonitor.com: ""Not In My Name" is fast becoming the most popular refrain of today's antiwar movement. At the demonstrations I attended in London, thousands of placards declare that an attack on Iraq is "Not In My Name." In March, a huge variety of American antiwar groups set up an umbrella organization in New York called the Not In Our Name Project. One protester I talked to recently said: "Whatever Bush does or doesn't do in Iraq, it won't be in my name." This slogan sums up the current antiwar sentiment. Rather than trying to stop America's and Europe's warmongers in their tracks, antiwar protesters instead wash their own hands of war. Saying "not in my name" seems to be a way of declaring that, if and when war breaks out, we personally want nothing to do with it. This is as passive as it gets. It's almost like saying, "Do what you like, we know we can't stop you - just count us out.""
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Lott Often Opposed Measures Identified With Civil Rights: "In his 30 years in Congress, 16 in the House and the last 14 in the Senate, Trent Lott has voted consistently against measures that could be identified as civil rights legislation, and often he was one of a small number of lawmakers to vote that way.
A review of his voting record shows, for example, that Mr. Lott, a Mississippi Republican, opposed extension of the Voting Rights Act, expansion of fair-housing laws, establishment of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday and payment of lawyers' fees to people who bring successful civil rights suits.
Last year, Mr. Lott was the only senator to vote against President Bush's nomination of Roger L. Gregory to be the first black judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va.
Over the years, he favored measures to outlaw busing for school desegregation, to extend a design patent owned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and to eliminate affirmative action in federal contracts."
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Friday, December 13, 2002
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New Kind of Dam Rises in Switzerland: To Hold Back the Land: Global warming: "Swiss scientists are studying landslides to determine which ones may have been caused by melting permafrost. One terrifying instance was in September in the Caucasus, in Russia. There, scientists say, 140 million cubic feet of rock layers, including a mass of ice, rock and ferns, snapped off and began a free fall down the the northern slope of Kazbek Mountain, gathering fresh mud, trees and rock until it hit the Kolka Glacier. A portion of the glacier sheared off and an estimated 2.1 billion cubic feet of snow, trees, ice, debris, rock, mud and water continued to rumble toward the bottom of the mountain. It landed in the Genaldon Gorge, near Karmadon, and killed about 140 people. The compressed avalanche dammed several lakes, including one whose water rose to flood level, threatening a second village."
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Iraq Opposition Is Pursuing Ties With Iranians: "Leaders of all the major opposition groups, including an Iranian-backed group that represents Shiite Muslims and two Kurdish groups that have tens of thousands of troops on the ground, warned that while they welcomed American help in overthrowing President Saddam Hussein, Iraqis would not tolerate an American military occupation afterward or an American "viceroy" to govern Iraq, as some administration officials have contemplated."
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Republican Party's 40 Years of Juggling on Race: "Ever since the Republican Party in the South was reborn by hostility to the civil rights legislation of the 1960's, the national party has increasingly depended on Southern votes while insisting to Northern moderates that it is still the party of Lincoln."
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The Other Face: Krugman: "while Mr. Bush has finally denounced Mr. Lott's remarks, he and his party benefit from the strategy that allows the likes of Mr. Lott to hold so much power. Let's not forget, in particular, the blatant attempts to discourage minority voting in South Dakota, Louisiana, Maryland and elsewhere. It's about time for those of us in the press to pay attention, and let this great, tolerant nation know what's really going on. "
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A Life Divided: Italy's Quixote of Terrorism: " March 14, 1972, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, a leading European publisher who was one of Italy's richest men, was blown up trying to ignite a terrorist bomb on an electric pylon outside Milan. It was a strange and yet emblematic end to the complex career of a man who was a major figure in the history of postwar European culture. Feltrinelli had helped revolutionize Italian book publishing. The son of a family of wealthy Italian monarchists, he joined the Communist Party while still a teenager. He nonetheless published, over the objections of the Soviet Union, the first world edition of Boris Pasternak's "Doctor Zhivago," an event that shook the Soviet empire and won Pasternak the Nobel Prize for Literature. Feltrinelli also started the first (and still the best) great bookstore chain in Italy, which still bears his name."
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Thursday, December 12, 2002
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William Rivers Pitt | The Pure Essence of Stupid: "George W. Bush has tapped John J. Snow to replace blabbermouth former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill. Snow rises to his post from a corporate executive background, having served as the CEO of railroad giant CSX... Mr. Snow ran a company whose 2001 annual report claimed this as its company motto: "CSX will pursue all available opportunities to pay the lowest federal, state and foreign taxes." They succeeded admirably in this. CSX has not paid taxes in three of the last four years. In fact, CSX supplemented its $934 million in pretax U.S. profits over those four years with a total of $164 million in tax rebates from the federal government. "
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Wednesday, December 11, 2002
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A Liberal With a Wrestler's Stance: by Bill Holm - " Paul Wellstone was an unlikely politician in a place like Minnesota -- land of walleyes, cornfields and phlegmatic Scandinavians. He was an urban Jew, son of immigrants, a college professor at the fanciest of Minnesota's private colleges. And, probably worst of all for his non-talkative constituents, he was a passionate orator, a skilled rouser of rabble over issues he loved and an unapologetic populist liberal."
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A Terrifying Video Becomes a Best Seller: "ANSON W. SCHLOAT, the president of Human Relations Media, has an unexpected hit on his hands, a 26-minute video called "Dying High: Teens in the ER," which has become the hot teaching tool in Westchester County."
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Tuesday, December 10, 2002
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Venomous and Sublime: The Viper Tells Its Tale: ""Snakes turn out to be very complicated creatures," he said. "But they have few ways to express what they know. It's easy to underestimate a tube." "We're becoming more like primatologists in our thinking," said Dr. Gordon W. Schuett of Georgia State University and Zoo Atlanta, an editor of the new book. "We're tracking individual snakes for long periods of time to see who they hang out with and whom they might even form pair bonds with.""
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Watching Your Back as You Watch the Back Pocket: "Some pickpockets are known as cutters, old-school thieves who love the thrill of razoring women's wallets from their pocketbooks, leaving them clutching their bags, completely unaware. Others are creepers, who do not like to work crowds or jostle their victims but follow them out of the subway and are so talented they can steal a wallet, take a credit card from it and then replace it."
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Seeking Perfection in Shoe Lacing, With 43,200 Choices: "Dr. Polster also offered advice for tying shoelace knots that do not unravel 10 steps later. Most people tie their shoes in two steps, essentially layering two half-knots on top of each other (for example, wrapping the left piece of the lace over and around the right one and pulling it through, then wrapping the left piece over and around a loop of the right piece of shoelace and pulling a second loop through). That produces a granny knot, which is unstable. Reversing the orientation of the first half-knot (by passing the left piece of the lace under the right one and pulling it through) produces a knot that will hold much longer."
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Statins: Miracles for Some, Menace for a Few: "hailed as miracle drugs for their ability to prevent deaths from heart attacks by lowering cholesterol... but... sometimes cause serious side effects. The most serious involves the muscles, a disorder called rhabdomyolysis, rare but debilitating and deadly if not detected in its early stages."
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The Next Africa?: "Until now, the only part of the world to suffer a sustained drop in incomes has been Africa. But South America and Central America now risk becoming another Africa, in the sense of institutionalized Western neglect and indigenous despair, of tumbling living standards, of coups and civil war and failed states. If we allow this to happen, we Yanquis will pay the price -- in terms of economics, drugs and immigration -- for years to come. "
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The Land That War Protected: "a preserve carved from the [Korea] demilitarized zone could be the source for replenishing endangered plants and animals lost to development in both North and South. It could also serve as a laboratory to study nature's resilience. In little more than five decades, the natural world has reclaimed an area devastated by war. There is no comparable place on earth. However, the window of opportunity for preservation may be closing. In September the two Koreas signed an agreement to build two rail lines and adjacent highways through the zone. Efforts to remove mines have already begun. Roads are likely to follow, and thereafter harm to the environment."
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Rural America's new problem: handling sprawl | csmonitor.com: "Missouri... represents trends taking place around the country. Joplin and the state's three other smaller metro areas grew faster during the 1990s than the state's two largest metro areas - Kansas City and St. Louis - according to a new report on Missouri growth patterns released Sunday by the Brookings Institution in Washington. More telling, unincorporated, "open country" areas of the state saw population rise an average 12.3 percent. That's 50 percent faster than the population growth in Missouri's cities and towns... The result is a thinning and spreading of population that looks all too familiar to smart-growth advocates:"
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After Top Job at Yosemite, He's Hanging Up the Ranger Hat: "After 30 years with the National Park Service, Mr. Mihalic is at the top of his career in a high-visibility assignment, a member of the federal government's prestigious Senior Executive Service, and recently picked by the Bush administration as the next superintendent for Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the country's most visited national park. But Mr. Mihalic is saying goodbye to it all. On Jan. 3, he will retire...
Mr. Mihalic said the Bush administration wanted him to push through two contentious proposals at Great Smoky. The proposals, a land swap and a road project, had long been opposed by the National Park Service because of environmental concerns but had been backed by some influential Republicans in North Carolina and Tennessee. "
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New Tools for Domestic Spying, and Qualms: "across the country, sometimes to the dismay of civil libertarians, law enforcement officials are maneuvering to seize the information-gathering weapons they say they desperately need to thwart terrorist attacks. From New York City to Seattle, police officials are looking to do away with rules that block them from spying on people and groups without evidence that a crime has been committed. They say these rules, forced on them in the 1970's and 80's to halt abuses, now prevent them from infiltrating mosques and other settings where terrorists might plot. At the same time, federal and local police agencies are looking for systematic, high-tech ways to root out terrorists before they strike. "
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Administration Proposes Rules That Can Alter Pension Plans: " Bush administration has proposed sweeping new pension rules that will encourage companies to adopt a type of retirement plan that has been under attack for three years for what critics call a tendency to strip benefits from older employees. The proposed rules, which are to be released by the Treasury Department on Tuesday, describe the steps for companies to avoid age-discrimination challenges when they convert their traditional pension plans into what are called cash-balance pension plans. Cash-balance plans tend to benefit younger workers, often at the expense of older workers, and are less costly for companies."
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World War 3 Report #63: "In an analysis for the LA Times, Sandy Tolan, an IF Stone Fellow at UC Berkeley, joins those who see an imperialist plot to redraw the boundaries of the Middle East behind the Iraq war drive: "
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Economist tallies swelling cost of Israel to US | csmonitor.com: "Since 1973, Israel has cost the United States about $1.6 trillion. If divided by today's population, that is more than $5,700 per person. This is an estimate by Thomas Stauffer, a consulting economist in Washington. For decades, his analyses of the Middle East scene have made him a frequent thorn in the side of the Israel lobby."
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Monday, December 09, 2002
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Don't Blame Columbus for All the Indians' Ills: "the general health of Native Americans had apparently been deteriorating for centuries before 1492. That is the conclusion of a team of anthropologists, economists and paleopathologists who have completed a wide-ranging study of the health of people living in the Western Hemisphere in the last 7,000 years. The researchers, whose work is regarded as the most comprehensive yet, say their findings in no way diminish the dreadful impact Old World diseases had on the people of the New World. But it suggests that the New World was hardly a healthful Eden....
researchers attributed the widespread decline in health in large part to the rise of agriculture and urban living. People in South and Central America began domesticating crops more than 5,000 years ago, and the rise of cities there began more than 2,000 years ago.
These were mixed blessings. Farming tended to limit the diversity of diets, and the congestion of towns and cities contributed to the rapid spread of disease. In the widening inequalities of urban societies, hard work on low-protein diets left most people vulnerable to illness and early death."
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Philip Berrigan, Peace Advocate in the Vietnam War Era, Dies at 79: "The life of black sharecroppers in Georgia, where he had basic training, and the treatment of black soldiers on his troop ship to Europe made an indelible impression on his conscience. So did his own role in infantry and artillery battles that earned him a battlefield commission as second lieutenant. In so many words, he came to consider himself as guilty of murder as the Germans and Japanese. Along with this came the conviction that he had grown up on a diet of nationalistic propaganda in which the good -- "white Europeans" -- always triumphed over evil -- "anyone else.""
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Abrams Back in Capital Fray at Center of Mideast Battle: "Mr. Abrams's selection this week as President Bush's director of Middle Eastern affairs at the White House plunged him into one of the sharpest disputes in the nation's capital -- the one in the administration over how to deal with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Mr. Abrams's appointment thrilled those who had criticized the administration for being too tough on Israel and too deferential to the Palestinians. But it dismayed those, especially at the State Department, who want Israel to ease its crackdown in the West Bank and Gaza. An administration official said Mr. Abrams's ascension had created "serious consternation" at the State Department. It was seen there, he said, as likely to impede the efforts of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to work with European nations to press Israel and the Palestinians to adopt a staged timetable leading to creation of a Palestinian state in three years."
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G.I.'s Walk Perilous Line Between Finding Enemy and Alienating Afghans: "Four months after the United States adopted a new strategy of using more ground troops to hunt for remnants of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, it is unclear if the strategy is working, Afghan officials say. Attacks on American bases have continued through the fall, and by some measures are intensifying. Afghans along the border with Pakistan say aggressive American ground troops and a lack of relief aid are alienating the local population. The central issue of the American military mission here is at stake: how to defeat a shadowy guerrilla enemy without alienating fiercely independent Afghans with a long tradition of souring on, and then humbling, great powers, among them the British Empire and the Soviet Union. Recent attacks and dozens of interviews with Afghans in three strategic border provinces -- Paktia, Khost and Kunar -- suggest that American forces are, at best, holding their own in what has evolved into a classic counterinsurgency campaign. Rather than being cowed, their enemies appear to be gradually growing bolder."
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Growing Poverty Is Shrinking Mexico's Rain Forest: "Five miles up a muddy trail from Emiliano Zapata, in southeastern Chiapas State, is Mexico's largest unpolluted lake, Laguna Miramar, and beyond that stands the last rain forest in Mexico. But today almost half a million poor people, speaking six different languages, live in that dying forest. For some here in Chiapas, the issue is turning from saving the trees to saving the people. A century of government reaching into this most remote corner of Mexico has left most citizens with next to nothing. "
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Pastoral Poverty: The Seeds of Decline: "Around the country, rural ghettos are unravelling in the same way that inner cities did in the 1960's and 70's, according to the officials and experts who have tried to make sense of a generations-old downward spiral in the countryside. In this view, decades of economic decline have produced a culture of dependency, with empty counties hooked on farm subsidies just as welfare mothers were said to be tied to their monthly checks. And just as in the cities, the hollowed-out economy has led to a frightening rise in crime and drug abuse...
Supporters of subsidies say they keep entire counties from going under and ensure a cheap and abundant food supply.
But opponents say that the biggest checks go to large corporate farms and do little to stem rural decline. The farm bill signed in May by President Bush — and backed by both parties — will, over the next 10 years, distribute two-thirds of $125 billion in payments to the top 10 percent of farms, according to an analysis done by the Environmental Working Group, a conservation group."
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Why Confess to What You Didn't Do?: " if the convictions are ultimately thrown out, what does that say about the ease with which investigators can persuade an innocent person to confess? "Reform in this area has been extremely slow in coming because law enforcement generally have refused to acknowledge that their interrogation techniques themselves can produce false confessions," said Steven A. Drizin, a professor at Northwestern University School of Law. More verdicts are being reversed every year because of advances in the use of DNA evidence. As a result, there may have been more research in the area of false confession in the last 10 years than in the previous century. The very nature of interrogation is antagonistic, accusatory and focused on leading questions rather than on open lines of inquiry. Many of those methods have been upheld by the courts. Interrogators sometimes lie. They claim to have evidence that they don't really have or confessions from accomplices. The more compliant, naïve or cowed by authority a suspect is, the more likely that person is to confess -- honestly, or falsely. Suspects who are young or mentally ill are particularly vulnerable to pressure."
