9/11
October 22nd
posted: October 22, 2007 6:11 EST
9/11 hysteria, even surrounding 60-year-old documents about American spies
By Graham Rayman, Village Voice
On October 9, Charlotte Dennett, a prim Vermont woman uneasily holding her handbag, stood up in federal court in Manhattan to try yet again to pry the 60-year-old secrets about her father’s death from the U.S. government.
Daniel Dennett was an American spy working in the Middle East during and after World War II, at a time when the world powers were jockeying for control of oil in the region. He died in a mystery-shrouded 1947 plane crash in Ethiopia, when Charlotte was just six weeks old.
Now a 60-year-old journalist, Charlotte Dennett traveled to the stately federal appellate courtroom at 500 Pearl Street from tiny Cambridge, Vermont, this month to try to convince a three-judge panel to let her continue her lawsuit against the CIA for records surrounding her father’s work.
Even though the records pre-date the Eisenhower administration and most of the people named in them are dead, the CIA has blocked, resisted, and delayed her Freedom of Information Act requests for over eight long years. CIA spokesman George Little declined to comment on the pending litigation. In court papers, the agency argues that the release of the records could compromise national security and expose intelligence “sources and methods.”
To Dennett, also a self-taught lawyer, the case speaks volumes about the government’s post-9/11 obsession with secrecy.
“It’s hard enough to get documents from the CIA, but post-9/11, it’s 10 times more difficult,” she says. “I am concerned that there is an effort to secretize our history. This lawsuit has been a struggle to prevent that.”
John Taylor, a legendary archivist specializing in intelligence at the National Archives who assisted Dennett in her research, says he’s puzzled by the agency’s stubbornness. “The CIA is very reluctant to release anything on the Middle East regardless of date,” the 87-year-old Taylor says. “It’s not clear to me why, especially since these records are from the 1940s.”
Charlotte Dennett’s odyssey began 15 years ago, when she decided to learn everything she could about her father and write a book about that era. In 1943, she learned, the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of today’s CIA, sent her father, then 37, to the Middle East. Based in Lebanon, Daniel Dennett specialized in counterintelligence, or keeping an eye on other spies. His code name was “Carat,” and his working cover was as a cultural attaché in the U.S. Embassy in Beirut.
read on . . .
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October 18th
posted: October 18, 2007 4:40 EST
Professors caught in the feds' post-9/11 web of paranoia and incompetence.
By Lisa Rab, Cleveland Scene
Marixa Lasso and Jim Raden took their wedding vows in March. The family Lasso had adopted for herself in Cleveland, thousands of miles from her native Panama, encircled her that day. Fellow Case history professor Renée Sentilles provided the flowers and decorated the cake; a grad student's husband played DJ.
At 38, Lasso had waited long for this moment. Her youth was dedicated to building the perfect résumé — winning prestigious fellowships, gaining two coveted posts as a professor of Latin American history, writing a book.
She and Raden were planning an all-American life. Just two months after the wedding, the newlyweds steeled themselves for a brief separation. Lasso needed to spend the summer doing research in Panama. Raden flew down for a visit in June, urging her to hurry back. She planned to join him in August for a surprise birthday party for his mother. Then she'd return to Cleveland to teach her fall classes.
But when Lasso went to the U.S. consulate in Panama for a routine visa renewal, she hit a strange roadblock. After living, studying, and working in the United States for 13 years, she was suddenly barred from re-entering the country. Her visa could not be issued. She had to wait for additional "procedures."
No one could tell her why or how long it would take. The irony of her predicament was not lost on Lasso. When she first came to the U.S. in 1994, she was invited by the American government. She won a Fulbright fellowship — a program that, in addition to sending Americans abroad, funds academics wanting to do research in the United States. The program's quaint goal is to promote "mutual understanding" between America and other countries, and it worked well in Lasso's case.
She used the funding to earn a master's degree in history from Pitt, then got a doctorate at the University of Florida. A tiny woman with dark, sparkling eyes who quotes the Statue of Liberty's "huddled masses" inscription in her e-mails, she wrote about hot topics such as race and revolution in Colombia 200 years ago. Viewed as a rising star in her field, she had no trouble snagging a job at Cal State Los Angeles in 2002. It was a tenure-track position, offering the gold medal of academia — lifetime job security — if she did well.
Meanwhile, the world outside the ivory tower was changing. After 9/11, academics with names like Habib and Ramadan began to arouse suspicion. Asians, Latinos, and certain Europeans suddenly became a threat to unseen bureaucratic eyes within the U.S. government. Foreign scholars were being shut out of the country due to rarely explained visa problems.
