Cleanup-other madness

A lot of people talking about the rhetoric of fascism along with crazy symbols of power. I can't say I'm a fan of that kind of crazy talk, but also as an atheist I am hearing an increasing amount of crazy talk that threatens to overrun my value system. Some are freaked out. Yes, many are. I'm not going to get into talking much about the unfortunate kidnapped defense contractor in Saudi Arabia... it is worth considering that Apaches do not have a great public reputation in the Arab world, as their networks are far less reluctant to show the Israeli ones in action. The documentary Control Room that I mentioned earlier is playing at either Lagoon or Uptown, I need to go see it.

We can't quite measure terrorism accurately. It's on the decline! Brilliant.

Measuring the self-appointed cultural warriors, look at the evil rhetoric of ol'David Horowitz from back in 2000.

Nasty bit mocking the NY Times for torching their credibility on Chalabi. Tragically, due to my unemployed status, I suspended the Times delivery this weekend. It was a nice dead pulp sort of read... This blog, page A01, monitors the Times all the time. (mahablog and the left coaster ain't bad either)

An excellent bit on Juan Cole's site about what a bad idea it was to ditch early elections in Iraq, and the shadowy motives involved. Al-sadr increases in popularity, the bloody way.

A lot of retired officials, some of them key Republican appointees of yore, have released a statement saying Bush must leave office because of all the alliances he's shattered.

Look, 2004 political campaigns are advertising on blogs and making some money. Yay for that... is it effective???? It's gotta be, in some situations.

Last bits of Reagan anti-nostalgia: "Schisms from administration lingered for years," to put it mildly. Yes, it was not all rosy tinted scenarios and photo ops. The end of the cold war: we needed Gorbachev to do it, bottom line.

A humorous bit about Iran-Contra: what if it was really quite a skim-off-the-top kind of bribery scheme?

Middle east chunking up, getting ominous etc.: "Worst is yet to come as US pays the price of failure" but sadly, "a tough time for neo-cons," widely discredited, they say.

Speaking of photo ops, Josh Marshall asks:

In fact, the prison abuse and torture story itself has become a perfect example of how two separate media storylines — ones that clearly contradict each other — can coexist and yet seemingly never cross paths.
[.....]
In this case, the partisan divide is conventional and predictable. Administration advocates argue that abuse was isolated — just a few malefactors who got out of control — while critics claim that it was systemic, stemming from policy choices made at the highest levels of the Pentagon and the White House.

Yet, while this debate is being carried on, we’ve also had a steady stream of evidence (not pictures, but reports, testimony, and other documentary evidence) that makes it fairly clear that the first debate really isn’t a debate at all, or rather, that it’s an open-and-shut case.
[....]
Let’s start by discussing what’s in the pictures: limited violence against detainees, the use of nudity and sexual humiliation as a means of “softening up” detainees, psychological “torture” like the threat of death (such as the case of the picture of the man standing, arms outstretched, who was told he’d be electrocuted if he fell), and the use of attack dogs to frighten if not necessarily attack prisoners.

Those are the acts contained in those lurid photos. But even from the internal reports and official statements coming from the Pentagon and other branches of the administration, it’s clear that each of these methods was approved and authorized as a way of preparing detainees for interrogations.

First, there was approval for using an enumerated list of interrogation techniques for al Qaeda terrorists housed at Guantanamo and other U.S. facilities. Eventually those techniques — honed in Afghanistan and Guantanamo — were OK’d for use against detainees in Iraq. We even know that the importation of those methods into Iraq probably happened in the late summer and early fall of last year. Most of the techniques mentioned above are specifically mentioned in the list of authorized methods issued by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez in Iraq. The rest are detailed in other memos and reports made public over the last month and would certainly be covered by the new “torture memo” out this week.
[......]
Yet the debate over who is responsible for what we see in those pictures continues, even when we have plenty of evidence that the tactics they were using were either specifically authorized by policymakers at the Pentagon or widespread at U.S.-detention facilities commanded by the same folks now prosecuting those reservists in the photos.

Isn’t it about time that we just come clean with ourselves and admit that those half-dozen reservists really probably were just following orders?

i'm going to throw in a handful of final, old, links here, which spelled out rather neatly two flip sides of the situation: the neo-con fanatic wing [one two three] and the fundamentalist Christian fanatic wing [one two three].

Well there you have it, a few of the fine trends making up this turning point month.

Cleanup-Israel

Well well then, I've got two classes at the university tomorrow... this is going to be a good time. On Sunday, for my dad's birthday, as a family we rode around the Mississippi waterfront area on Segways. 'Twas excellent. The company, Human on a Stick, has a website, and hopefully soon a few pictures they took of us will appear in the photo gallery. They took us into the base of the Mill City Museum and gave us cookies halfway through the trip. I won't share more because I have to get to bed soon.

However, here is some of the stuff which has been backing up in my browser windows in this June of Suspense.

First area: in Israel there is confrontation over the stability of Sharon's government, as the hard-rightwing pro-settler parties dropped out. Housing Minister Effi Eitam and Tourism Minister Benny Elon (a favorite of evangelical Christians) couldn't handle supporting the withdrawal from Gaza and parts of the West Bank, so they quit the government. (more on the arguing inside the NRP) Now Sharon's government has only 59 of the 120 Knesset members' complete support, and some members of the Likud party are now voting against the government in no-confidence motions, while some of Sharon's Likud ministers are failing to show up for key votes altogether. As usual it is so complicated that the parentheses are nested:

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told Likud members on Monday night that the 12 party dissidents were forcing him to invite Labor Party to join the coalition, a move he was not happy to take.
He explained that the current coalition was unable to function with only 49 MKs (59 coalition members, together MKs David Tal (One Nation) and Michael Nudelman (National Union), but excluding the 12 "rebels").