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Use of Renewable Energy Took a Big Fall in 2001: "Consumption of energy from renewable sources, like the sun, the wind and biological fuels, fell sharply in 2001, the Department of Energy has reported. The department attributed much of the decline to a drought that cut generation of hydroelectric power by 23 percent. Such variations are natural. But in a report last month, the department's Energy Information Administration also said solar equipment was being retired faster than new equipment was being built."
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Chechen in Extradition Dispute: Criminal or Peacemaker?: "Akhmed Zakayev has been an actor and a rebel commander, a negotiator, a politician and then a commander again. Bearded, articulate and mild-mannered, he has over the last decade become perhaps the most prominent public face of Chechnya's struggle for independence from Russia. To the Russian government, he is a terrorist and a murderer... To others, even some in Russia, he is none of those things, but rather the best hope for a peaceful resolution of Russia's long, bloody Chechen conflict."
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Grand Soviet Scheme for Sharing Water in Central Asia Is Foundering: "From the mountainous Chinese border to the Caspian Sea, the Soviet Union remade the two grand rivers of Central Asia, building 20,000 miles of canals, 45 dams and more than 80 reservoirs. The government turned sand and dust into one of the world's great cotton-growing regions. But the Soviet Union is long dead. And here in western Uzbekistan and in areas of its four neighbors, one of socialism's most grandiose schemes is being sundered by capitalism, nationalism and a legacy of waste. Without a bigger supply of water -- or better use of it -- an economic and social crisis seems to be awaiting the region of 58 million people"
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From Radical Background, a Rhodes Scholar Emerges: "Chesa Boudin was unable to celebrate with his parents on Saturday afternoon when he was named a Rhodes scholar. He could not even share the good news. As maximum-security inmates in the New York State prison system, Katherine Boudin and David Gilbert are barred from receiving telephone calls or e-mail messages. "
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Guardian - Poisoning the air "Atropine is used for treating various heart and respiratory disorders. It is also the drug of choice in cases of organophospate (pesticide) poisoning, where massive amounts - up to 100 times the normal dose - may be needed to effect recovery. The UN sanctions committee, which of course includes Americans, took the view that the Iraqi orders were probably about adequate to meet the country's routine medical needs. But suddenly, as the US prepares to invade, along comes another order - seemingly very similar - which, according to American officials, far outstrips the amount Iraq could conceivably need for normal hospital use. Someone, somewhere, has clearly got it wrong.
There is also a lot that the US has not disclosed about the latest Iraqi order for atropine. For a start, there has been no public confirmation of the order from independent sources."
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The Liberal Quandary Over Iraq: "This Bosnian generation of liberal hawks is a minority within a minority, but they hold an important place in American public life, having worked out a new idea about America's role in the post-cold war world long before Sept. 11 woke the rest of the country up. An antiwar movement that seeks a broad appeal and an intelligent critique needs them. Oddly enough, President Bush needs them, too. The one level on which he hasn't even tried to make a case is the level of ideas. These liberal hawks could give a voice to his war aims, which he has largely kept to himself."
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Hundreds opposed to war let their feelings be known at rally By JODI GENSHAFT Post-Dispatch 12/08/2002 10:28 PM"
The "Instead of War" rally to display opposition to U.S. military action in Iraq drew an estimated 1,500 people of all ages Sunday afternoon in downtown St. Louis.
Protesters marched to Soldiers Memorial, at 14th and Chestnut streets, carrying hand-drawn signs and chanting, "Down with war, up with peace." Cheering them on was a group of young adults - many with dyed hair and painted faces - calling themselves the "radical cheerleaders." The young people chanted anti-war and anti-globalization cheers as the march set out.
"We don't want to see innocent lives destroyed, Iraqi and American," said Lubna Alam, academic vice president of St. Louis University's Student Government Association.
Alam said many college students felt an acute responsibility to speak out about the "pre-packaged" war with Iraq, "complete with theme music, colorful graphics and catchy sound bites."
"Why should we punish an entire nation for the heinous actions of one man?" Alam asked the audience at Centenary United Methodist Church in St. Louis, during the anti-war rally held before the march. Participants spilled into the aisles and hallways of the church, which seats about 1,200. An organizer of the rally estimated the crowd at 1,500.
Jason Murphy, 31, of St. Louis, said the turnout "proves there's not a national consensus in favor of violence in the Middle East."
A Gallup poll, conducted Nov. 22-24, showed that Americans support 58 percent to 37 percent a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Polling has continually illustrated that Americans want U.N. and allied support before U.S. officials launch military action.
"We should be working through the United Nations to apply pressure," said Elizabeth Case, 70, of Clayton.
Iraq submitted a declaration of its weapons programs Saturday to the U.N. weapons inspectors in Baghdad.
U.S. officials say Iraq is violating U.N. resolutions requiring it to give up all biological, chemical and nuclear weapons, but Iraq claims it no longer possesses any banned weapons.
"I don't think they have weapons we should be concerned about," said Carolyn Griffeth, 30, of St. Louis. "This isn't about democracy. Now we're fabricating a threat. Saddam isn't a threat, but the sanctions are a breeding ground for terrorism. Our only defense to terrorism is to invest in peace relationships in the Middle East."
The poll showed that about 80 percent of Americans think Saddam would use weapons of mass destruction to attack the United States.
Ron Strawbridge, 31, of Webster Groves, sees the threat differently. "I think he's a threat if he's attacked," Strawbridge said.
Anthony Fotenos, 26, of St. Louis, said mainstream opposition to war could have a big impact on U.S. military involvement. He said the success of the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War set a good example for future protests.
"I'm sure we would win a war in Iraq, but it will invariably come back to haunt us," said Fotenos, as his 2-month-old daughter, Naomi, slept next to a poster that read "Babies for peace."
The Rev. Emery Washington, president of Congregations Allied for Community Improvement, said he feared the legacy being left for future generations. He said, "There has to be another way" to resolve the U.S.-Iraqi conflict.
Still, some protesters were skeptical that the anti-war sentiment would have staying power.
"I don't think support will last as long as it did in Vietnam," Murphy said.
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Thursday, December 05, 2002
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Eating less for longevity: "Reduce an animal's intake of calories by 30% and it will live 30% longer than those on an ordinary diet. Now scientists want to know if the same severely restricted diet that has produced dramatic results in laboratory experiments in animals will work in humans. In September, the National Institute on Aging began scientific trials involving about 200 people at three locations in Louisiana, Massachusetts and Missouri. "
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Capital Games: David Corn on Kissinger - "Asking Henry Kissinger to investigate government malfeasance or nonfeasance is akin to asking Slobodan Milosevic to investigate war crimes. Pretty damn akin, since Kissinger has been accused, with cause, of engaging in war crimes of his own. Moreover, he has been a poster-child for the worst excesses of secret government and secret warfare... Consider the record: "
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Three Reagan-Era Hard-Liners Return to Help Run Bush's Foreign Policy Team: "They were key figures in the Iran-Contra scandal and U.S.-backed "dirty wars" in Central America in the 1980s. Now Otto Reich, Elliot Abrams and John Negroponte are back, helping run White House policy toward Latin America. The re-emergence of the three has caused consternation among human rights activists and some regional experts, who fear President George W. Bush's team is taking the country back to Cold War days, when the United States intervened flagrantly in Latin America by supporting coups, bankrolling dictatorships that suppressed leftists, and training soldiers linked to human rights abuses. "
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The Pentagon Muzzles the CIA. Robert Dreyfuss. "as it prepares for war against Iraq, the Pentagon is already engaged on a second front: its war against the Central Intelligence Agency. The Pentagon is bringing relentless pressure to bear on the agency to produce intelligence reports more supportive of war with Iraq, according to former CIA officials. Key officials of the Department of Defense are also producing their own unverified intelligence reports to justify war. Much of the questionable information comes from Iraqi exiles long regarded with suspicion by CIA professionals. A parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation, in the office of Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith, collects the information from the exiles and scours other raw intelligence for useful tidbits to make the case for preemptive war."
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New Scientist: "A war against Iraq could kill half a million people, warns a new report by medical experts - and most would be civilians. The report claims as many as 260,000 could die in the conflict and its three-month aftermath, with a further 200,000 at risk in the longer term from famine and disease. A civil war in Iraq could add another 20,000 deaths."
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The Poetry of Programming: Richard Gabriel "We've only been building software for 50 years, and almost every time we're creating something new. If you look at software developers and what they produce, if you look at their source code, the programs they make, and the designs that they end up creating, there is real variability. And some people are really good and others are not so good. So, because you can program well or poorly, and because most of it is creative (in that we don't really know what we're doing when we start out), my view is that we should train developers the way we train creative people like poets and artists. "
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Into the Breach: Borosage: "Contrary to the DLC, the Democratic Party is not a dirigible that can be repositioned to fit the passing winds. It is a party of working people against the Republican Party of corporations and wealth. It is a party of diversity against the whites-only Republican Party. It is a party of prochoice women against the party of the radical right. It is a party of unions and of environmentalists against the party of Ken Lay and Dick Cheney. It won't ever be more muscular than Republicans on war abroad or guns at home. "
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No more going it alone for Uncle Sam: The End of the American Era: US Foreign Policy and the Geopolitics of the 21st Century By Charles Kupchan. "claims American primacy in global politics will end before the decade is out. The transition to a multipolar world is the paramount issue of international relations, but recent events (read: war on terrorism) only obfuscate it. If the US is wise, it will "design" a liberal world order to accommodate rising powers such as Europe and China. But if America "defaults" and remains a "great power adrift," the consequences will be dire: an aggressive China and Japan; a resurgent Russia; a remilitarized Europe; and the hungry, angry masses of the developing world."
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Wednesday, December 04, 2002
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Study Suggests Mercury in Vaccine Was Not Harmful: "small but groundbreaking study of infants who received vaccines containing a mercury-based preservative has found that the levels of mercury in their blood were well within federal safety limits. The study, reported on Saturday in the British medical journal The Lancet, also found that infants excrete the mercury much faster than expected, suggesting that it does not build up from one vaccination to the next."
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The Legacy of Lewis F. Powell Jr.: "Justice Powell's particular legacy illustrates a somewhat different point: that on a court composed of human beings, biography matters. The fact is that Lewis Powell, who died in 1998 just short of his 91st birthday, was a person of a particular time and place, a patrician son of the Old South, who transcended his origins in some ways and not in others, and who drew particular lessons from some singular life experiences. The same could be said of many people, if not most. The difference is that Supreme Court justices, including those now on the court and any future appointees, may be in a position to apply their life lessons in shaping the law for an entire country."
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Bush to End Rule Allowing Jobless Money for New Parents: "Bush administration will repeal a Clinton-era rule that allows states to use unemployment insurance money to help people who take a leave from work to have babies or adopt children, officials said today. The executive action will effectively shut down legislative efforts in as many as 16 states to make unemployment compensation money available to working parents who have taken time off to care for a newborn or adopted child."
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Tuesday, December 03, 2002
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Will China Blindside the West?: Kristoff - "China's transformation is trickling even into the poor interior, dragging all 1.3 billion people into the world economy. When historians look back on our time, I think they'll focus on the resurgence of China after 500 years of weakness -- and the way America was oblivious as this happened. Plenty can still go wrong in China, from a banking crisis (national banks are insolvent) to labor riots (laid-off workers are grumbling everywhere). The government is often brutal and is catastrophically mismanaging an AIDS crisis"
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Can Global Warming Be Studied Too Much?: "Bush administration convenes a three-day meeting here to set its new agenda for research on climate change. But many climate experts who will attend say talking about more research will simply delay decisions that need to be made now to avert serious harm from global warming. President Bush has called for a decade of research before anything beyond voluntary measures is used to stem tailpipe and smokestack emissions of heat-trapping gases that scientists say are contributing to global warming.... But many climate experts say the perennial need for more study can no longer justify further delays in emission cuts. "
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Texas Death Row Appeals Lawyers Criticized: "Death row inmates in Texas are often assigned incompetent or unqualified state appellate lawyers who do not raise legitimate constitutional arguments and who fail to unearth facts that could prove the innocence of their clients, according to a new study by an advocacy group for capital defendants. The group, Texas Defender Service, examined the state habeas appeals of nearly every death row inmate in Texas since 1995 and found that those inmates had a one in three chance of being executed without their cases being adequately investigated or argued by a competent state appeals lawyer. "
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Union Head Cites Secret Report in Quitting Insurer: "A.F.L.-C.I.O. president John J. Sweeney resigned yesterday from the board of Ullico, an embattled union-owned insurer, because of concerns that an outside counsel's report into accusations of insider trading at the insurer might never be made public. Mr. Sweeney resigned on the day that Ullico's board met in Washington to consider an investigative report.. into highly profitable stock trades by members of Ullico's board, which is made up primarily of former and current union presidents... with Mr. Sweeney demanding that the Thompson report be made public and Mr. Georgine seeking to limit its disclosure. Mr. Sweeney, who did not participate in the stock trades, has criticized them and was one of the first to urge that an outside counsel be named. "
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A Telling North Korean Journey: "Drinking wines imported from France, nibbling on gourmet meals with silver chopsticks, and joining in rousing choruses of old Soviet songs with "beautiful lady conductors," North Korea's remote "Dear Leader" emerges in flesh and blood from the pages of a new memoir by Mr. Pulikovsky, the representative of President Vladimir V. Putin in Russia's Far East. Called "Orient Express" and published this fall in Moscow, the 200-page snapshot-laden book prompted a diplomatic protest from North Korea and teeth gnashing in Russia's Foreign Ministry. It draws heavily on a confidential report prepared by a Russian Foreign Ministry notetaker on board during Mr. Kim's leisurely one-month train ride across Russia in the summer of 2001."
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Dietary Advice Takes On Mediterranean Flavor: "a diet like the one consumed by heart-healthy people along the Mediterranean: rich in vegetables and fruits, whole grains, nuts, unsaturated vegetable oils and protein derived from fish, beans and chicken, not red meat. "Compelling" evidence for this view was thoroughly reviewed last week in The Journal of the American Medical Association by Dr. Frank B. Hu and Dr. Walter C. Willett, nutrition and epidemiology experts at the Harvard School of Public Health, who have followed tens of thousands of Americans for decades to uncover relationships between diet, habits and health."
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Health Food Company Buys Rival: "For the last decade, a significant part of Hain's strategy has been to grow by acquisition. In 2001, Hain Celestial acquired Yves Veggie Cuisine Inc., a Canadian manufacturer of soy-based burgers and cheese substitutes. In the same year, the company also picked up Lima N.V., a Belgian company that makes natural and organic foods. Hain purchased Celestial Seasonings, the tea company, for about $390 million in 2000, and in 1999, it bought the Earth's Best brand of organic baby food from the H. J. Heinz Company. In exchange, Heinz took on a 19.5 percent ownership stake in Hain Celestial"
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Monday, December 02, 2002
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Arguing That Historians Can Be Scientists, Too: THE LANDSCAPE OF HISTORY How Historians Map the Past, By John Lewis Gaddis " the author of several distinguished books on the cold war, both pays homage to Bloch (and with more conditional admiration, to the British historian E. H. Carr) and addresses the challenge of postmodernism. He does all of this in an urbane and eloquent little volume that, in its way, might even be what Bloch himself would have written had he lived."
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Gay History Is Still in the Closet: "most gay people know little about Harry Hay. Even fewer know that his comrades, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, who founded the first American lesbian organization, Daughters of Bilitis, are still alive... Gay and lesbian leaders have yet to find a place in the civil rights pantheon. Why are the gay movement's roots so obscured? The reason is the invisibility of gay history. With rare exceptions, schools fail to acknowledge that there even is such a thing. "
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Amnesty: Iraq 'torture' dossier was manipulated: "Amnesty International said a dossier released today by the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, listing torture, rapes and other abuses perpetrated by the Baghdad regime, is a "cold and calculated manipulation" of the work of human rights activists. "Let us not forget that these same governments turned a blind eye to Amnesty International's reports of widespread human rights violations in Iraq before the Gulf war," the group's secretary general, Irene Khan, said. "They remained silent when thousands of unarmed Kurdish civilians were killed in Halabja in 1988."