Take Haluk Gerger, a Turkish political scientist and journalist who has criticized the presence of American nuclear weapons in Turkey. He was frequently jailed in his own country for protesting his government's treatment of Kurds. When he and his wife tried to visit America in October 2002, he experienced a strange moment of déjà vu. They landed at Newark airport and were informed that his 10-year visa had been revoked. He was fingerprinted, photographed, and forced to return to Europe.
A few months later, Carlos Alzugaray Treto, a Cuban scholar and former ambassador to the European Union, applied for a visa to speak in Dallas at the Latin American Studies Association's International Congress. He had no reason to expect trouble. He'd been a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins and had recently finished a research fellowship at Harvard.
But after State Department officials in Havana discovered that he planned to lecture about the history of U.S.-Cuban relations, his visa was denied. No reason was given, but Treto was certain it wasn't a bureaucratic glitch. "Obviously they are trying to punish me for being so critical of U.S. policy toward Cuba," he told the Chronicle of Higher Education.
The same thing has happened to thousands of foreign scholars since the Twin Towers fell. While academics always had their fair share of immigration problems, Bush's war on terror provided a convenient excuse to bar critics — whether real or imagined — from entering the U.S.
Many who got stuck had nothing in their background that could even remotely be linked to terrorism. They merely studied subjects — or expressed views — considered sensitive by the Bush administration. In fact, their most common crime seemed to be harboring left-leaning sympathies for the underdog.
As the feds tightened visa checks, consular officials were warned that if they had doubts about an application, they should send it on to the bureaucratic jungle in Washington, D.C. Academics weren't told why their visas had been flagged or how long the reviews would take. People were delayed for months or forced to cancel their trips altogether. Most never received an explanation.
"After September 11 this became a very great concern," says Penny Rosser, director of the International Scholars Office at MIT. "The number of delays and denials skyrocketed for students and scholars."
read on . . .
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October 16th
posted: October 16, 2007 10:56 EST
Bad news on the global terror front: Unstable Pakistan will become even more shaky when its former leader (and Musharraf's enemy) returns home this week.
By Ward Harkavy, Village Voice
As Benazir Bhutto prepares to return to Pakistan later this week from her Dubai exile and becomes a target of strongman prick Pervez Musharraf's assassins, we can only recall how tragic it was for the U.S. to pull back from that volatile region more than five years ago.
Back in 2002, the Bush-Cheney regime abandoned the full-fledged hunt for Osama bin Laden and duped Congress and the country into invading Iraq.
Pakistan was where it was at. Bin Laden was hiding there and in neighboring Afghanistan. As the Soviets found out, you can't fight rebels in Afghanistan without somehow, some way also fighting them as they scurry across the border into Pakistan, where they have even government support.
Officials of Pakistan's spy agency, the ISI — widely credited with co-opting the Taliban and, along with the Saudis and Reagan administration, arming them — were sympathetic to bin Laden as long as he didn't destabilize their own country.
Recall that Porter Goss and Bob Graham, chairs of the House and Senate Intelligence committees, were having breakfast on the morning of 9/11 with Mahmood Ahmed, the Pakistani ISI official who later turned out to be hijacker Mohammed Atta's bagman. It was also Ahmed who had sent $100,000 to Atta on orders from the guy who later kidnapped Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. You can't make this shit up.
Yes, we left Pakistan in 2002. Big mistake.
We invaded Iraq. Bigger mistake.
We inflamed the Shia-Sunni schism in Iraq, widening everywhere else that ancient rift between Islam's main sects. Take Pakistan. Unlike in Iraq, the Sunnis are the majority. Please remember that most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis, and despotic monarchy Saudi Arabia is ruled by Sunni fanatics.
There has long been sectarian violence in Pakistan — see this October 2004 BBC backgrounder. Add to that the return to the country of Benazir Bhutto, whose daddy, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was Pakistan's prime minister in the '70s before he was executed by the country's military. Later, Benazir Bhutto — nearly a dead ringer for Andrea Martin/Edith Prickley's version of another South Asia strongwoman, Indira Ghandi — became prime minister, and then she was driven from Pakistan amid corruption charges.
Pakistan was a bigger threat to world stability after 9-11 than Iraq was. Yes, Iraq was a bigger threat to Israel and always a danger to Kuwait, but Pakistan's instability was a much more dangerous threat to the U.S., no matter what the Bush regime's propagandists have drummed into our heads.