Sharon decided Monday night that "at this stage" he will not fire Likud Minister Uzi Landau or Likud Deputy Minister Michael Ratzon for skipping a no-confidence vote on the disengagement plan. The motion, filed by the National Union party, was defeated in the Knesset on Monday.
[....]
Likud "rebels" Landau and Ratzon preferred to risk Sharon's wrath by skipping the vote than support the government's position on evacuating from the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank. Sharon told his cabinet members Sunday that they must attend all votes and support his disengagement plan.
[....]
Meanwhile, half the National Religious Party faction - party chairman Effi Eitam and MKs Yitzhak Levy and Nissan Slomiansky - voted against the government on the anti-disengagement motion. The other three NRP faction members - Minister Zevulun Orlev and MKs Shaul Yahalom and Gila Finkelstein - refrained from voting.
[........]
National Union MK Binyamin Elon, who was fired as housing minister prior to last week's cabinet vote on disengagement, blamed Sharon for betraying the Likud movement, its constitution and its members, who voted to defeat the pullout plan in a May 2 party referendum.

Elon quoted from a section of the Likud constitution saying that the Jewish people have an eternal right to the Land of Israel, and said Sharon was threatening his ministers so they wouldn't oppose his disengagement plan.

Supposedly the Labor party is willing to join Sharon's government at the last second if it appears that it will fall. What would that bring? Another two-sided machine run by Sharon that, last time, left Labor a wasted, pointless shell of an opposition party? Yoel Marcus is serious about the cynicism that this is just talk:

Quite a few people are skeptical about Sharon's disengagement plan. On another TV talk show, "Hot Mishal," Netanyahu remarked that the government had not actually decided on evacuating settlements - "In nine months, we'll have to sit down and see what's what." This is Bibi's way of saying that for the time being, it's all talk. The left and the media commentators don't really believe that Sharon will do what he says either. They think that when the time comes, he'll find an excuse to get out of the whole thing.
[.....]
In practice, the plan to withdraw unilaterally from Gaza is an attempt to retain our hold on most of the West Bank. Sharon rejects Arafat as a partner for dialogue not because army intelligence whispered in his ear that the guy is a bastard. It's because he knows the conditions for an agreement with Arafat (or any other Palestinian leader) are the same as those insisted on by Sadat - withdrawal to the `67 borders and saying goodbye to the settlements. And that is not on Sharon's agenda, even in his worst nightmares.

Hence from Arafat's perspective, Sharon is not a peace partner either. Sharon is focused on Gaza, and he is not preparing the Israelis for the great exodus that will enable the two peoples to live side by side in peace. Unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, which has rattled the windowsills in these parts, is peanuts compared to the quake that is on its way. The epicenter - and the solution - are inside Gaza.

The threats of the organizational chiefs in the territories should be taken seriously. This is not the time to pooh-pooh the warnings of the world's leaders, who say that terror has assumed World War III proportions and will not stop unless Israel takes steps to leave the Gaza Strip and a Palestinian state is on the map.

Meanwhile, the real deal is that they are building a horrible fence around the grand mega-settlement of Ariel, in the center of the northern West Bank (near the area that they talk about "evacuating"). The last link, a Haaretz editorial, also describes the pain caused by the huge fence cutting through Arab towns that sit snugly against whatever might be called 'official' Jerusalem. And cash money, 300 million shekels to be dumped into the 'security' of the other unfenced settlements. They are considering building another neighborhood to fill the gap between Jerusalem and a huge bloc of settlements south of there. Very inflammatory.

Earlier in the month (reported June 9), a senior U.S. official demanded the withdrawal of settler outposts. This editorial pointed out the lurching, undemocratic nature of Sharon's moves, going from stupid ministers to a stupid Likud referendum to a worthless phone poll to "prove" that the public supported the withdrawal/annexation plan (yes we are mapping out oxymorons this evening). (See also "Four comments on the situation.") On the plus side, the evacuation planning committee announced that they would envision leaving by September 2005, a terribly long time, but at least it is a sort of planning timetable... and we all know how well those work in the middle east.

On the military planning side, it's been unearthed that the military establishment sees that the situation with the Arab world is, operationally speaking, a zero-sum game. But this is also interesting: the head of Israel's military intelligence research division, a very weird man named Amos Gilad, apparently gave false reports about what Arafat's intentions and actions were in the dawning days of this whole phase of the conflict. The difference between military intelligence and politics here is pretty much nil, but basically he argued that Arafat was determined to level Israel and hence there was no 'partner for peace' worth talking to. (this was the original report by veteran journalist Akiva Eldar)

Then, on the flip side, the Haaretz settlement reporter Nadav Shragai reports on "when rabbis and politicians clash" over the settlements (in this case National Religious Party rabbis, who have a degree of organizational authority). On the pro settler side "Religious Zionists cannot retreat"!!! A call to arms, nearly.

This whole crazy thing has dwelled on the inward machinations of Israeli politics, never a healthy hobby. In Palestine, a good chunk of the Jenin refugee camp that got leveled (and many innocent people killed) in the "Defensive Shield" phase, has been rebuilt with extra big gaps between buildings for Israeli tanks to go zooming through. About 100 of the 530 "housing units" obliterated more than two years ago have been replaced. That rounds it out for this batch of info... sorry its mostly from Haaretz, what can I say, they're pretty good.