The report contains graphic first-hand accounts by victims of the regime's human rights abuses, as well as intelligence material and evidence from aid charities working in Iraq. It makes clear that the abuses are carried out as a policy of the Iraqi dictator.
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India's Poor Starve as Wheat Rots: "More than two decades after a "green" revolution made India, the world's second-most-populous country, self-sufficient in grain production, half of India's children are malnourished. About 350 million Indians go to bed hungry every night... Yet the government is sitting on wheat surpluses -- now at about 53 million metric tons -- that would stretch to the moon and back at least twice if all the bags were lined up."
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Black Market for Software Is Sidestepping Export Controls: " illicit copies of the software from Intelligent Light, which in licensed versions typically sells for $12,000, was being sold by Chinese entrepreneurs for $200. The posted advertisement for the wares promised that a "step-by-step install guide and crack file make it easy to install and use!" Which means that anyone with a modem and a little cash can evade the export control rules, even those that apply to prohibited countries."
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Seeking a Vision of Truth, Guided by a Higher Power: "I believe creativity is a votive gift, presented arbitrarily by the hand of God, and those who possess it are simply its vessel... I also had to learn that the gift or obsession or neurosis that compelled me to write was one that required a discipline that did not allow exceptions"
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Sunday, December 01, 2002
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Rights Group Blames Arafat for Not Halting Suicide Attacks: "A report by Human Rights Watch on Palestinian suicide bombings calls the attacks crimes against humanity and criticizes the Palestinian Authority for failing to act effectively to stop them. The 170-page report, to be issued Friday, says Yasir Arafat and the Palestinian Authority bear a "high degree of responsibility" for the attacks and have "contributed to an atmosphere of impunity" that has allowed the bombings to continue."
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Reliving World War II With a Captain America of a Different Color: "The Negro press attacked military segregation so mercilessly that Franklin Roosevelt considered shutting down the papers. This version of the war has been marginalized in books and largely omitted from movies. Contemporary ignorance about this period has been painfully evident in the last two weeks, since the Marvel company released the first in a series of comic books that deal head-on with the hard-core segregation that dominated World War II. The series, entitled "Truth: Red, White and Black," has been derisively described as "politically correct" and attacked by people who do not believe that the country ever experienced an era like the one depicted in the comics."
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Eating meat 'may still pose CJD risk': "Muscle and flesh of cattle and sheep may harbour deadly levels of prions that cause variant CJD. This stark prospect, raised by the Nobel Prize winner who first discovered that these infective particles can cause brain illnesses, suggests eating meat may still pose a serious health risk. The prospect that a timebomb may still be ticking in our kitchens was raised by Stanley Prusiner, who revealed yesterday that experiments at the University of California in San Francisco had shown that scrapie-infected mice have unexpectedly high concentrations of prions in their muscles. "
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Guardian - Fire union chief pledges to topple New Labour: "FBU leader appeared determined to extend the breadth of his attack against the Government beyond the issue of the 16 per cent salary increase, which has been rejected. He said that war against Iraq would be wrong and directly attacked the Chan cellor's decision to provide £1 billion pounds of funding for any future military campaign. 'It's disgraceful to say that for people in this country who are prepared to risk their lives to save others you can't find any extra money, but you can find at least a billion to bomb innocent men, women and children in Iraq,' he told the rally. 'I have no nostalgic romanticism about old Labour but there are real Labour values built on real social progress, on real justice for working class people and indeed for fairness for all.' "
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Saturday, November 30, 2002
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Union Chief to Return $200,000 From Stock Deal Under Inquiry: (11/1/02) "The president of the carpenters' union, Douglas J. McCarron, President Bush's closest friend in organized labor, has agreed to return more than $200,000 in profits he made in a stock deal that is under federal investigation. On Tuesday, Mr. McCarron informed the Union Labor Life Insurance Company, a labor-owned carrier known as Ullico, that he would pay back the money, which he earned when he sold Ullico shares in what is being investigated for the possibility of insider trading."
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Jet Purchase Splits Brazil: New Leader Wants Voice: "feelings are running high over what is perceived here as Pentagon meddling to prevent Embraer, the country's largest exporter, from selling planes to Colombia. Last month, the Colombian Defense Ministry invited Embraer to tender an offer for the purchase of 40 of its Super Tucano light attack aircraft, a $234 million deal. Almost immediately, however, Gen. James T. Hill, head of the United States Southern Command, sent a letter to the Colombian authorities warning that if they went ahead with that plan it might "negatively influence" Congressional approval of future military aid to Colombia. "I recommend the Colombian Air Force spend this money on more pressing requirements, such as modernizing its C-130 fleet," General Hill wrote. The C-130 is of American manufacture"
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Ideal Terror Weapons: Portable, Deadly, Plentiful Missiles: "The SA-7 is not as capable as the newer American Stinger, which proved devastating against Soviet aircraft during Moscow's failed occupation of Afghanistan. In fact, the threat of leftover Stingers in Afghanistan was so great that the Central Intelligence Agency offered to pay hefty bounties to anyone who would return one of the missiles during the American-led campaign to topple the Taliban and rout Al Qaeda there."
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'One World': The Moral and Practical Challenges of Globalization: "Peter Singer's timely and thoughtful book, ''One World: The Ethics of Globalization.'' A professor of bioethics at Princeton University and one of the most provocative philosophers of our time, Singer writes, ''How well we come through the era of globalization (perhaps whether we come through it at all) will depend on how we respond ethically to the idea that we live in one world.'' "
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In Harvard Papers, a Dark Corner of the College's Past: 1920: "A group of students were brought before the Court for interrogation about their sex lives. So were some local men who were not students, despite the Court's lack of jurisdiction. Most of the students found "guilty," one a congressman's son, were told to leave not only the college but also the city of Cambridge. Two students convinced the Court that they were heterosexual but were forced to leave anyway because they had associated with some of those identified as gay. The dean also ordered that a letter be added to the student files of all those ousted, which dissuaded the college's Alumni Placement Service from "making any statement that would indicate confidence in these men." Two of those men later committed suicide."
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Administration Begins to Rewrite Decades-Old Spying Restrictions: "The Bush administration, in its fight against terrorism, is slowly chipping away at the wall that has existed for nearly three decades between domestic law enforcement and international intelligence gathering in an effort that senior officials said was vital to waging war against Al Qaeda and other terror networks."
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Mexico's Amber Miners Find Risk, Not Riches: "The difference between suffering and sustenance lies in finding amber. A week's work might produce a quarter-ounce -- for which a miner will be paid as little as $2.50 on top of his regular earnings. A pendant or earrings made from that much amber may sell for $100 or more in the tourist shops of the nearest city, San Cristóbal de las Casas, which lies a hard morning's drive away. The price can double if a piece reaches New York City or Los Angeles. But the miners never see the money from the markup. Fifteen years ago, the miners here tried to form a collective, pooling their money and labor. They accumulated a cache of nearly 900 pounds of amber, and planned to set up their own store. But bandits stole the whole load, and the cooperative collapsed in bitterness."
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S.E.C. Facing Deeper Trouble: "Bowsher said there were ominous parallels to the problems facing the commission and the difficulties that confronted regulators during the onset of the savings and loan collapses of more than a decade ago, when he led the General Accounting Office. As was the case then, he said, the regulators are sharply underfinanced, face ferocious corporate lobbying interests with friends in Congress who want to weaken the rules, and are often unable to anticipate or prevent major infractions that can wind up costing investors huge sums of money."
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If we cannot find Osama, bomb Iraq.
If the markets hurt your Mama, bomb Iraq.
If the terrorists are Saudi
And the bank takes back your Audi
And the TV shows are bawdy,
Bomb Iraq. ....
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Wednesday, November 27, 2002
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False Confessions and the Jogger Case: "Every minute of interrogation should be videotaped. This simple procedural reform will deter police coercion, deter frivolous defense claims of coercion, and enable trial judges and juries to assess the veracity of taped confessions. The best way to ensure and determine the truth of a confession is to record and see the entire picture."
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What Did Poe Know About Cosmology? Nothing. But He Was Right.: "Departing from conventional wisdom of the day, which saw the universe as static and eternal, Poe insisted that it had exploded into being from a single "primordial particle" in "one instantaneous flash." "From the one particle, as a center," he wrote, "let us suppose to be irradiated spherically -- in all directions -- to immeasurable but still to definite distances in the previously vacant space -- a certain inexpressibly great yet limited number of unimaginably yet not infinitely minute atoms.""
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Critics Say Government Deleted Web Site Material to Push Abstinence: " Information on condom use, the relation between abortion and breast cancer and ways to reduce sex among teenagers has been removed from government Web sites, prompting critics to accuse the Department of Health and Human Services of censoring medical information in order to promote a philosophy of sexual abstinence."
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Ford Motor Is Linked to Argentina's 'Dirty War': "a federal prosecutor here filed a criminal complaint against Ford Argentina this month and ordered an investigation into the company's conduct under the junta that ruled this country. It charges that Ford and its senior executives "managed, participated in or covered up the illegal detention" of Mr. Troiani and nearly two dozen other employees. ... Over the next year, he says, he was repeatedly beaten, tortured and deprived of sleep and food. The case is an outgrowth of similar charges made against Mercedes-Benz, today a subsidiary of DaimlerChrysler. A total of 16 workers at its plant in a suburb of Buenos Aires were abducted either at home or on the job from 1976 to 1977. All but two are assumed to have been killed. "
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Justice Dept. Seeks to Seal Vaccine Papers: "Lawyers for the families said they were outraged by today's move. They said the government was trying to prevent families from obtaining damaging information about the preservative, which could later be used against drug companies in civil courts."
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Judging a Mother for a Crime by Someone Else: " Illinois Supreme Court overturned Ms. Pollock's conviction, saying the prosecution's theory -- that she should have known that her boyfriend, Scott English, who is serving a life sentence, was going to murder her child -- has no basis in the law.... Ms. Pollock will go free only because a student plucked her letter from among the 17,000 that the law school clinic at Northwestern University receives every year, and the clinic persuaded the Supreme Court to hear an appeal filed after the deadline had passed. The court reversed the conviction outright rather than order a new trial."
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In Iran, a 'second revolution' gathers steam | csmonitor.com: ""When I remember the promises and pledges of the revolution, I tremble like a willow thinking of my faith," wrote Ayatollah Jaluddin Taheri, a long-venerated cleric who has since been placed under house arrest. Ayatollah Taheri struck at the ruling clerics as corrupt hypocrites and a "gang of shroud-wearers," whose "deviations" were undermining Islamic rule. He accused Khamenei of being propped up by "louts and fascists, who sharpen the teeth of the crocodile of power.""
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Monday, November 25, 2002
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Amnesty Accuses Israeli Forces of War Crimes: "A new report by Amnesty International contends that Israeli forces committed war crimes in Jenin and Nablus this spring during a large-scale offensive in the West Bank, killing Palestinians unlawfully, blocking medical care, using people as human shields and bulldozing houses with residents inside."
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Rights Group Says Governor in Afghan West Abuses Power: "Human Rights Watch, in a new report, accuses one of Afghanistan's most powerful regional governors of creating a "virtual ministate" in western Afghanistan where "political intimidation, arrests, beatings and torture" are widespread. The human rights group, in a report to be issued on Tuesday, also contends that the commander, Ismail Khan, who controls the western province of Herat, is reinstituting Taliban-era restrictions on dress for women and is banning Western movies and music. The group also says the United States and the United Nations are not doing enough to rein in Mr. Khan, who is accused of personally ordering political arrests and beatings, and it accuses the United Nations of turning a blind eye to the violations in the hope of maintaining stability. Mr. Khan, an ethnic Tajik who battled the Taliban, is also accused of overseeing the systematic harassment of ethnic Pashtuns, the country's largest ethnic group and a large source of support for the Taliban."
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'Reversible Errors': Presumed Guilty: "''Reversible Errors,'' the latest addition to the Turow oeuvre, may well offer us the richest blend yet. At the center of ''Reversible Errors'' is a confession made by a suspect, Rommy Gandolph, that results in his conviction in a murder case. The plot of the novel moves along on two converging tracks: the events of 1991 leading up to Gandolph's conviction, and the events of 2001 involving his new lawyer's attempt to save him from imminent execution."
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Former Hostage Taker Now Likes to Take On the Mullahs: "The three leaders of the embassy takeover -- Mr. Asgharzadeh, Mohsen Mirdamadi and Habibollah Bitaraf -- were university students in Tehran in late October 1979, when they met to plan the operation. Today, Mr. Asgharzadeh, along with his former compatriots, is a changed man. As the secretary general of the Solidarity Party -- which advocates more political and social freedom -- he is a strong supporter of President Mohammad Khatami and is a member of the Tehran municipal council. Mr. Mirdamadi is a member of Parliament and Mr. Bitaraf is President Khatami's minister of power. All three consider themselves political reformers. "
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Prison Class: What Ma Barker Knew and Congress Didn't: "prison education programs were radically undermined during the 1990's, when Congress made convicted felons ineligible for Pell grants, the federal tuition aid program aimed primarily at the poor. The government also limited the flow of money to prisons for adult and special education -- a move that turned out to be seriously self-destructive. Researchers have discovered and rediscovered, over and over again, that inmates who attend vocational training or college classes are more likely to stay out of jail once they leave."
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Whose Hands Are Dirty?: Bob Herbert "Last week the Senate approved legislation to establish a Department of Homeland Security and it will soon be signed into law by the president. Buried in this massive bill, snuck into it in the dark of night by persons unknown (actually, it's fair to say by Republican persons unknown), was a provision that -- incredibly -- will protect Eli Lilly and a few other big pharmaceutical outfits from lawsuits by parents who believe their children were harmed by thimerosal. Now this has nothing to do with homeland security. Nothing. This is not a provision that will in any way protect us from the ferocious evil of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. So why is it there? Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the major drug companies have become a gigantic collective cash machine for politicians, and that the vast majority of that cash goes to Republicans. Or maybe it's related to the fact that Mitch Daniels, the White House budget director, is a former Eli Lilly big shot. Or the very convenient fact that just last June President Bush appointed Eli Lilly's chairman, president and C.E.O., Sidney Taurel, to a coveted seat on the president's Homeland Security Advisory Council."
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A Pig Returns to the Farm, Thumbing His Snout at Orwell: "An American novelist has written a parody of "Animal Farm," George Orwell's 1945 allegory about the evils of communism, in which the exiled pig, Snowball, returns to the farm and sets up a capitalist state, leading to misery for all the animals. The book, "Snowball's Chance" by John Reed, is being published this month by Roof Books, a small independent press in New York. And the estate of George Orwell is not happy about it. "
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Sunday, November 24, 2002
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U.S. Is Wooing a Shiite Exile to Rattle Iraq: "An Iranian-backed ayatollah may seem an unlikely ally for the Bush administration. But consider Ayatollah Muhammad Bakir al-Hakim. The ayatollah is an Iraqi Shiite who has been living in Tehran for more than two decades. He is backed by the Iranian government, the one that President Bush has derided as part of an "axis of evil." His father once gave sanctuary to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the fiery anti-American cleric who later rose to power in Iran's 1979 revolution. Still, the United States and the Shiite cleric are in the process of forging a political alliance of convenience"
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Nurses' Association Says in Study that Big Hospital Chain Overcharges Patients for Drugs: "Tenet Healthcare, already under scrutiny for receiving unusually high Medicare payments in recent years, apparently charged patients high prices for drugs as well, according to a new analysis by the California Nurses Association to be released tomorrow. In recent years, Tenet-owned hospitals have raised their drug prices to roughly eight times actual costs, the association said. Tenet, one of the nation's largest commercial hospital chains, has come under intense scrutiny for the unusual amount of special Medicare payments it has received in recent years. By raising prices sharply at some of its hospitals, particularly in California, Tenet received hundreds of millions of dollars in special payments. "
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Conservatives Sweep Vote in Austria: "Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel's conservative party made large gains to dominate parliamentary elections on Sunday, according to initial results. But his coalition partner, the anti-immigration party of Joerg Haider, was pounded at the polls, the results released by state television showed. Preliminary results showed Schuessel's People's Party captured over 42 percent, the Interior Ministry said. That's a 16 percentage-point increase over its performance in 1999 elections. Haider's Freedom Party stood at just over 10 percent, down nearly two-thirds from the 27 percent it captured in the last elections. The Social Democrats also gained but appeared to have been outpaced by the People's Party. They were listed at just over 37 percent, more than three percentage points more than in the last elections. The environmentalist Greens stood at around 9 percent, little changed from their results two years ago, the preliminary results showed."