Now's the perfect time to recall that the hunt by Musharraf and the ISI for bin Laden was half-hearted at best. Our reaction has been to step up arm sales to Musharraf, as I noted in April 2005.
Don't be surprised if that well-armed Pakistan government sends more Lockheed fighter jets swooping down on Bhutto than it sent to look for bin Laden.
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September 24th
posted: September 24, 2007 8:04 EST
Too late to ask Bill Kunstler about that.
By Ward Harkavy, Village Voice
The most thorough news story so far about putative Attorney General Michael Mukasey comes, not from the mainstream press, but from the Jewish Week. And James D. Besser's extremely well-balanced account cuts right through to the topics of church-state separation, the Patriot Act, and civil liberties.
Faith is an issue when it comes to Mukasey, and that has nothing to do with the Jew-hating websites that are foaming at the mouth about him.
It figures that the Bush administration would replace a dumb but avid opponent of civil liberties — Alberto Gonzales — with a smart but avid opponent of civil liberties, as I pointed out in "War of Terror's New Front: Mukasey." But with the Arab world blowing up all around us, do we have to have an attorney general who's not only an ardent supporter of the Patriot Act but also an avid Zionist?
We already know, as I pointed out earlier, that Mukasey regards the Bill of Rights as less important than the rest of the Constitution because it was tacked-on and that he wants the citizenry to have faith in their government.
The New York Times managed to write an entire story this morning about Mukasey's handling of "war on terror" suspects without mentioning his handling of terror suspects in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing case. Philip Shenon's story even says this:
Although Mr. Mukasey is otherwise widely admired by prosecutors and defense lawyers alike in New York, his handling of the cases of … material witnesses taken into custody in terrorism investigations after Sept. 11 produced some rare, sharp criticism of his performance on the bench and raised concern among civil liberties groups.
"Widely admired"? That's not backed up in the story. "Material witnesses"? That's the Times's euphemism for the thousands of Muslims unjustifiably scooped off our streets by the hysterical AG John Ashcroft (see my August 2004 review of the film Persons of Interest).
The Wall Street Journal is the only mainstream outlet that even mentioned that William Kunstler tried to have Mukasey removed from the 1993 bombing case because of the judge's Orthodox Judaism. But the September 18 Journal piece was misleading, saying that Kunstler wanted him removed because he's Jewish. No, it's because Mukasey is both Orthodox and Zionist. There's a difference between that and simply being Jewish.
The Jewish Week story by Besser you haven't read? Check it out, particularly a telling analysis of Mukasey and civil liberties from, of all people, Marc Stern of the ardently pro-Israel American Jewish Congress:
Mukasey presided over the trial of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, who was convicted in a case involving the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and ruled in the controversial case involving Jose Padilla, charged in a "dirty bomb" plot.
Mukasey, while differing with the Bush administration on some details, earned a reputation as a forceful defender of the controversial legal procedures used by the Bush administration in the war on terrorism.
"He has not been a rubber stamp for the administration's policies on terrorism but he is a very deep skeptic about the law's ability to cope with terrorism," said Stern. "He doesn't take the reflective response of civil libertarians that the only way to fight terrorism is through the ordinary legal system. The only question is whether he goes too far the other way."
Now that is interesting: a judge who is a "very deep skeptic" about the legal process concerning terror suspects. Stern accurately notes that the only question is whether Mukasey goes too far. And Besser accurately portrayed the Kunstler v. Mukasey episode:
During the World Trade Center trials, defense attorneys demanded Mukasey be removed from the case because of his Jewish affiliations. Attorney William Kunstler argued in a district court motion that Mukasey's Orthodox Jewish and Zionist views rendered him unfit to try the case.
But Besser stopped there. In fact, Mukasey cleverly had Kunstler removed as the sheik's lawyer. Without context, Shenon's story this morning mentioned a very similar move by Mukasey in an October 2001 case of Osama Awadallah, a college student with no criminal record who was one of thousands of Muslims rounded up on U.S. streets after 9/11:
Judge Mukasey sided with prosecutors and refused to allow a prominent Arab-American criminal defense lawyer, Abdeen M. Jabara, to help defend Mr. Awadallah.
Prosecutors argued that Mr. Jabara had a conflict of interest because he defended Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric convicted in 1995 in a terrorist plot to blow up New York City landmarks. Judge Mukasey was the judge in that trial.
Talking about bending the law for political purposes. I thought Bush didn't like "activist judges."