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Saturday, November 23, 2002
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Madison Ave. Plays Growing Role in Drug Research: "The three largest advertising companies -- Omnicom, Interpublic and WPP -- have spent tens of millions of dollars to buy or invest in companies like Scirex that perform clinical trials of experimental drugs. One advertising executive calls it "getting closer to the test tube." Ad agency executives say they do nothing to distort the research process. But critics worry that science is being sacrificed for the sake of promotion.... Dr. Thomas Bodenheimer of the University of California at San Francisco has been critical of drug company involvement in clinical trials."
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Egyptian Islamist group faces key leadership question | csmonitor.com: "With the leadership void left by Mr. Mashhour's death, the Brotherhood, which is known for its social activism as well as a radical brand of Islam, is at a crossroads. Despite a government crackdown over the past few years, the Brotherhood's appeal has grown, in large part due to younger members who are more committed to democracy and human rights in Egypt. If a younger leader gets the nod, it could signal a significant shift in focus, as well as more openness for this organization and possibly for other opposition groups as well."
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Should churches convert drivers of SUVs? | csmonitor.com: "Economist Michelle White of University of California at San Diego calculated the effect of SUVs and light trucks on traffic safety. Many people purchase SUVs to make their families safer, but the cost is extremely high, Dr. White said in an interview. "My calculations suggested that for every accident involving a fatality that you avoided by buying a bigger vehicle, you cause 2 1/2 accidents involving fatalities for vehicles that you hit."
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The Sons Also Rise: Krugman - "Last week my Princeton colleague Alan Krueger wrote a column for The Times surveying statistical studies that debunk the mythology of American social mobility. "If the United States stands out in comparison with other countries," he wrote, "it is in having a more static distribution of income across generations with fewer opportunities for advancement." And Kevin Phillips, in his book "Wealth and Democracy," shows that robber-baron fortunes have been far more persistent than legend would have it. But the past is only prologue. According to one study cited by Mr. Krueger, the heritability of status has been increasing in recent decades. And that's just the beginning. Underlying economic, social and political trends will give the children of today's wealthy a huge advantage over those who chose the wrong parents."
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'Rebel Colonel,' Ecuador Favorite, Adopts Capitalist Look: "Lucio Gutiérrez sounds every bit the button-down capitalist who by nearly every measure appears poised to win the presidency in an election this Sunday. Forget that just three years ago he was a rebellious army colonel who led a revolt that toppled this country's president, drawing comparisons with another former coup plotter, Venezuela's president, Hugo Chávez. Or that, like Mr. Chávez, he burst onto the political stage by railing against market reforms and the corruption of traditional parties. Mr. Gutiérrez, in an interview, was having none of it. He promised to create jobs with economic reforms and foreign investment, pay Ecuador's debt, negotiate a deal with the International Monetary Fund, and allow the American military to continue using its air base here. "
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Agency Weighed, but Discarded, Plan Reconfiguring the Internet: "Pentagon research agency that is exploring how to create a vast database of electronic transactions and analyze them for potential terrorist activity considered but rejected another surveillance idea: tagging Internet data with unique personal markers to make anonymous use of some parts of the Internet impossible. The idea, which was explored at a two-day workshop in California in August, touched off an angry private dispute among computer scientists and policy experts who had been brought together to assess the implications of the technology. The plan, known as eDNA,"
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From Wolf to Dog, Yes, but When?: "Three studies in today's issue of Science shed light on the questions of when, where and how dogs were first domesticated from wolves. One suggests that a few wolves, perhaps from the same population somewhere in east Asia, are the mothers of almost all dogs alive today. "
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Shouting the Pain From Japan's Germ Attacks: "she vowed... to shake Japan, China and the United States out of the great Pacific amnesia about biological warfare. Ms. Wang assembled 180 Chinese victims and sued Japan, charging that its forces had spread bubonic plague and other diseases in China during World War II. The group claimed that 300,000 people were killed by germ warfare, though there are no official tallies. After five years in court, the plaintiffs scored a partial victory in late August when Judge Kohi Iwata of Tokyo District Court ruled that Japan's infamous Unit 731 "used bacteriological weapons under the order of the imperial Japanese Army's headquarters." The judge rejected compensation, however, saying the plaintiffs had no right to demand money from Japan under international law. "
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Changing of Republican Budget Guard Could Create Waves: "The question being asked throughout the Capitol and in the institutes that track budget and tax matters is whether the officials who replace Ms. Paull, Mr. Crippen and Mr. Hoagland -- none have been named yet -- will mainly be honest evaluators of tax and budget policy or primarily facilitators of the Republican political agenda. The three who are leaving were squarely in the camp of honest brokers. Year after year, they spoke their minds and resisted all efforts to alter their designs to fit the latest Republican fashions. For example, Republican leaders were furious this year when Mr. Crippen said publicly that the federal budget would still show a surplus if not for the president's $1.35 trillion tax cut."
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Turks, Fearing Flow of Refugees, Plan Move Into Iraq: "Turkish officials are preparing to send troops up to 60 miles into northern Iraq on what they say is a mission to prevent an influx of refugees in the event that a war there sets off a mass movement toward Turkey's borders. The plan, which is being circulated among top government officials, is giving rise to fears that it could be used as a cover for the Turkish military to snuff out any attempt by Iraqi Kurds to set up their own state if President Saddam Hussein falls from power."
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E.P.A. Says It Will Change Rules Governing Industrial Pollution: "Bush administration today announced the most sweeping move in a decade to loosen industrial air pollution rules. The administration said the changes would encourage plant improvements that would clean the air. But critics denounced the changes as a retreat from tougher rules now in place that require factories to make costly investments in pollution control equipment when they modernize."
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South American Trading Bloc Frees Movement of Its People: " In an important step toward regional integration, the six member nations of the South American common market have approved a plan that will allow their 250 million people to live and work in any other member country and be granted the same rights as the citizens of those nations... Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay were the founders and are full members of the common market, known as Mercosur, which with a combined gross product of more than $1 trillion is the world's third-largest trade group. Bolivia and Chile joined later and are associate members."
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As Andean Glaciers Shrink, Water Worries Grow: "In a phenomenon scientists here and abroad call a calamity in the making, the glaciers of the central Andes are vanishing because of global warming driven at least in part by pollution. Their disappearance, scientists now say, is nearly unavoidable and could lead to water shortages in places like Bolivia and Peru that depend on glaciers and the rain and snow that fall on the mountains for water for drinking, irrigating fields and generating electricity... Scientists say that without the glaciers the region's natural water cycle will be disrupted. Glaciers release water in dry seasons and collect it in rainy ones. "It's a natural dam," said Lonnie Thompson, a research scientist at the Byrd Center who has studied Andean glaciers closely. "Some people refer to these glaciers as the world's water towers, and once they're dry, you lose that water."
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Why U.S. Oil Companies and Russian Resources Don't Mix: " Bush administration is pushing American oil companies to invest in Russia, and President Vladimir V. Putin has thrown his weight behind tax and regulatory changes to draw foreign investment. The only problem is that American oil companies are not buying. After years of grappling with stubborn bureaucracies and hostile local oil companies, Western executives doubt that even Mr. Putin can make investing in Russia much easier. The Russian industry, led by companies like Yukos and Sibneft, has turned itself around and is now battling to keep foreigners off its turf. The two sides are mired in a standoff that most executives and analysts say will drag on for years. "
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The New York Review of Books: Brazil: Lula's Prospects: "For a country of its size and importance, Brazil has little support in the US Congress. Nor do the US press and television take much interest in it. News from Brazil is mainly about samba, sex, and soccer, and economic reporting is confined to the financial pages. It is time Washington realized that loose talk in the Treasury, hysteria on Wall Street, and foolish fears about a new axis of evil can hurt US interests. Brazil's election must be seen against the backdrop of the Argentine crisis, the imminent possibility of a bloody coup in Venezuela, and the escalating conflict in Colombia. If Brazil fails, as it could, this will have major implications not only for the international financial system but for the prospects of democracy in the region. How ironic that while the United States is now talking about how to "build" a democracy after a war in Iraq, it risks, by inattention and misplaced priorities, aggravating the problems that could undermine the largest and most successful democracy in what it likes to think of as its own "neighborhood.""
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Shooting Magda, by Joshua Sobol: "Shooting Magda tells the story of Samira (Robin Kacyn), a young Palestinian woman who has fallen in love with an Israeli law student and whose life is now being captured by an Israeli film crew. Benesh (Brad Schwartz), the film's director, has helped Samira draft a semi-autobiographical script but, as budget issues force a marathon, 24-hour shoot, differences of vision -- both personal and national -- begin to arise. "
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Thursday, November 21, 2002
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States of Pain: "Watching the fiscal crises gripping cities and states across the U.S. is like watching a chain-reaction auto wreck in slow motion. I don't think the general public has a good sense yet of the pain that will result from the carnage. California residents learned last week that their state, already laboring under a huge budget gap in the current fiscal year, will face a potentially catastrophic shortfall next year -- $21 billion, which is far higher than almost anyone expected. In New York, state officials will have to close an estimated $10 billion gap next year."
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How War Left the Law Behind: "How can the council's decision bind Iraq but not the United States?... Absent Security Council approval, the United Nations Charter prohibits the use of force except for self-defense. NATO, which led the Kosovo war, never seriously claimed a defensive rationale, and the United States has yet to advance such a justification concerning Iraq. Given the contradiction between the mandate of the Charter and the prevailing American view on Iraq and Kosovo, what has happened to the law? It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Charter provisions governing use of force are simply no longer regarded as binding international law.... since 1945, dozens of member states have engaged in well over 100 interstate conflicts that have killed millions of people. This record of violation is legally significant. The international legal system is voluntary and states are bound only by rules to which they consent. A treaty can lose its binding effect if a sufficient number of parties engage in conduct that is at odds with the constraints of the treaty. The consent of United Nations member states to the general prohibition against the use of force, as expressed in the Charter, has in this way been supplanted by a changed intent as expressed in deeds. The United States is therefore correct: it would not be unlawful to attack Iraq, even without Security Council approval. It seems the Charter has, tragically, gone the way of the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact which purported to outlaw war and was signed by every major belligerent in World War II. "
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Wednesday, November 20, 2002
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Proud, patriotic & green | csmonitor.com: "In ads, articles, and websites, environmentalists have pulled a page from President Bush's patriotic playbook, selling their cause of energy conservation against a backdrop of national security."
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US forms Iraqi opposition army | csmonitor.com: "Critics say the new army is designed to provide a power base for the INC leader, Ahmed Chalabi, who has the ear of Congress, the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney's office, but has little support in Iraq and is dismissed by some State Department and CIA officials as a self-promoting solo act."
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TidBITS: The Evil That Is the DMCA: "Much has been written about what's wrong with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). After all, it's been used to jail programmers, threaten professors, and censor publications, and because of it, foreign scientists have avoided traveling to the U.S. and prominent researchers have withheld their work. In a white paper about the unintended consequences of the DMCA, the Electronic Frontier Foundation argues that the DMCA chills free expression and scientific research, jeopardizes fair use, and impedes competition and innovation. In short, this is a law that only the companies who paid for it could love."
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Nuns Bring Hope to Mississippi Delta Towns: "In the 1980's, a half dozen orders of Catholic nuns looked around the country to see where they could be most helpful, and they began sending members into the Delta, with the support of the Diocese of Jackson, Miss. Since then, several hundred nuns have settled in communities like Tutwiler, Tunica, Marks, Rosedale and Jonestown -- places that whites had deserted with the desegregation of schools. With little fanfare and no government help to speak of, these sisters help reinforce the town's crowded and underfinanced public schools. They are also nurses, doctors, counselors and community organizers. They build medical clinics, nonsectarian preschools for the youngest children and houses with Habitat for Humanity volunteers. They provide the towns' only refuges for many children to do homework or make decorations for Halloween. They organize programs for teenage girls as alternatives to becoming pregnant. "
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Senate Votes, 90-9, to Set Up Homeland Security Department Geared to Fight Terrorism: "Eight Democrats voted against the bill: Senators Daniel K. Akaka of Alaska, Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, Russell D. Feingold of Wisconsin, Ernest F. Hollings of South Carolina, Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii, Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, Carl Levin of Michigan and Paul S. Sarbanes of Maryland. Senator James M. Jeffords, Independent of Vermont, also voted against it, and Senator Frank H. Murkowski of Alaska was not present."
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HU'S ON FIRST By James Sherman
Playwright Jim Sherman wrote this today after Hu Jintao was named chief of the Communist Party in China.
(We take you now to the Oval Office.)
George: Condi! Nice to see you. What's happening?
Condi: Sir, I have the report here about the new leader of China.
George: Great. Lay it on me.
Condi: Hu is the new leader of China.
George: That's what I want to know.
Condi: That's what I¹m telling you.
George: That's what I¹m asking you. Who is the new leader of China?
Condi: Yes.
George: I mean the fellow's name.
Condi: Hu.
George: The guy in China.
Condi: Hu.
George: The new leader of China.
Condi: Hu.
George: The Chinaman!
Condi: Hu is leading China.
George: Now whaddya' asking me for?
Condi: I'm telling you Hu is leading China.
George: Well, I'm asking you. Who is leading China?
Condi: That's the man's name.
George: That's who's name?
Condi: Yes.
George: Will you or will you not tell me the name of the new leader of China?
Condi: Yes, sir.
George: Yassir? Yassir Arafat is in China? I thought he was in the Middle East.
Condi: That's correct.
George: Then who is in China?
Condi: Yes, sir.
George: Yassir is in China?
Condi: No, sir.
George: Then who is?
Condi: Yes, sir.
George: Yassir?
Condi: No, sir.
George: Look, Condi. I need to know the name of the new leader of China. Get me the Secretary General of the U.N. on the phone.
Condi: Kofi?
George: No, thanks.
Condi: You want Kofi?
George: No.
Condi: You don't want Kofi.
George: No. But now that you mention it, I could use a glass of milk. And then get me the U.N.
Condi: Yes, sir.
George: Not Yassir! The guy at the U.N.
Condi: Kofi?
George: Milk! Will you please make the call?
Condi: And call who?
George: Who is the guy at the U.N?
Condi: Hu is the guy in China.
George: Will you stay out of China?!
Condi: Yes, sir.
George: And stay out of the Middle East! Just get me the guy at the U.N.
Condi: Kofi.
George: All right! With cream and two sugars. Now get on the phone.
(Condi picks up the phone.) Condi: Rice, here.
George: Rice? Good idea. And a couple of egg rolls, too. Maybe we should send some to the guy in China. And the Middle East. Can you get Chinese food in the Middle East?