Anyway, Besser did a good job in his story by talking to Muslim groups, among others:
[M]ajor Muslim groups are being cautious in responding to the appointment.
"We won't be taking any formal position on the nomination. Instead, we are hoping that whoever becomes attorney general will maintain the civil liberties of all Americans, an issue that has been the top concern of the American Muslim community," said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR).
But he said his group will have "concerns about any nominee who favors aspects of the Patriot Act that we believe violate civil liberties."
Mukasey's status as an Orthodox Jew is "irrelevant," Hooper said. "We would hope he would not allow his political and religious beliefs to cloud his judgment as attorney general, but that goes for any attorney general of any faith."
Besser's story points out that Mukasey's views on the separation of church and state are not really known. But his story itself helps provide the troubling answer.
First off, Ibrahim Hooper was simply being shrewdly politic about Mukasey. The future AG's status as an Orthodox Jew is highly relevant.
Just as right-wing Christians use their faith as a political bludgeon, so do Mukasey's fellow Orthodox Jews. He's a graduate of the Ramaz School, an Upper East Side school affiliated with Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun (which calls itself "KJ"), and his wife was a teacher there.
Here's the congregation's mission statement. See if it differs much from the kind of politicized religion practiced by the likes of the late, unlamented Jerry Falwell and the alive, unlamented Pat Robertson, among many others:
Our identification with the State of Israel and our fellow Jews extends well beyond the more conventional UJA/Federation, Israel Bonds and tree-planting campaigns (although KJ is an active promoter and participant in all of the foregoing important programs). KJ participates in and sponsors political action groups supporting Israel and oppressed Jews around the world, and runs several well-attended missions each year to Israel for the primary purpose of demonstrating solidarity and support to our brethren, especially in these incredibly difficult times for the State and its citizens.
Church-state separation? No. Political action by a religious organization? Yes. I'm not saying this is remarkable or even right-wing. This is the way most American Jewish congregations look at Israel.
But why do you think that American Muslims protest when their own ties to overseas Muslims are unfairly questioned and even prosecuted?
More to the point of church-state separation: When it comes to most sects of Orthodox Judaism, there ain't no separation. So that's bound to raise some worries about Mukasey from those who defend such a separation.
I guess that, with the hawks like Cheney beating the drums for some kind of war with the mullahs of Iran, we might as well have a Zionist as attorney general.
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posted: September 24, 2007 6:17 EST
This oily business of dealing with evil foreign leaders.
By Ward Harkavy, Village Voice
Cold War, warm feelings: Reagan chats with the Taliban in the White House in 1983.
New York's tabloids and assorted pols came unglued yesterday about the very idea of Iran's crackpot hardliner Mahmoud Ahmedinejad wanting to visit Ground Zero.
Where were they when Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov, whose regime boils people to death, was courted by George W. Bush and Mayor Mike Bloomberg?
Don't let your own blood boil at the thought of a bad guy visiting our sacralized 9/11 site. Condemn it, if you want, but Ahmedinejad was just trying to score political points, as our own pols do all the time at Ground Zero. He got what he wanted: The angry U.S. reaction will play well back home in Tehran, especially with the radical mullahs who really run Iran and like to stir up hatred for the "Great Satan."
Do we even have to say that in international politics, enemies today are pals tomorrow, and vice versa, and that the reasons almost always have to do with greed for money and natural resources?
On the other hand, it would be nice if our press at least reported these events. The Uzbek despot Karimov laid a wreath at Ground Zero in 2002, and there was literally not one word in the U.S. press about it at the time — I'm not talking about criticism or praise but any words at all. Nothing.
So Karimov is not a bad enough guy to get you worked up? Saddam Hussein was brown-nosed by Don Rumsfeld in December 1983. There's no reason to condemn Rumsfeld for that; it was just oil politics — just like the oil politics that Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney played when they seized upon the 9/11 attacks to justify invading Iraq.
After all, when Texas oil execs questioned Cheney in 1998, when he was still at Halliburton, about the physical dangers of pursuing oil in turbulent parts of Asia, the future vice president and de facto commander in chief told them:
"You've got to go where the oil is. I don't worry about it a lot."
Saddam is gone, but we still don't really have Iraq's oil. We do, however, have such evil people as the Taliban to deal with, right? Well, the Taliban were hailed as Afghan freedom fighters by Ronald Reagan during their triumphant visit to the White House on March 21, 1983. Reagan said at the time:
"To watch the courageous Afghan freedom fighters battle modern arsenals with simple hand-held weapons is an inspiration to those who love freedom. Their courage teaches us a great lesson - that there are things in this world worth defending.