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Byrd, at 85, Fills the Forum With Romans and Wrath: ""That Department of Homeland Security will not add one whit of security in the near future to the American people," he said. "In the meantime, the terrorists are going to be very busy. I'm concerned that in our drive to focus on the war in Iraq and the Department of Homeland Security, we're going to be taking our eyes off what the terrorists may do to us." Mr. Byrd advocated slowly creating the department, with Congress overseeing the process, and he pulled out the ever-present copy of the Constitution from his breast pocket to make his point. "We're being recreant in turning over to this president the power shift that is included in that bill," he said.... Mr. Byrd, who will celebrate his 50th anniversary in Congress in January, said he had no illusions that his oratory was going to change the outcome of the final vote. So why was he on the floor day after day? What was he accomplishing? "To me, that question misses the point, with all due respect to you for asking it," he said. "To me, the matter is there for a thousand years in the record. I stood for the Constitution. I stood for the institution. If it isn't heard today, there'll be some future member who will come through and will comb these tomes."
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Tuesday, November 19, 2002
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Victors and Spoils: Krugman - "The federal civil service, with its careful protection of workers from political pressure, was created specifically to bring the spoils system to an end; but now the administration has found a way around those constraints. We don't have to speculate about what will follow, because Jeb Bush has already blazed the trail. Florida's governor has been an aggressive privatizer, and as The Miami Herald put it after a careful study of state records, "his bold experiment has been a success -- at least for him and the Republican Party, records show. The policy has spawned a network of contractors who have given him, other Republican politicians and the Florida G.O.P. millions of dollars in campaign donations." What's interesting about this network of contractors isn't just the way that big contributions are linked to big contracts; it's the end of the traditional practice in which businesses hedge their bets by giving to both parties. The big winners in Mr. Bush's Florida are companies that give little or nothing to Democrats... It's as if firms seeking business with the state of Florida are subject to a loyalty test. "
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Celestial Light Show Tonight as Earth Clips Comet's Wake: "Temple-Tuttle orbits the Sun every 33 years, and during its closest approach the heat of the Sun causes some of the comet's ice to bubble off, taking some dusty debris with it. This year, which some experts believe may feature the most intense meteor storm until the end of the 21st century, the early peak will be caused by a dust stream from Temple-Tuttle's approach in 1767. The late peak involves a cloud from 1866. A later cloud generally has had less time to spread, so it has a higher concentration of dust particles, which should make for more meteors. Earth will also hit this stream more head-on than the 1767 one. These factors mean that the later peak should have more activity than the earlier. Estimates of the rate of meteors during the late peak are as high as 5,000 per hour, although Mr. Kronk notes that, because the moon will be nearly full, a peak of about 3,000 is more likely."
[Between 4:25 and 4:52 a.m. (just after the "late peak"), we counted 100 meteors, from the playing field at Jackson Park Elementary School, University City, Missouri, with a light haze and nearby street lights interfering. (Stars in Leo visible to about 4.5 magnitude.) Magnificent!]
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Monday, November 18, 2002
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Hu Jintao: Mystery Man at the Helm: " Low-profile even by the hermetic standards of China's one-party system, Hu Jintao today took over the most important political position in the world's most populous nation by appealing to the one constituency that counts: elite party insiders. A merchant's son, Mr. Hu survived a decade-long leadership trial by persuading elders that he was the perfect party mandarin, pragmatic and flexible, yet discreet and fiercely loyal. "
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Iraqi army is tougher than US believes "Baghdad will be key. It is within this sprawling city of five million that US troops will have to hunt down the Iraqi dictator and his close associates. With this in mind, all troops and security services loyal to the government will in the last instance be massed in and around the capital.
Caught between a potentially hostile Iraqi population bent on revenge and an invading army committed to regime change, those fighting alongside President Saddam will have little choice but to remain loyal to the end. The result could be the worst-case scenario for US military planners: an organised, committed and disciplined force with nowhere to go, defending a highly populated urban area. In front of the world's media, US troops would have the unenviable task of distinguishing these forces from the wider, innocent, civilian population. "
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Gay Army Linguists: "Editor: In "Gay Army Linguists Say They Were Ousted", you report that "nine Army linguists, including six trained in Arabic, have been dismissed from the military because they are gay, even as the military faces a critical shortage of translators and interpreters for the war on terrorism." While we down under debate Australian support for any United States-led war on terror, I would be ever so grateful if an American politician would explain why the Taliban's persecution of women is considered barbaric, yet persecution of gay military personnel by your government is deemed quite acceptable. MIKE LECLERC Sydney, Australia, "
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After Conviction of Boy, Prosecutor Switches Sides: " It was not simply a change of heart. As a South Florida prosecutor, Marc Shiner had always considered himself liberal and right thinking, he said. Just a man doing his job. But then he won a murder case against Nathaniel Brazill, who shot his favorite teacher when he was 13. That is when Mr. Shiner decided he had had enough. Now he is preparing to handle a case in which a 16-year-old girl stands accused of murdering her newborn daughter. This time, however, Mr. Shiner is on the other side of the courtroom. He is a defense lawyer now, representing the girl, and making the broader point that children should not be tried as adults"
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British Star Speaks Up for 'Quiet American': "Greene's story, about a middle-aged British correspondent in Saigon who loses his very much younger Vietnamese girlfriend to a seemingly naïve American aid worker (played by Brendan Fraser), casts a harsh light on well-intentioned United States meddling in Indochina that led to bloodshed and war. So the days after Sept. 11, when the United States and the world were rallying around the American flag, seemed an inopportune time to release such a film. Why the film was still being delayed a year later puzzled Sir Michael [Caine].... The Quiet American" premiered at Toronto in September and not only drew a standing ovation but also spawned a series of glowing reviews about Sir Michael's performance that overnight made him among the front-runners for an Academy Award nomination. "
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Sunday, November 17, 2002
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Thursday, November 14, 2002
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In the middle of 12th century | csmonitor.com: ""Baudolino" is a richly rewarding novel, as satisfying as it is stimulating. War and peace, belief and skepticism, false dreams and true, the pleasures of storytelling, and the mysteries of love: Eco handles these themes with an exhilarating blend of profundity and lightness. Long though it is, this a novel that keeps getting better, gathering irresistible force as it sweeps toward its brilliantly inevitable conclusion."
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Guardian - Interview with Michael Moore he says, the money is about more than status. He leans close. "Back home we call it fuck-you money. OK? What that means is, the distributor of the film can't ever say to me, 'Don't you dare say this in the interview or you better change that in the movie because if you don't, you're not going to get another movie deal.' Because I already have my home and my family taken care of, and enough money from this film and book to make the next film, I'm able to say, 'Fuck you.' No one in authority can hold money over me to get me to conform."
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You Are a Suspect: Wm Safire - "If the Homeland Security Act is not amended before passage, here is what will happen to you: Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend -- all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as "a virtual, centralized grand database." To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you... This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario. It is what will happen to your personal freedom in the next few weeks if John Poindexter gets the unprecedented power he seeks. "
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Saddam Hussein's Delusion: "As early as 1969, Saddam Hussein spoke of his determination to strengthen Iraq's uruba (Arabness). This was no easy task. Although all the people of Iraq do feel that they are Iraqis, not all regard themselves as Arabs. Historically, only part of the 7,000-year biography of the land that is Iraq could be described as Arab. The rest is covered by Sumerian, Assyrian, Akkadian, Babylonian, Elamite, Urartan, Persian, Byzantine, Mongol, Mamluk and Ottoman periods, among others. Iraqi architecture, music, cuisine and daily rituals reflect this rich diversity. The word Iraq is Persian, meaning lowlands, as is Baghdad, which means God-given. The names of Iraq's two great rivers, the Euphrates and the Tigris, are Greek. Iraq is also the home of 11 living languages,"
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Study Says a Protein May Be Better Than Cholesterol in Predicting Heart Disease Risk: "inexpensive blood test for a protein linked to artery disease may be better than a cholesterol test at predicting a person's risk for a heart attack or stroke, researchers are reporting today. The test, for the substance, C-reactive protein, may help identify people who have an increased risk even though they do not have high cholesterol. About half of the people with heart disease have normal cholesterol levels"
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The Kind of Noise That Keeps a Body on Balance: "In a series of experiments, healthy 75-year-olds stood on a platform that transmitted randomly varying vibrations to the soles of their feet. With these good vibrations, the subjects reflexively adjusted their balance until they swayed about the same amount as 25-year-olds who did not receive the random signals. Younger people who used the vibrating system also swayed less. James J. Collins, a professor of biomedical engineering who led the research group, attributed the improvement to stochastic resonance, a well-known phenomenon in which random noise enhances the detection of weak signals. In this case the noise made the nerves in the feet more sensitive and better able to detect the kinds of pressure changes that occur when the body goes slightly out of balance and puts more pressure on one part of the foot."
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Update on 'Arming America' - The Nation: "Michael Bellesiles, the historian accused of research falsification in his book Arming America, a study of gun culture, announced on October 25 that he was resigning from Emory University, citing a "hostile environment" [see Jon Wiener, "Fire at Will," November 4]. His resignation, effective at the end of the year, came the very afternoon that Emory released the report of a three-person external board that had been asked to review some of the charges.... if Bellesiles is right in his reply, then those distinguished historians are guilty of some of the same sins they accuse him of committing: suppressing inconvenient evidence, spinning the data their way, refusing to follow leads that didn't serve their thesis. "
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Wednesday, November 13, 2002
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Silver swindle?: "hallmarked Sterling silver jewellery (925 fineness) being hawked at major US retail outlets and even prominent jewellers is probably little better than stainless steel... nearly everything clung to his magnet for dear life. Sterling silver doesn't do that."
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The Chronicle: 8/2/2002: Copyright as Cudgel: "When Congress brought copyright law into the digital era, in 1998, some in academe were initially heartened by what they saw as compromises that, they hoped, would protect fair use for digital materials. Unfortunately, they were wrong. Recent actions by Congress and the federal courts -- and many more all-too-common acts of cowardice by publishers, colleges, developers of search engines, and other concerned parties -- have demonstrated that fair use, while not quite dead, is dying. And everyone who reads, writes, sings, does research, or teaches should be up in arms. The real question is why so few people are complaining."
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Erik H. Thoreson | Bush Liberates Europe!: "Bush intends "to extend the benefits of liberty and prosperity through the spread of American values and tangible rewards for good governance." Discussion and speculation abound. What will the new Americanized Europe look like?...
After more than half a century of high-quality, universal and equal healthcare treatment for all, Norwegians will adopt the more elegant pay-as-you-go American system. The best medicine will be reserved for those who can afford it. Those who can't will either join a limited service, for-profit HMO or simply go without healthcare. After all, who said healthcare was a right? It is a privilege for those who have earned the right to pay for it....
To improve their safety and allow them to defend their personal property, Europeans will be encouraged to own and carry handguns, assault rifles and any other weapons they want. There is little doubt Europe will be the "safer" place promised by Bush once capital punishment returns"
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Ashcroft's Narco-Terror War: "Announcing the arrest last Wednesday of suspects in two drugs-for-weapons deals, Attorney General John Ashcroft declared, "The war on terrorism has been joined with the war on illegal drug use." One could almost hear him lick his lips, savoring the thought of it....
The drug war and the war on terrorism do resemble each other in important ways, although not those that Ashcroft emphasizes. Both efforts are open-ended, or maybe never-ending. Both lend themselves to broad extensions of government power, and thus, if not carefully controlled, both can lead to violations of fundamental rights. But in trying to combat terrorism the government has at least chosen a worthwhile opponent.
The drug war is not just a conspicuously unsuccessful war, it is a misguided one. Reviving it under the guise of fighting terrorism--and possibly making it more war-like in the process--will only make matters worse."
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The Noah's Ark of the Web, 7,000 Characters at a Time: "a new set of fonts being developed by six publishers of scientific, technical and medical journals promises to contain every character - more than 7,000 in all - that might be needed in a technical article published in any scientific discipline. When complete, sometime next fall, the fonts will be shared freely with publishers, software manufacturers and scholars, under the condition that they not be altered. "This work is a breakthrough for publishers and scientists," said Tim Ingoldsby, director of business development at the American Institute of Physics, one of the publishers working on the project, called the Scientific and Technical Information Exchange, or STIX (www.stixfonts.com). "
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Greeting card virus licensed to spread - The FriendGreetings electronic greeting card has all the hallmarks of a mass-mailing computer virus. The e-mail misleads a victim into downloading an application--ostensibly to view a Web card--and then sends itself to every e-mail address in the victim's Outlook contacts file. At least a few systems administrators have complained in Usenet postings that the mass-mailing e-card was to blame for swamping their network.
Yet the creators--Permissioned Media, a company apparently based in Panama--will be hard to prosecute: The viral card is protected by a license agreement that tricks unsuspecting users into clicking "Yes" and consenting to have the program send itself to all their e-mail contacts. "They are deliberately trying to hide something in a wrapping that they know people won't read," said Vincent Gullotto, vice president of security company Network Associates' antivirus emergency response team.
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Hit by a terrorist, kibbutz still shares a well with Arabs | csmonitor.com: ""As it stands, a grave injustice is being done to our neighbors," said Doron Lieber, the economic coordinator of the kibbutz, the only Israeli community to argue for rerouting the fence. According to current plans, Kafin would lose two square miles - 60 percent of its farmland. Mr. Lieber says this will not only be bad for the Palestinians, but bad for the kibbutz, fueling enormous resentment throughout the area.
"The moment those beautiful trees are cruelly uprooted, our island of tranquility is turned into any other place in Israel," he says. This kibbutz prides itself on a half century of good relations with neighboring Arab Israeli villages. So the irony that it was targeted by a militia linked to Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement was not lost on anyone, including Palestinian leaders.
But on Monday and Tuesday, it seemed to be precisely that history, as well as the kibbutz's humanistic ideology that were coloring the initial responses to the attack. "I feel like someone who has been slapped in the face," said Lieber. "My hand was stretched out in peace. But a slap in the face is only temporary. It rings in your ears a bit, but when the ringing stops you go on."
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Inquiries on Gun and Ousters Focus on Health Dept. Official: " Federal officials said today that they were investigating whether the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services had kept a gun in her office without authorization and whether she violated personnel rules by ousting career employees.... Mr. Grassley said Ms. Rehnquist's dismissal, demotion or reassignment of 19 senior executives could "hinder the performance of an office that has a stellar reputation for fighting fraud, waste and abuse in federal health care programs." The federal government spends more than $400 billion a year on the largest of those programs, Medicare and Medicaid, which provide health insurance for 70 million people who are elderly, disabled or poor.... Ms. Rehnquist, a former assistant United States attorney who is the daughter of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, refused to discuss the accusations. "
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Bill Moyers on Election 2002: "it is a heady time in Washington -- a heady time for piety, profits, and military power, all joined at the hip by ideology and money. "
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Government Outlines Plan for Research on Warming: "Bush administration, saying there are still many uncertainties about threats posed by human-caused climate change, has outlined a broad, years-long research agenda on global warming. Among many other goals, the draft plan calls for new work to be completed in the next four years to clarify how much of the warming since 1950 has been caused by human actions like emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide or soot; to explain differing temperature trends in the upper and lower atmosphere; and to improve computer models that simulate climate and monitoring systems for tracking the real thing. Advertisement The proposal was lauded yesterday by industry officials and some scientists who have long questioned the mainstream view that global warming is mainly caused by people and poses big risks....Dr. Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences at Princeton who has long advocated acting promptly to reduce emissions, said: "The plan veers off into emphasizing what we don't know at the expense of a thorough description of what we do know. If you strip away the rhetoric, there's a valuable agenda of research here to pursue. The danger is that while they're continuing to do the research, the window of opportunity to avoid dangerous global warming is closing." "
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Iraq war could recast US-Iran ties: "The leader of Iraq's most powerful armed Islamic opposition group is moving closer to backing American plans for toppling Saddam Hussein. The support of Ayatollah Mohammad Bakr al-Hakkim, whose Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) adheres to the same Shiite branch of Islam as most Iraqis, would be a welcome ingredient in US plans."
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"There is, of course, no guarantee of success. But politics is not about observations or predictions. Politics is what we create by what we do, what we hope for, and what we dare to imagine."- Paul Wellstone
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Minnesota's shame - Republicans don't like my criticism? Too bad.
They have to answer for Norm Coleman's campaign, which exploited 9/11 in a way that was truly evil.
By Garrison Keillor
(creator and host of the nationally syndicated radio show "A Prairie Home Companion," broadcast on more than 500 public radio stations nationwide.)
From salon.com, Nov. 13, 2002
The hoots and cackles of Republicans reacting to my screed against Norman Coleman, the ex-radical, former Democratic, now compassionate conservative senator-elect from Minnesota, was all to be expected, given the state of the Republican Party today. Its entire ideology, top to bottom, is We-are-not-Democrats, We-are-the-unClinton, and if it can elect an empty suit like Coleman, on a campaign as cheap and cynical and unpatriotic as what he waged right up to the moment Paul Wellstone's plane hit the ground, then Republicans are perfectly content. They are Republicans first and Americans second.
The old GOP of fiscal responsibility and principled conservatism and bedrock Main Street values is gone, my dear, and something cynical has taken its place. Thus the use of Iraq as an election ploy, openly, brazenly, from the president and Karl Rove all the way down to Norman Coleman, who came within an inch of accusing Wellstone of being an agent of al-Qaida. To do that one day and then, two days later, to feign grief and claim the dead Wellstone's mantle and carry on his "passion and commitment" is simply too much for a decent person to stomach. It goes beyond the ordinary roughhouse of politics. To accept it and grin and shake the son of a bitch's hand is to ignore what cannot be ignored if you want your grandchildren to grow up in a country like the one that nurtured and inspired you. I would rather go down to defeat with the Democrats I know than go oiling around with opportunists of Coleman's stripe, and you can take that to the bank.
I've run into plenty of Coleman supporters since the election and they see me and smirk and turn away and that's par for the course. I know those people. To my own shame, I know them. I'm ashamed of Minnesota for electing this cheap fraud, and I'm ashamed of myself for sitting on my hands, tending to my hoop-stitching, confident that Wellstone would win and that Coleman would wind up with an undersecretaryship in the Commerce Department. Instead, he will sit in the highest council in the land, and move in powerful circles, and enjoy the perks of his office, which includes all the sycophancy and bootlicking a person could ever hope for. So he can do with one old St. Paulite standing up and saying, "Shame. Repent. The End is Near."
The Republican exploitation of 9/11 for political gain is the sort of foulness that turns young people against the whole business, and for good reason. All sorts of people went down in the World Trade Center, execs and secretaries and bond traders and also the dishwashers in Windows on the World and secretaries and cleaning ladies. Think of all those portraits of the victims that ran daily week after week in the Times that we read, read tearfully, saw ourselves in those lives, and the wave of patriotic tenderness that followed was genuine and included us all. For a cynic like Norman Coleman to hitch his trailer to that tragedy is evil -- call it by the right name. To exploit 9/11 and the deaths of those innocent people on that beautiful day in Manhattan -- to appropriate that day and infer so clearly that there is a Republican and a Democratic side to it, is offensive to our national memory and obscenely evil, and it was rewarded by the voters of Minnesota.
Ordinarily, there should be a period of good feeling after an election, of relief, or relaxation, when we join hands and become one people again, but Norman Coleman doesn't deserve any Democrat's hand. We had come together as one people already -- the precious gift of 9/11 -- and he used that as a campaign ploy against us, suggesting that Democrats are unpatriotic, and he is not to be forgiven for it. I personally don't believe he had anything to do with the crash of Paul's plane. Plenty of people suspect he did. I don't. But I do think he is a cynical politician who should make himself scarce for the next few years until people start to forget his campaign.
Lord, America does love a winner. When you're riding high, people can't do enough for you, and when you fall down low, they don't want to be around to see. I know something about that -- every performer does -- and you quickly recognize your false friends, the people who clutch your hand and grab your elbow and give you a gigantic smile and tell you how much they love your work but they get the name of the show wrong, or the day of the week, or they mispronounce your name, and you see them clear for the phonies they are. Norman Coleman is that very person, the false knight upon the road, and he always has been and always will be. Paul Wellstone was a real person who led an authentic life. The contrast couldn't be clearer.
All you had to do was look at Coleman's face, that weird smile, the pleading eyes, the anger in the forehead. Or see how poorly his L.A. wife played the part of Mrs. Coleman, posing for pictures with him, standing apart, stiff, angry. Or listen to his artful dodging on the stump, his mastery of that old Republican dance, of employing some Everyguy gestures in the drive to make the world safe for the privileged. What a contrivance this guy is.
Paul Wellstone identified passionately with people at the bottom, people in trouble, people in the rough. He was an old-fashioned Democrat who felt more at home with the rank and file than with the rich and famous. (Bill Clinton, examine your conscience.) He loved stories and of course people on the edge tend to have better stories than the rich, whose stories are mostly about décor and amenities.
Paul walked the walk. He was a wonder. Everyone who ever met him knew that he lived a whole life and that he and Sheila were crazy about each other. To be in love with one person for 38 years is nothing you can fake: Even the casual passerby can see it. To die at 58, having lived so well and so truthfully, is enviable, compared to the longevity of a man who invents his own life in order to achieve the desired effect and advance himself. To gain the whole world and lose your own soul is not a course that Scripture recommends. You can do it so long as God doesn't notice, but God has a way of returning and straightening these things out. Sinner beware.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is posted without profit for educational purposes.)
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Tuesday, November 12, 2002
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G.O.P. Victory Sets Stage for Pro-Business Agenda: "Waking to a new power configuration in Washington yesterday, business leaders began to revise their wish lists for action on contentious issues like taxes, health care costs, personal-injury lawsuits and the ability of government employees to strike"
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USATODAY.com - Maintain CIA's independence: by James Bamford "As the White House searches for every possible excuse to go to war with Iraq, pressure has been building on the intelligence agencies to deliberately slant estimates to fit a political agenda. In this case, the agencies are being pressed to find a casus belli for war, whether or not one exists. "Basically, cooked information is working its way into high-level pronouncements, and there's a lot of unhappiness about it in intelligence, especially among analysts at the CIA," Vince Cannistraro, the agency's former head of counterterrorism, told The Guardian, a London newspaper."
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Chokehold on Knowledge: LA Times Editorial - "The Bush administration's plan to strip the Government Printing Office's authority is a threat to democracy. Office of Management and Budget Director Mitch Daniels wants to transfer control of information management from the printing office to individual Cabinet agencies. That would spell the end of the current system, in place since the Jeffersonian era, which requires executive branch agencies to send their documents and reports to neutral librarians, who then make them available to the public both online and in 1,300 public reading rooms nationwide. Daniels would replace that system with a more secretive one in which individual agencies would manage -- and possibly sanitize -- their own electronic databases. "
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William Rivers Pitt | The Desert of the Real: "One way or another, we must deal with the conservative freight train of legislation that is ramrodding towards us. A brief look at who will be taking control of the congressional agenda in January proves to be revealing..... "
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Pentagon Plans a Computer System That Would Peek at Personal Data of Americans: "The Pentagon is constructing a computer system that could create a vast electronic dragnet, searching for personal information as part of the hunt for terrorists around the globe -- including the United States. As the director of the effort, Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, has described the system in Pentagon documents and in speeches, it will provide intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials with instant access to information from Internet mail and calling records to credit card and banking transactions and travel documents, without a search warrant. Advertisement Historically, military and intelligence agencies have not been permitted to spy on Americans without extraordinary legal authorization. But Admiral Poindexter, the former national security adviser in the Reagan administration, has argued that the government needs broad new powers to process, store and mine billions of minute details of electronic life in the United States.... Before taking the position at the Pentagon, Admiral Poindexter, who was convicted in 1990 for his role in the Iran-contra affair, had worked as a contractor on one of the projects he now controls. Admiral Poindexter's conviction was reversed in 1991 by a federal appeals court because he had been granted immunity for his testimony before Congress about the case."
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Monday, November 11, 2002
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British Judges Criticize U.S. on the Prisoners Held at Guantánamo: "A panel of three senior British judges used extraordinary language in a ruling this week to criticize the United States' detention of prisoners from Afghanistan at Camp X-ray in Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. The three judges, ruling in a case involving a British subject held at Guantánamo, said detention of prisoners at the United States naval base there appeared to be a violation of both international law and the concept of habeas corpus developed centuries ago in England. Although the judges said the holding of prisoners at Guantánamo with no recourse to a court created an unacceptable "legal black hole," they acknowledged that they could do little about it. But it appeared evident that the judges were intent on sending a message to an appeals court in the United States that is considering the same issue."
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Report Criticizes Colombia on Militias: "new report by Human Rights Watch asserts that Colombia's attorney general has undermined investigations of right-wing paramilitary groups by firing or transferring prosecutors, particularly those working on cases in which military officers were believed to have assisted the groups in mass killings or assassinations."
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The Not-So-Crackpot Autism Theory: "Halsey attended a meeting to discuss thimerosal, a mercury-containing preservative that at the time was being used in several vaccines -- including the hepatitis B shot that Halsey had fought so hard to have administered to American babies. By the time the dust kicked up in that meeting had settled, Halsey would be forced to reckon with the hypothesis that thimerosal had damaged the brains of immunized infants and may have contributed to the unexplained explosion in the number of cases of autism being diagnosed in children. That Halsey was willing even to entertain this possibility enraged some of his fellow vaccinologists, who couldn't fathom how a doctor who had spent so much energy dismantling the arguments of people who attacked vaccines could now be changing sides. But to Halsey's mind, his actions were perfectly consistent: he was simply working from the data. And the numbers deeply troubled him. ''From the beginning, I saw thimerosal as something different,'' he says. ''It was the first strong evidence of a causal association with neurological impairment. I was very concerned.'' "
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An Animal's Place: "The industrialization -- and dehumanization -- of American animal farming is a relatively new, evitable and local phenomenon: no other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or as brutally as we do. Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to do it this way. Tail-docking and sow crates and beak-clipping would disappear overnight, and the days of slaughtering 400 head of cattle an hour would come to an end. For who could stand the sight? Yes, meat would get more expensive. We'd probably eat less of it, too, but maybe when we did eat animals, we'd eat them with the consciousness, ceremony and respect they deserve. "
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The Murder of Emmett Louis Till, Revisited: "A new documentary by 31-year-old Keith Beauchamp could well cause this case to be reopened. There will be a private screening of the film, "The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till," on Nov. 16 at the New York University Cantor Film Center"
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Beyond Anger: Studying the Subconscious Nature of Rage: "The popular notion is that rage is an undesirable but completely controllable emotion. As with drug abuse, the theory goes, one can just say no to it; take an anger management course and get a grip. But what many people don't realize is that the human brain comes hard-wired for anger and rage. There is strong recent evidence from neuroscience that people share this ancient emotional neural circuitry with all kinds of animals.... Dr. Maurizio Fava of Harvard Medical School has reported that up to 40 percent of depressed patients experience anger attacks, which subside in about 70 percent of the subjects who are successfully treated."
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Spaniards at Last Confront the Ghost of Franco: "only now is the country beginning to confront the terror of the 1936 army uprising and civil war that brought the generalissimo to power. Nearly 40 percent of Spain's 40 million people either were not born when Franco ruled or are too young to remember him. So in fits and starts, Spaniards are overcoming their fear that something bad will happen if they remember, shattering a conspiracy of silence that may force Spain's center-right government to acknowledge an era it wants to forget."
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The Fifty-first State? | Fallows: "Going to war with Iraq would mean shouldering all the responsibilities of an occupying power the moment victory was achieved. These would include running the economy, keeping domestic peace, and protecting Iraq's borders--and doing it all for years, or perhaps decades. Are we ready for this long-term relationship? " - [very long but fascinating.]
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A Post-Saddam Scenario | Kaplan: "Our goal in Iraq should be a transitional secular dictatorship that unites the merchant classes across sectarian lines and may in time, after the rebuilding of institutions and the economy, lead to a democratic alternative. In particular, a deliberately ambiguous relationship between the new Iraqi regime and the Kurds must be negotiated in advance of our invasion, so that the Kurds can claim real autonomy while the central government in Baghdad can also claim that the Kurdish areas are under its control. A transitional regime, not incidentally, would grant us the right to use local bases other than those in the northern, Kurdish-dominated free zone."
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America's For-Profit Secret Army: "During the Persian Gulf war in 1991, one of every 50 people on the battlefield was an American civilian under contract; by the time of the peacekeeping effort in Bosnia in 1996, the figure was one in 10. No one knows for sure how big this secretive industry is, but some military experts estimate the global market at $100 billion. As for the public companies that own private military contractors, they say little if anything about them to shareholders.... Private military contractors are flushing out drug traffickers in Colombia and turning the rag-tag militias of African nations into fighting machines. When a United Nations arms embargo restricted the American military in the Balkans, private military contractors were sent instead to train the local forces. At times, the results have been disastrous. In Bosnia, employees of DynCorp were found to be operating a sex-slave ring of young women who were held for prostitution after their passports were confiscated. In Croatia, local forces, trained by MPRI, used what they learned to conduct one of the worst episodes of "ethnic cleansing" "
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The software that saved my job (and marriage): " Let me tell you what recommends PlanPlus most: Without ever leaving Outlook, I have at my fingertips what FranklinCovey considers to be the foundations of effective planning: a rundown of my main goals and the big roles in my life (father, husband, editor, manager), right along with my calendar and to-do list of daily and undeadlined tasks. Now, in Outlook, I can distinguish between daily tasks (which have due dates) and master tasks (which don't have immediate deadlines). Even better, I can prioritize each task according to FranklinCovey's characteristic A,B,C and 1,2,3 technique. I can also split my main goals into the intervening tasks or appointments necessary to reach each one. I use the PlanPlus's Taskpad several times a day to jot down those little things that crop up. Throughout the day, I'll adjust my priorities accordingly. I also use a built-in weekly planning procedure--it takes me from values, roles, and goals right through to tasks and appointments--in a single, fully aligned process of managing my time to what really matters most to me. "
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Sunday Herald - Ian Bell: "can liberal Americans really despise [Bush] so much if they cannot even be bothered to vote against his party? And does a result unthinkable in European terms not remind us, finally, that our American allies have become very distant cousins indeed? Isolationism is a fact of US history. American power, meanwhile, is now the only relevant fact in world affairs. The decay of American politics, its simul taneous surrender to money and voter apathy, is a third fact we now take for granted -- while listening to all those lectures on freedom -- yet we rarely make the connection between these truths.... A nervous people fearing attack have chosen the promise of security, have watched bemused as their leaders have lurched back and forth between bombast and paranoia, but have not all become subscribers to the weird Republican doctrine of interventionist isolationism. If -- and it is a big if -- the Democrats can begin to articulate reasoned dissent then America's multiple personalities, its extraordinary diversity, will again assert themselves. Two apparently contradictory things are clear. First, according to all the rules, Bush won his electoral prize hands- down. Second, this president has yet to forge the sort of coalition among his own people that makes a long war possible -- let alone convince the rest of the world. Vietnam is too often called in evidence -- this time the stakes are much higher -- but the history of that conflict contains an important truth. It began with a broad consensus and ended in acrimony so profound that America was almost torn apart. It was launched by Democrats and continued by Republicans, but in the end neither party was capable of sustaining the effort, or of explaining away its sheer pointlessness. "
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Saturday, November 09, 2002
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Salon.com Politics | Letters: Readers respond to Michelle Goldberg's "Peace Kooks." "While I too disagree with the more radical positions ascribed to Not In Our Name and the International Action Center, I have questions for Gitlin. Where is your more moderate protest organization? What are you doing to lead the hordes of people who want to work through the U.N. to stop both the more dangerous weapons development of Saddam Hussein and the war with Iraq under Bush's plan?