"To the Afghan people, I say on behalf of all Americans that we admire your heroism, your devotion to freedom, and your relentless struggle against your oppressors."
That's ancient history, huh? In fact, they were still our pals 14 years later. In late 1997, the Taliban were wined and dined at the homes of Bush's pals, the Houston oil execs, during Dubya's reign as the hangingest governor in U.S. history.
The oil schnooks were buttering up the Taliban for pipelines and other bidness, of course. See Wayne Madsen's "Afghanistan, the Taliban, and the Bush Oil Team" for details.
At least that courting of the Taliban less than 10 years ago was reported at the time. Of the many words in the mainstream press, my favorites are from a December 14, 1997, story by Caroline Lees in the Telegraph (U.K.), in which she describes the Taliban officials' visit to Unocal vice president Martin Miller's palatial Houston home:
After a meal of specially prepared halal meat, rice and Coca-Cola, the hardline fundamentalists — who have banned women from working and girls from going to school — asked Mr Miller about his Christmas tree.
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September 17th
posted: September 17, 2007 1:45 EST
Picking Mukasey as AG should help the GOP and Rudy and should scare civil libertarians.
By Ward Harkavy, Village Voice
The selection of terror-case judge Michael Mukasey, a pal of Rudy Giuliani's, as the next AG broadly hints at the GOP's strategy for next year's elections: Terror 24-7.
Mukasey's close ties to Rudy make him a simply fabulous choice as attorney general. He's practically a running mate for Giuliani during the next year of campaigning.
What about Mukasey and the rest of us? For the next year as lame-duck AG, Mukasey, who presided over the trial of the World Trade Center's 1993 bombers, will be a constant and sympathetic/heroic reminder of the "war on terror." Maybe that will stoke enough fear in us that we'll forget the war of terror we've created in Iraq.
This is a smart move by the GOP. It smacks of Karl Rove, but he supposedly left the building.
Here's the bad news: Mukasey is potentially far more hazardous to our civil liberties than Alberto Gonzales ever was. Gonzales was a dumb-ass, and Mukasey is very sharp. Mukasey thinks so highly of the Patriot Act that he felt compelled to defend it in a 2004 Wall Street Journal op-ed, writing:
I think that that awkward name may very well be the worst thing about the statute.
Dispensing with the name, Mukasey proceeds to write a scary analysis, particularly his sneering at librarians' concerns and his strong implication that the Bill of Rights, because it was tacked onto the Constitution, has less heft.
His argument is that we ought to give the government the benefit of the doubt in its dealings with we the people. That's the same kind of reasoning that Chief Justice John Roberts uses to give corporations the benefit of the doubt over people, as I wrote in July 2005..
Here are Mukasey's concluding paragraphs from the WSJ op-ed:
As we participate in this debate on what is the right course to pursue [regarding the Patriot Act and civil liberties], I think it is important to remember an interesting structural feature of the Constitution we all revere. When we speak of constitutional rights, we generally speak of rights that appear not in the original Constitution itself, but rather in amendments to the Constitution — principally the first 10. Those amendments are a noble work, but it is the rest of the Constitution — the boring part — the part that sets up a bicameral legislature and separation of powers, and so on, the part you will never see mentioned in any flyer or hear at any rally, that guarantees that the rights referred to in those 10 amendments are worth something more than the paper they are written on.
A bill of rights was omitted from the original Constitution over the objections of Patrick Henry and others. It may well be that those who drafted the original Constitution understood that if you give equal prominence to the provisions creating the government and the provisions guaranteeing rights against the government — God-given rights, no less, according to the Declaration of Independence — then citizens will feel that much less inclined to sacrifice in behalf of their government, and that much more inclined simply to go where their rights and their interests seem to take them.
So, as the historian Walter Berns has argued, the built-in message — the hidden message in the structure of the Constitution — is that the government it establishes is entitled, at least in the first instance, to receive from its citizens the benefit of the doubt. If we keep that in mind, then the spirit of liberty will be the spirit which, if it is not too sure that it is right, is at least sure enough to keep itself — and us — alive.
Of course, it's the government that determines what measures are required to "keep us alive." This is one scary lawyer, or as Ben Franklin said:
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security.
But concerning the really important stuff — the '08 presidential campaign — Giuliani now has a security blanket. Mukasey is, in effect, his running mate. He'll get bipartisan support from the Senate — Chuck Schumer and other Democrats love him, and Mukasey's role as a judge intimately involved with World Trade Center and other terrorism cases while he was a federal judge in New York City will guarantee him a free pass during confirmation hearings.