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Salon | The respectable cult: "The respectable cult A new book asks why Christian Science has gotten away with the kind of paranoid, secretive practices that usually push religions into the kook bin. "
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IndyMedia Center Behind the Placards The Odd and Troubling Origins of Today's Anti-War Movement by David Corn. If public-opinion polls are correct, 33 percent to 40 percent of the public opposes an Iraq war; even more are against a unilateral action. This means the burgeoning anti-war movement has a large recruiting pool, yet the demo was not intended to persuade doubters. Nor did it speak to Americans who oppose the war but who don’t consider the United States a force of unequaled imperialist evil and who don’t yearn to smash global capitalism. This was no accident, for the demonstration was essentially organized by the Workers World Party,
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In Guantánamo: By Joseph Lelyveld. "On February 7 the President decreed that Taliban captives would be treated humanely "in accordance with the Geneva convention." He had the grace not to say that it was better than they and their al-Qaeda brethren deserved and that we are prepared to hold the lot of them at Guantanamo until the distant day, if it ever comes, when Islamic terrorist networks have been universally uprooted; but that, basically, appears to be the administration's position."
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Bush and Iraq: By Anthony Lewis "What is President Bush's ultimate objective in Iraq? Is it to make sure that Saddam Hussein does not have weapons of mass destruction? Or is it to remove Saddam by force and remake the politics of Iraq? And if the latter, would it be the first step toward a new American imperium?"
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Friday, November 08, 2002
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The unlikely career of one of American's most loved poets | csmonitor.com: "Lucille Clifton is often surprised by the reception she gets from audiences. In September, at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, Ms. Clifton received two standing ovations -- the first for simply walking onstage. "I don't understand it," she says without any pretense. "I just try to write clearly and directly. I try to appeal to the whole human." "
they ask me to remember
but they want me to remember
their memories
and I keep on remembering
mine
["why some people be mad at me sometimes"]
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The Saudis' Brand of Islam and Its Place in History: "THE TWO FACES OF ISLAM The House of Saud From Tradition to Terror By Stephen Schwartz" The 4,000 members of the Saudi ruling family are, as he puts it, "a vast mafia of princely parasites." He holds the Western oil companies, especially the Aramco partners and "the American political and media elites that have served them," responsible for "the continuation of dishonesty and injustice in Arabia." Contrary to the standard view of him, Mr. Schwartz writes, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran is at the opposite end of the spectrum from Wahhabi extremism and actually represents "the pluralist face of Islam."
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Russia and the Wages of Terror: "A young generation of radical Chechen fighters, reared on these Russian methods, is now fighting far more cruelly for the liberation of their land from federal forces than the Aslan Maskhadov, the aging Chechen president. And only a small fraction of those radicals was destroyed by Russian special forces in the Moscow theater on Oct. 26; the far larger part is preparing new acts of revenge against Russia that we cannot anticipate. At the same time, the intellectual inadequacy of our special services, especially the Federal Security Service, has become obvious."
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Labor Opens a Drive to Organize Wal-Mart: "labor is escalating its efforts, and in an all-out assault on the discount retailer that has grown to nearly 100 stores in 20 states, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union has hired disaffected managers as organizers and created a radio show and Web site that lambaste Wal-Mart's working conditions."
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As Big-City Debut Looms, New Air Traffic System Draws Fire: "A week before a new air traffic control system is supposed to be put into service in a highly congested airspace, federal aviation officials have called an unusual high-level meeting to review criticism that the system is not safe and has not been adequately tested. The ambitious system, which is late and over budget, is called the Standard Terminal Automation Replacement System, or Stars. It is eventually intended for use in nearly 200 air traffic offices around the country, as well as some military bases, to guide planes near airports. Proponents of the system, who want to begin using it in Philadelphia on Nov. 17, say it will increase safety and reduce flight delays, rein in maintenance costs and establish a platform for future improvements.... Current rules on how close airplanes are allowed to fly near each other — rules that often set limits on how much traffic an area can handle — are based on the possibility that a single radar is wrong. With more precise knowledge of where planes are, they could fly closer together, experts say. "
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Friday, November 01, 2002
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The New York Review of Books: Love in a Time of Revolution: review By Stephen Kinzer of The Country Under My Skin: A Memory of Love and War by Gioconda Belli. "Belli has written the first literary memoir by a Sandinista woman. It tells two stories. One is about a rich girl in a poor country who was carried away by political and physical passion. The other is an account of what went on behind the public façade of the Sandinista regime. They merge easily. Belli's progress through her various love affairs mirrors Nicaragua's history during the same period. "
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Wednesday, October 30, 2002
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The New York Review of Books: The Religious Success Story: Jared Diamond "But once a state invokes religion to require peaceful behavior toward fellow citizens with whom one has no relationship, how can a state convince its citizens not to apply those same precepts during wartime? States permit, indeed they command, their citizens to steal from and kill citizens of other states against which war has been declared. After a state has spent eighteen years teaching a boy "Thou shalt not kill," how can the state turn around and say "Thou must kill, under the following circumstances," without getting its soldiers hopelessly confused and prone to kill the wrong people (e.g., fellow citizens)? Again, in recent as in ancient history, religion comes to the rescue.... Wilson explains that fanatical religious sects, such as expansionist Islam and Christianity, spread as a result of group selection operating at the level of human societies: those early state societies whose religions were especially effective at motivating their citizens to sacrifice themselves succeeded in defeating societies with less motivating religions. Fictitious beliefs —such as the belief that a heaven populated by beautiful virgins awaits those who die for the cause—can contribute powerfully to effective motivation.
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Michael Moore.com : Mike's Message: "Yesterday, Larry Bennett, a 16-year old, was shot in the head after he was involved in a minor traffic accident. You probably didn't hear about it because, well, how could he be dead if he wasn't shot by The Sniper? Yesterday, an unidentified woman was shot to death in her car in Fenton, MI. You probably didn't hear about it because she had the misfortune of not being shot by The Sniper. Two nights ago, Charles D. Bennett, 48, an apartment security guard, was shot to death after confronting two teenagers in his parking lot in Memphis, TN. You probably didn't hear about it because the sniper was too busy sleeping in his car that night, and thus, poor Charles was not shot by The Sniper. Yes, The Sniper has apparently been caught, so we can go back now to NOT reporting the DOZENS of gun deaths that occur every day, the ones that just aren't newsworthy because they happen in all those old boring ways -- unlike the ways of The Sniper, who was interesting and creative and exciting and scary! He played so much better on the news. ... Thank you, Mr. Heston for this unnecessary carnage. Thank you, Mr. Bush, for supporting Mr. Heston and his group's agenda -- which protects only the criminals. And thank you, Bushmaster Firearms, Inc., for providing the gun used to shoot the 13 people in the DC area. Bushmaster's president, Richard E. Dyke, was the Maine finance chairman of George W. Bush's 2000 Presidential campaign. According to Business Week, Dyke had to step down as Bush's finance chair "after reporters began quizzing him about his business dealings. Bushmaster Firearms Inc., is notorious for using loopholes to sidestep a 1994 federal ban on assault rifles." Bush and Bushmaster. Too tragically perfect.
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Capital Games on Paul Wellstone: David Corn "Politics, he once said, "is what we dare to imagine." Before he came to Washington, many Americans could only imagine a senator like Paul Wellstone. But he proved that the dream of having passionate, caring, for-the-people representation in Washington--of having an utterly unabashed populist liberal who lived his principles in the hallways of power--could happen. He demonstrated that he could find his place in Washington, even if he was not embraced by the town; that he could find common ground with ideological foes in pursuit of the public interest; that he could joust with the pundits; and that he could serve nobly and effectively without ceding too much to the capital's culture of calculation and compromise. Wellstone showed progressives how much is possible. His presence here, these past twelve years, expanded their imagination. "
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Senator Wellstone was one of twenty-three Senators to vote against the White House's recent resolution authorizing the use of military force in Iraq. Twenty-one Democrats, joined by one Republican, Lincoln Chafee (RI), and one Independent, Jim Jeffords (VT), all voted no to war. In addition to Wellstone, the Democrats were: Daniel Akaka (HI), Jeff Bingaman (NM), Barbara Boxer (CA), Robert Byrd (W. VA), Kent Conrad (ND), Jon Corzine (NJ), Mark Dayton (MN), Richard Durbin (IL), Russell Feingold (WI), Bob Graham (FL), Daniel Inouye (HI), Ted Kennedy (MA), Patrick Leahy (VT), Carl Levin (MI), Barbara Mikulski (MD), Patty Murray (WA), Jack Reed (RI), Paul Sarbanes (MD), Debbie Stabenow (MI) and Ron Wyden (OR).
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Paul Wellstone, 1944-2002: "for the family-farm activists with whom Wellstone marched and rallied across the 1980s and 1990s and into the twenty-first century, the Minnesota Democrat was more than a representative. He was their champion. And the news of his death Friday in a Minnesota plane crash struck with all the force of a death in the family. "
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Iranian Leader Says U.S. Helps bin Laden's Image: "I hear a discourse from two poles," Mr. Khatami said in his native Persian. "One is the voice raised from Afghanistan by bin Laden that says, `Whoever is not with us must be destroyed.' The other is the voice from the United States that says, `Whoever is not with us is against us."' ... At Complutense University in Madrid, he delivered a speech on Cervantes and his relevance in today's world. In the course of the speech, he cited Proust, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Orwell, Kafka and Mann, and criticized modern-day Don Quixotes who lack his "kindhearted, merciful and humanitarian" nature and "ruthlessly assassinate and annihilate people with their huge war machines."... "If chemical weapons are bad, why when they were used against us or Iraqi citizens wasn't Iraq condemned and pressured?" he asked. But Iran, which shares a long border with Iraq, is vehemently opposed to a unilateral American war against its neighbor and the installation of a government of Washington's choosing in Baghdad. Iranians of all political persuasions are deeply suspicious of American designs on the Persian Gulf, recalling that a C.I.A.-led coup overthrew the government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 and returned the shah to the throne.
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Rally in Washington Is Said to Invigorate the Antiwar Movement: "Emboldened by a weekend antiwar protest in Washington that organizers called the biggest since the days of the Vietnam War, groups opposed to military action in Iraq said they were preparing a wave of new demonstrations across the country in the next few weeks. The demonstration on Saturday in Washington drew 100,000 by police estimates and 200,000 by organizers', forming a two-mile wall of marchers around the White House. "
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Tuesday, October 29, 2002
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For the People: Krugman - "Paul Wellstone took risks. He was, everyone acknowledges, a politician who truly voted his convictions, who supported what he thought was right, not what he thought would help him get re-elected. He took risky stands on many issues: agree or disagree, you have to admit that his vote against authorization for an Iraq war was a singularly brave act. Yet the most consistent theme in his record was economic -- his courageous support for the interests of ordinary Americans against the growing power of our emerging plutocracy. In our money-dominated politics, that's a dangerous position to take."
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Thursday, October 24, 2002
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Films With War Themes Are Victims of Bad Timing: "After Sept. 11 the wait was significantly longer for several independent films... Among the independents in limbo were "The Quiet American" and the dark military comedy "Buffalo Soldiers." Their already provocative themes became even more so after the attacks and the war in Afghanistan, and distributors fretted that audiences would hardly be in the mood for such sobering offerings... the film made moviegoers uncomfortable because its title character, a charismatic intelligence officer played by Brendan Fraser, sponsors terrorist acts that kill scores of innocent Vietnamese. "There will be people who are sensitive about seeing the American point of view presented as less than sympathetic," said Sydney Pollack, a producer of the movie. "
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Monday, October 14, 2002
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Duct tape zaps warts: "patients wore duct tape over their warts for six days. They removed the tape and used an abrasive on the spot. The tape was reapplied, and treatment continued for two months or until the wart went away. The tape irritated the warts, and that apparently caused the immune system to attack them. "
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Sunday, October 13, 2002
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Kibbutzniks Offer Land to Palestinians in a Rare Protest Over Israel's 'Berlin Wall': " The planned course of the wall will cut off 80 per cent of the farming land from the village of Kafin. Most of the village's 10,000 people will lose all their income. There are supposedly plans to issue permits for Palestinian farmers to cross. But according to the Mayor of Kafin, the nearest gate in the wall will involve a six-mile detour. And there are no guarantees they will all get permits. Kafin is not an isolated case. Throughout the West Bank, the wall will be a disaster for Palestinians. Long sections of it will not follow the Green Line, but will cut swathes out of Palestinian territory, permanently cutting off thousands of farmers from their land. Some Palestinian villages will be stranded on the Israeli side of the wall, but the villagers will not be allowed into Israel proper."
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Floor Statement by Rep. Wm. Lacy Clay Congress debates the Administration's resolution to authorize military action against Iraq September 2002
As Congress debates the Administration's resolution to authorize military action against Iraq, I urge my colleagues to consider the very dangerous consequences of unilateral military action.
If the United States rushes into war without concrete evidence of Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction - and without the backing of the UN and key international allies - we face the loss of much-needed support in our war against terrorism. Without a valid reason to remove Saddam Hussein from office our integrity is at risk and it may be assumed that the U.S. mission is aimed at allowing oil companies access to Iraqi oil reserves.
Up until now, the Bush Administration has completely failed to address the need for peace in the Middle East. This Administration has only watched the turmoil escalate and ignored the Arab-world's blossoming hatred of the United States. At this point in time, a war with Iraq only ensures Iraqi retaliation against Israel and more upheaval and instability throughout the Middle East.
I urge my colleagues to be more cognizant of the real immediate threats to our nation. An invasion of Iraq poses a costly economic burden and we simply cannot afford to commit American lives and resources to overthrow a regime which does not pose an imminent danger to our nation. At present, American families are facing many far more immediate threats. Americans are experiencing growing unemployment, an unstable stock market, a rising poverty level and an escalating need for homeland security protections.
Finally, it is unconscionable to expose thousands of young Americans to the perils of war before it is established that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction and we have exhausted all diplomatic and peaceful means of eliminating such a threat. The American people will not tolerate sending their sons and daughters off to fight another war that serves no certain purpose.
A war with Iraq is bound to inflame Arab-world hostility toward the United States, invite more terrorism and jeopardize our children's future. I am cosponsoring H.J. Resolution 110, which authorizes the use of United States Armed Forces against Iraq to defend our national security interests and sets forth Congressional mandates which must be met before the President engages the U.S. military. This resolution would ensure that all conceivable diplomatic options have been explored and exhausted and that a preemptive strike is our nation's only option. I am also supporting H. Con. Res. 473 which asserts that there are alternatives to a war with Iraq and the United States should work through the United Nations to resolve the matter of ensuring that Iraq is not developing weapons of mass destruction and employ mechanisms such as weapons inspections, negotiations, enquiry, mediation regional arrangement and other peaceful means to address the Iraqi threat.
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Friday, October 11, 2002
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The high-tech angle on an old-fashioned dock strike: "THE CURRENT DISPUTE between dockworkers and port owners is a repetition of the age-old union struggle, but with a technological twist: One of the primary stumbling blocks is over the possible adoption of new technology that could eliminate up to 800 union jobs. But what most media reports have failed to mention thus far is that the technology at the center of that dispute was invented by a member of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). He is, in fact, among those in danger of losing his job if the technology is adopted. Bob Carson, the "chief visionary officer" of three-year-old tech start-up ContainerTrac, is also the chief clerk for Pier 80 in San Francisco. Adding to the irony, ContainerTrac chief operating officer Red Smith says the Berkeley, Calif., company's technology is actually endorsed by the union. "
[This is a great story. It's not coincidental that this ingenious use of life-saving, cost-saving technology comes from a leading member of a strong, independent labor union, giving the lie to the classic canard that unions hold back progress. What democratic unions fight is not technology, but the use of technology to deprive workers of a fair return on labor, and of what little control they still have over labor conditions. What possible reason could the shipping industry have for insisting that the new jobs be non-union, other than as part of a long-term strategy to push labor costs toward third world levels, as industry after industry has done so successfully? This is the same morality that produced bloated paychecks for CEOs and collapsed pension funds for everyone else.]
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Wednesday, October 09, 2002
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Truth on Iraq seeps through- Robert Scheer : " Plainly put, Bush's big bad Boogeyman is a bunch of bull. In truth, the invasion is required not to meet a pressing threat to our security but rather to meet the threat to GOP control of Congress posed by a sagging U.S. economy and a stock market that has wiped out the savings of many Americans. That and the pent-up desire of frustrated wannabe imperialists among top Bush advisors to find a way to use our high-tech weaponry to micromanage the world. The CIA report makes it clear there is no plausible national security reason for pushing for war with Iraq at this time, other than the ill-advised imperial goal of directly controlling the world's oil supplies."
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Molly Ivins - Death of Corporate Reform: "We just lost the whole ballgame on corporate reform -- without the news even making it to the front page. The sick, sad tidings were tucked away discreetly on the business pages: "SEC Chief Hedges on Accounting Regulator." Now there's a sexy headline. All of you who were shafted by Enron, shucked by Worldcom, jived by Global Crossing, everyone whose 401(k) is now a 201(k) (I think that's Paul Begala's line), you just got screwed again. They're not going to fix it. They've already called off the reform effort; it's over. Corporate muscle showed up and shut it down. "
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A squad of American soldiers was patrolling the Iraqi border, when they came across a badly mangled dead body. As they got closer, they found it was an Iraqi soldier.
A short distance up the road, they found a badly mangled American soldier in a ditch on the other side of the road, struggling to breathe. They ran to him, cradled his bruised head and asked him what had happened.
"Well," he whispered, "I was walking down this road, armed to the teeth when I came across this heavily armed Iraqi border guard. I looked him right in the eye and shouted, 'Saddam Hussein is a moronic, deceitful, lying piece of trash!'"
"He looked me right in the eye and shouted back, 'George W. Bush is a moronic, deceitful, lying piece of trash too!'"
"We were standing there shaking hands when the truck hit us."
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Group 4 security firm pulls guards out of West Bank "The security conglomerate Group 4 Falck, which pioneered the private contracting of detention facilities and prisons in Britain, has decided to withdraw the private guards employed by one of its offshoots at Israeli settlements in the West Bank after the Guardian raised questions about their behaviour and the legality of their role. The company, the world's second biggest security firm, took a controlling stake earlier this year in an Israeli security company, Hashmira, which employs at least 100 armed guards at settlements. A Guardian investigation in the settlement of Kedumim showed that Hashmira's guards work closely with Israel's military and security apparatus. In the name of "security" the guards, many of whom are settlers, routinely prevent Palestinian villagers from cultivating their own fields, travelling to schools, hospitals and shops in nearby towns, and receiving emergency medical assistance. "
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Saturday, October 05, 2002
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The New York Review of Books: Is the Universe a Computer?: review by Steven Weinberg "Usually I put books that make claims like these on the crackpot shelf of my office bookcase. In the case of Wolfram's book, that would be a mistake. Wolfram is smart, winner of a MacArthur Fellowship at age twenty-two, and the progenitor of the invaluable Mathematica, and he has lots of stimulating things to say about computers and science. I don't think that his book comes close to meeting his goals or justifying his claims, but if it is a failure it is an interesting one... ...Wolfram's classification of the patterns produced by cellular automata dates from the early 1980s, and the discovery that the rule 110 elementary cellular automaton is a universal computer was made in the early 1990s. Since then, none of this work has had much of an impact on the research of other scientists, aside from Wolfram's employees. The strongest reaction I have seen by scientists to this new book has been outrage at Wolfram's exaggeration of the importance of his own contributions to the study of complexity. Wolfram's survey of the complex patterns produced by automata may yet attract the attention of other scientists if it leads to some clear and simple mathematical statement about complexity. I doubt if even Wolfram cares what picture is produced by the rule 110 cellular automaton after a billion steps. But if Wolfram can give a precise statement of his conjecture about the computational equivalence of almost all automata that produce complex patterns and prove that it is true, then he will have found a simple common feature of complexity, which would be of real interest. In the study of anything outside human affairs, including the study of complexity, it is only simplicity that can be interesting"
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As Trees Die, Biologists Battle Back the fast-spreading new disease known as sudden oak death syndrome. .... The disease has already killed tens of thousands of trees in California and spread to 17 different species, including huckleberry, big leaf maples, rhododendrons and bay trees. Scientists have found it can also infect the northern red oak and pin oak, species that are widespread in the East and Midwest. Recently, the United States Forest Service declared large regions of the East, including the southern Appalachian Mountains, whose climate would probably suit the disease, as areas of high risk. In September, scientists reported that the disease was attacking the beloved redwood and the Douglas fir....... bay trees appear to be infected in leaves and nowhere else. More surprisingly, these leaves, whose only symptoms are small discolorations, are so full of spores that the laboratory machinery cannot detect the total number. ... The finding revealed bay trees, not oak trees, to be the unexpected, key disperser of the disease....
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Saturday, September 14, 2002
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In war, some facts less factual: "When George H. W. Bush ordered American forces to the Persian Gulf -- to reverse Iraq's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait -- part of the administration case was that an Iraqi juggernaut was also threatening to roll into Saudi Arabia. Citing top-secret satellite images, Pentagon officials estimated in mid--September that up to 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks stood on the border, threatening the key US oil supplier. But when the St. Petersburg Times in Florida acquired two commercial Soviet satellite images of the same area, taken at the same time, no Iraqi troops were visible near the Saudi border -- just empty desert.... "This administration is capable of any lie ... in order to advance its war goal in Iraq," says a US government source in Washington with some two decades of experience in intelligence, who would not be further identified. "It is one of the reasons it doesn't want to have UN weapons inspectors go back in, because they might actually show that the probability of Iraq having [threatening illicit weapons] is much lower than they want us to believe.""
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Independent News: Robert Fisk "are we now trying to turn Huntington's third-rate book into a success story? Are we actually now in the process of starting a clash of civilisations? Never before have Muslims and Westerners been so polarised, their conflicts so sharpened â013 and Arab hopes so fraudulently raised. We are no more planning to give those Arabs "democracy" than we planned to honour our promise of independence at the end of the 1914-18 war. What we want to do is to bring them back under our firm control, to ensure their loyalty. " [ Long but well worth the read]
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The Guns of September - Kristof quoting Prof Alison "Bush displayed Kennedy's toughness, resolve and even eloquence. But he did not display the other qualities of statesmanship: humility about the risks of miscalculation, a passion to avoid war. ... Kennedy turned first to diplomacy and a blockade. He offered the Russians a graceful exit and thus saved lives and avoided a dangerous spin into the unknown. Today as well, why shouldn't war be a last resort instead of the first tool that President Bush grabs off the shelf? The fundamental question is left unanswered: Why initiating war against Saddam is better than the next option, which is deterring and containing him... You could agree that this is an evil guy — he is evil — who defied the U.N. resolutions — he did — and still ask why he is not susceptible to the same treatment that was used against Stalin, who was also evil and dangerous and cheated. A succession of presidents chose to deter and contain Stalin — rather than invade and occupy Russia — just as every president until now has chosen to deter and contain Saddam. Before launching a war, Mr. Bush still needs to show two things: first, that the threat is so urgent that letting Iraq fester is even riskier than invading it and occupying it for many years to come; second, that deterrence will no longer be successful in containing Saddam."
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Jesse Jackson, Jr. | Bush Needs Moral Authority To Use Military Force: "The U.S. and the UN must exhaust all other possibilities before launching military action against Iraq. The President must convince the world that the danger presented by Saddam Hussein is imminent. And the U.S. must respect the views of others in the world before we use, hopefully, any joint military might to attack and remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq"
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Thursday, September 12, 2002
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Study: Iraq could arm nukes quickly: "Contrary to Bush's claim, however, the 1998 IAEA report did not say that Iraq was six months away from developing nuclear capability, NBC News' Robert Windrem reported Saturday. Instead, Windrem reported, the Vienna, Austria-based agency said in 1998 that Iraq had been six to 24 months away from such capability before the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the U.N.-monitored weapons inspections that followed. The war and the inspections destroyed much of Iraq's nuclear infrastructure and required Iraq to turn over its highly enriched uranium and plutonium, "
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Drain the swamp and there will be no more mosquitoes: Chomsky - "much of the world regards Washington as a terrorist regime. In recent years, the US has taken or backed actions in Colombia, Nicaragua, Panama, Sudan and Turkey, to name a few, that meet official US definitions of "terrorism" - that is, when Americans apply the term to enemies. In the most sober establishment journal, Foreign Affairs, Samuel Huntington wrote in 1999: "While the US regularly denounces various countries as 'rogue states,' in the eyes of many countries it is becoming the rogue superpower ... the single greatest external threat to their societies." "
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Nelson Mandela: The United States of America is a Threat to World Peace: "The United States has made serious mistakes in the conduct of its foreign affairs, which have had unfortunate repercussions long after the decisions were taken. Unqualified support of the Shah of Iran led directly to the Islamic revolution of 1979. Then the United States chose to arm and finance the [Islamic] mujahedin in Afghanistan instead of supporting and encouraging the moderate wing of the government of Afghanistan. That is what led to the Taliban in Afghanistan. But the most catastrophic action of the United States was to sabotage the decision that was painstakingly stitched together by the United Nations regarding the withdrawal of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. If you look at those matters, you will come to the conclusion that the attitude of the United States of America is a threat to world peace. "
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A World That is Not Just Ours Two Veteran Conservationists Challenge Americans to Take the Lead in Preserving Wildlife.... "joined the Peace Corps in 1973, spent two years teaching in... Zaire, and fell in love with Africa. Even before their Peace Corps days ended, they knew they wanted to come back. Within a few years, they found their way to Rwanda and the mountain gorillas of the Parc National des Volcans.... “I was very content to be running the Africa programs, but meanwhile, I’m reading about spotted owls and wolves here in the United States. It seemed odd to me that we’re asking the world’s poorest people to live with tigers and elephants, but we won’t live with wolves. We’re asking other countries not to log while we knock down our own forests."
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Monday, September 09, 2002
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How Did Iraq Get Its Weapons? We Sold Them: "the US, under the successive administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr, sold materials including anthrax, VX nerve gas, West Nile fever germs and botulism to Iraq right up until March 1992, as well as germs similar to tuberculosis and pneumonia. Other bacteria sold included brucella melitensis, which damages major organs, and clostridium perfringens, which causes gas gangrene. "
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'In America's Court': A Lawyer Reflects on Injustice: "Geoghegan portrays American law as a creature of politics. From 1910 to 1940, it was shaped by the right, then by the left and most recently by the right again. ''I finally realized the Constitution, American law, is not enough,'' he declares. His solution is that American courts should be governed by the principles of human rights exemplified in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.... He wants a new Constitution that on the model of the United Nations declaration would include ''the right to health care, the right to be educated, the right to a good job.'' "
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Friday, September 06, 2002
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Senator Dianne Feinstein: More Questions Than Answers on Iraq: " I believe any action in Iraq at this time, without allied support, without United Nations support, and without a compelling case for just cause, would be both morally wrong and politically mistaken. I just returned from a trip to Europe.... I was shocked at how dramatically perceptions in Europe have shifted since September 11 toward our country. All of the sympathy and concern we received in the wake of the terrorist attacks has apparently vanished, replaced by the sense that the United States is becoming an arrogant and aggressive power, a nation that simply gives orders, a nation that neither listens nor hears. "
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Wednesday, September 04, 2002
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St. Louis Post-Dispatch: UMSL still plans to open arts center next year: "The departure of its executive director has left the nearly finished performing arts center at the University of Missouri at St. Louis without a staff, an operating budget and a schedule of events.... A big setback for the center has been the state of Missouri's refusal so far to produce the $1 million in operating funds UMSL had been counting on to help plug the building's projected annual operating deficit of $1,245,000."
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How Israel's Peace Movement Fell Apart: "The hard truth is that the peace movements and organizations were tired long before the Camp David fiasco. Their leaders were the same well-meaning but worn-out activists who had founded the original Peace Now movement more than 20 years ago.... they failed to attract the younger, middle-class, high-tech generation to their ranks. This failure contrasted strongly with the dynamic activism of the right-wing and West Bank settler movements that have successfully won the hearts and minds of a second, and even third, generation of activists. Israeli right-wing ideology has constantly been renewed through the messages of religious nationalism and irredentism, while the messages of peace and reconciliation -- however difficult they are to sell during periods of violence and terrorism -- have been relegated to irrelevance."
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Give WU a first-class performing arts center: "Washington University is the richest educational institution in the region. Its endowment (more than $4 billion before the stock market tanked) consistently ranks among the Top 10 for universities in the nation. It has a wealthy alumni base whose members give generously when called on. Its building projects provide seemingly nonstop work for construction companies. One would expect the university to have a performing arts center to match its business school, its law school and its other fine facilities. One would be sorely disappointed in that expectation. Many suburban high schools in the area have better setups."
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Monday, September 02, 2002
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Bernard Weiner | The Charnel House Future: Why Bush&Co. Must Be Stopped Now: " by behaving in such an arrogant, bullyboy fashion around the globe, Bush&Co. is building up anti-U.S. resentment and anger, creating conditions in which terrorism grows, ignoring and insulting our traditional allies (especially in Europe), risking our long-term economic and social health, and so on. In the long run, the world is a shakier, more violent place, U.S. interests are damaged, the international economic and civil situation is more chaotic (and we all know what kind of leaders rise in chaotic times), the domestic political situation in the U.S. grows more fascist-like, with a concomitant rebellion amongst key elements in the citizenry. "
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Wednesday, August 28, 2002
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Cheney Stumps for War, Ignores His Own Ties to Hussein: "According to the Financial Times of London, between September 1998 and [early 2000], Cheney, as CEO of Halliburton, oversaw $23.8 million of business contracts for the sale of oil-industry equipment and services to Iraq through two of its subsidiaries, Dresser Rand and Ingersoll-Dresser Pump, which helped rebuild Iraq's war-damaged petroleum-production infrastructure. The combined value of these contracts exceeded those of any other U.S. company doing business with Baghdad. "
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Sunday, August 25, 2002
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Alzheimer's in America: The Aluminum - Phosphate Fertilizer Connection: "The phosphate fertilizer industry seems to be the common thread in Alzheimer's - and maybe also in thyroid and mad cow type diseases. Aluminum by itself may not cause Alzheimer's, but in combination with the radioactive products of the phosphate fertilizer industry, it could be wreaking havoc on our health." [Provocative commentary, but jumbled and hard to evaluate.]
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Friday, August 23, 2002
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Secret Court Rebuffs Ashcroft: "The secretive federal court that approves spying on terror suspects in the United States has refused to give the Justice Department broad new powers, saying the government had misused the law and misled the court dozens of times, according to an extraordinary legal ruling released yesterday."
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Deadly Decisions : Presented by American RadioWorks: "While the states have adopted new instructions to guide jurors in making life or death decisions, many jurors appear to be just as confused about the law as they were when the high court put the death penalty on hold. "
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Scene of the Crime (Gene Santoro): "Everyone knows what happened thirty-seven years ago when Bob Dylan fronted an electric band at the Newport Folk Festival, which is why August 3 saw 100 scribes from all over the country merging into a crowd of 10,000"
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Wednesday, August 21, 2002
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