You'll hear the word "terror" about a million times during those brief hearings, and the horror of the attacks will be brought up again and again.
As to Mukasey's connections with Giuliani? Forget this morning's papers if you want all the details. As Ron Mills pointed out yesterday in his cleverly named blog, Ron Mills — News And Commentary, Mukasey is a really close pal of Rudy's — he administered the oath of office to newly elected Mayor Giuliani twice in 1994 — once in Mukasey's apartment.
Mukasey was already a member of the Giuliani campaign's "Justice Advisory Committee", and Mukasey's son Marc is a partner in Rudy's law firm.
The apartment oath and the fact that Marc Mukasey is a law partner of Rudy's somehow didn't make it into this morning's New York Times story.
But if Rudy wins the '08 election, you can be sure of one detail: Mukasey will stay on as AG.
If you have some time on your hands, go to John Young's insane and great cryptome.org for the complete transcript of the trial stemming from the '93 bombing.
And what a trial that was. The prosecutor won the case, and you'd think that the GOP would love to give him a top job in the Bush administration — except for the fact that the prosecutor was Patrick Fitzgerald.
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posted: September 17, 2007 1:43 EST
Iraq report reveals a failed state
By Marc Cooper, LA Weekly
General David Petraeus’ long-awaited report back to Congress has confirmed the worst fears of the Bush administration. Six years after 9/11 and nearly five years into the occupation of Iraq, we have been unable to prevent the creation of a failed state. I’m not talking about the one with its capital in Kabul, or even Baghdad; I mean the one with its capital in Washington, D.C.
Seems like it was yesterday, but in a few weeks it’s going to be a full year since a majority of the American people voted to start ending this war. Since then, such sentiment has grown to include about two-thirds of the population — 63 percent to precisely cite the latest polls.
And what do we have to show for that? An increase, not a wind-down, in troop levels; a new White House/Pentagon PR campaign that eerily evokes memories of the Saigon Five O’clock Follies; and a Democratic Congress unwilling to act on its anti-war mandate and make the only morally and politically possible move, which is to begin severing funds for the war. This is what political scientists call a crisis of representation: when a majority of a nation’s electorate no longer recognizes itself in its elected political class. It is, to be precise, a failed state.
General Petraeus’ testimony before Congress made another point starkly clear. We still have years ahead of us, perhaps many years, of U.S. combat troops fighting in Iraq. Pull down his charts and graphs, strip away his rhetoric, and the general’s numbers are as simple as they are staggering: one year from now — in the summer of 2008 — we will be back down to the 130,000 troop level that we were at in January of this year. The New Strategy, then, is but one more way to stay the course.
That ghastly course has now led to about 5,000 American deaths (if we count the untallied fatalities among “private contractors”) as well as a half-trillion dollars down the rat hole — so far. Yet, thanks to the rank cynicism of the Bushies and the fecklessness of the Democrats, the Iraq debate has been reduced to pointless bickering over nothing but the surge itself.
Larry Korb, Ronald Reagan’s former assistant secretary of defense, quickly scratched out a short list of all the inconvenient facts missing from Petraeus’ presentation and just as gingerly sidestepped by most of his congressional questioners: overall civilian deaths in Iraq are increasing, not decreasing; May was the deadliest month this year; the Pentagon’s scorecard of sectarian murders no longer includes Shia-on-Shia killings, Sunni-on-Sunni violence, car bombings or — can you believe this? — people being shot in the head from the front. Call the Baghdad coroner and tell him to pass on the good news to all the cold corpses he has stacked up like firewood.
read on . . .
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September 13th
posted: September 13, 2007 3:55 EST
Talking with the former FEMA chief about a disastrous Colorado emergency program. Who would know better?
By Patricia Calhoun, Westword
It's a disaster in the making.
"Since the terrible events of September 11, 2001, and with the increasing and widespread concern for pandemic influenza worldwide, Coloradans have been deluged with constant warnings about their ongoing safety," reads the What If? Colorado program overview page prepared by the Office of Emergency Preparedness and Response of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. "As a result, citizens need real solutions to their questions concerning influenza prevention and emergency solutions."
And what better way to offer those real solutions than to create a fake reality show?
September 11, 2007 — the sixth anniversary of the crisis that shook America to its core — just happened to be the second-to-last day that Coloradans could vote for their favorite What If? Colorado contestant, 31 semi-finalists culled from 123 "adventurous Coloradans" who'd all submitted one-minute videos describing the five things they couldn't live without in case of emergency. (Item number one for the blond babe who introduces the contest at http://whatifcolorado.com: a blow dryer.) On September 20, the nine top vote-getters will move into the What If? Colorado House — actually the Gregory Inn, a bed-and-breakfast in the Curtis Park neighborhood — where they will stay for three days, competing in seven disaster-related challenges for the chance to win $2,500 and be named this state's ultimate survivor.
I already know who's earned that title: Michael Brown. The day after September 11, 2005, Brown tendered his resignation as head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, not long after President George Bush said he was doing a "heckuva job" responding to the disaster that was Hurricane Katrina. "Heckuva job" Brownie, who'd moved up to the top slot at FEMA from a legal job there, which he'd taken after being thrown from his position as counsel to a Colorado-based Arabian horse outfit. When Brown finally left Washington, D.C. — FEMA kept him as a consultant for some time, which made it easier when he had to go testify before Congress — he moved to Boulder, where he set up a disaster-consulting business.
Truly, Brown knows a disaster when he sees it — and Colorado's ludicrous "What If?" campaign definitely qualifies.
"We're talking about this on 9/11," Brown said as we talked about it on Tuesday, after I'd clued him in to the campaign and he'd spent some time on the What If? website, watching a survivalist's audition tape and another from a girl who would bring her lip gloss. "I find that ironic. I think people are kind of starting to get it, and now they do this? It's kind of sad."
And he knows sad, too, since the tragic stories continue to mount in New Orleans, where schools are not repaired, homes are still abandoned. And the feds can't blame Brownie for their post-Katrina failures.
Now the feds are throwing good money after bad, with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services sending money to the states to use for pandemic influenza preparation. And Colorado, which on Tuesday finally got a new head of the Division of Emergency Management to replace the badly vetted fellow who never actually made it to the Capitol, decided to pour its share into the six-month What If? campaign, complete with fake disaster scenarios, a mass vaccination exercise in November and a YouTube contest.
"I agree with the concept of trying to get the culture to think about some of these things," Brown said. "If they want to reach the youth, go ahead and put something on YouTube, but have it professionally produced. Any communications expert would tell you that this is sending mixed messages."
The professional video that kicked off the YouTube contest includes a clip of a 48-year-old Denver man "originally from a city known as New Orleans, and we ran into a little wind disturbance down there known as Hurricane Katrina," he tells the audience. So he has a pretty good idea what five things you can't live without in case of an emergency: "cash, cash, cash, wheels and, of course, information."
But when the What If? crew trimmed the original entrants down to the semi-finalists, he didn't make the cut.
Brown recognizes that information is key, too. "Look, I go back to my biggest mistake," he said, when I asked him to do exactly that at the one-year anniversary of Katrina ("The Eye of the Storm," August 31, 2006). "At some point, I should have put down those stupid talking points and said, 'Look, I've asked for buses and they're not here yet. The Army is two days away.'"
read on . . .
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posted: September 13, 2007 3:27 EST
Fore! More Years! At Least!
U.S. Army/Staff Sgt. Jacob Boyer
No grunts, please: A sergeant and a captain tee off at the Camp Victory driving range.
By Ward Harkavy, Village Voice
While Americans were being shelled Tuesday by White-House-driven propaganda from General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker in D.C., rebels bombed our Camp Victory in Baghdad, a little-noticed Xanadu that illustrates the golf between us and the Iraqis.
Five years ago we "liberated" Saddam Hussein's sumptuous Al Faw Palace and planted the Pentagon's flag there.
By now we could have returned the palace to Iraq's citizens, who are dying of the heat, among other things. But all we've done is given it a friendlier second name, Camp Al-Nasr, for PR purposes aimed at Iraq's surviving Arab populace.
The only lifeguards with a good track record at Camp Victory are probably those at its pool — here's a photo of the actual palace swimmin' hole.
On Tuesday, the sixth anniversary of 9/11, Camp Victory, the U.S. military HQ, was shelled. Here's an AP report from this morning:
A fatal attack launched two days ago against the sprawling headquarters base of the American military in Iraq was carried out with a 240 mm rocket — a type of weapon provided to Shiite extremists by Iran, a U.S. general said Thursday.
One person was killed and 11 were wounded during the "indirect fire" attack Tuesday against Camp Victory, which includes the headquarters of Multinational Forces-Iraq. …
The attacks came despite the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which began Thursday for Iraq's Sunni Muslims, and Friday for the country's majority Shiites. Tradition requires faithful to abstain from eating and drinking from sunrise to sunset during the monthlong observance. …
The attack was overshadowed by congressional appearances by Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker in Washington.
And talk about surges and track records: How about that Christopher Harris! I still remember his Ironman Triathlon at Camp Victory in October 2005. The U.S. Army captain conducted his one-man surge while his wife competed in Hawaii's Ironman Triathlon.
But Iraqis are pretty fortunate, too. Praise Allah for good timing: Ramadan's month-long fasting coincides perfectly with the current food crisis. As IRIN reports:
The monthly food rationing system on which millions of Iraqis depend is not working properly, according to officials. They warn that delays in food deliveries will have a serious impact on those fasting during the upcoming holy Islamic month of Ramadan (beginning around 13 September), when Muslims go without food and drink from dawn to sunset.
The shortage of food can't be that serious if they're already fasting. Mind if we play through?
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September 12th
posted: September 12, 2007 9:41 EST
By Ward Harkavy, Village Voice
Osama wants Americans to convert, but many of us are already religious fanatics.
Sounding like a presidential candidate, Osama bin Laden sympathized with our "insane taxes and real estate mortgages," according to Al Qaeda's tape, brilliantly dissected by Anne Applebaum in Slate.
Bin Laden's solution for beleaguered Americans? Convert to his brand of hardline Islam.
That wouldn't be much of a leap for many Americans, because 12.6 percent of us are "traditional evangelical" Christians, according to a 2004 survey by the political science prof John Green at the University of Akron's Bliss Institute of Applied Politics.
And what do traditional evangelical Christians believe in? Evangelizing, by definition, which is what bin Laden was doing on that tape.
And here's a reminder: Most evangelical Christians believe in the Rapture, as beliefnet.org's Deborah Caldwell noted in an excellent 2002 article. For you who are unaware, this is how religioustolerance.org explains the Rapture:
Most Evangelical Christians believe that the Rapture … will happen precisely as described [in the Bible], sometime in the near future. All previously saved Christians, totaling perhaps 5 to 10 percent of the world's population, will suddenly have their bodies converted into a different form that they will wear for all eternity in Heaven. They will rise vertically into the air. Many believe that they will pass right through ceilings, roofs of cars, etc. to meet Jesus Christ in the sky. Although the vast majority of humans will be left behind, there will be much devastation as planes, trains and automobiles as their pilots, engineers and drivers suddenly disappear and the vehicles crash.
And Americans make fun of Islamic fanatics' beliefs about meeting virgins in Heaven?
Bin Laden's a violent creep, but his brand of religious fanaticism would be a pretty good fit for evangelical George W. Bush.
Reporters for Frontline's The Jesus Factor (2004) talked with top Southern Baptist official Richard Land — whose denomination is the biggest in the U.S. — about Bush's inauguration for his second term as Texas governor:
"The day he was inaugurated there were several of us who met with him at the governor's mansion," says Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. "And among the things he said to us was, 'I believe that God wants me to be president.' "
OK, I'm convinced: God is vengeful.
(Land, by the way, wears presidential-seal cuff links; see my September 2004 item "The Christocrats.")
I guess that those of you who voted for Bush — Twice! For Christ's sake! — are off the hook, in both senses of the phrase.
Judging by the results of the 2004 religious survey, the turban of conservative Muslim bin Laden would wear well on quite a few other Americans, as much as they rightly detest him.
Hardliners of one religion have more in common with hardliners of another religion than with the rest of us. They all believe in conservative, patriarchal "family values" and they give us the same fiery message: Convert, or burn in hell — and we'll light the match.
You still think there's no comparison between bin Laden's homicidal brand of Islam and the beliefs of America's Rock-of-Ages-rigid traditional Christian evangelicals? Here's the grim FAQ about the future of us unbelievers, according to the killer logic of raptureready.com:
What do most countries do with those who commit treason? The governments either incarcerate the traitors for the rest of their lives or they execute them.
Rejection of God is surely treason because mankind originates from Him: the DNA to form our bodies, the gravity to keep it intact, air to keep us breathing, food and water resources to sustain our bodies, materials for shelter, materials for clothing, and all the other good things about life that we take for granted everyday.
What, then, does a human being deserve when he dismisses God, disregards His law (that is written on our hearts), then even goes so far as to say He does not exist and that evolution is our creator?
Let this be a warning.
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