Dan Feidt's log on Minnesota, Information Operations, spinstorms and latent contradictions.
Sorry I haven't been able to update much lately. I am essentially in the final couple weeks of class at the University and my final project for Electronic Art class is still coming together here. Ahhh heck.......
[Book of] Revelation is must reading nowadays, especially for the nonbeliever. I have returned to it, many years after abandoning the above-mentioned childhood faith, not because I think it is inspired prophecy, there being in my opinion no such thing, but because many other people (including many I'd grant are "good" people) think that it is. And because some of them think this piece of Holy Scripture somehow justifies ongoing imperialist war, which they (with their commander-in-chief) conceptualize religiously as a war of Good versus Evil. And because that conviction causes believers to support, on faith, Bush's efforts to remold the Middle East in the way the neocons (who are overwhelmingly not fundamentalist Christians, but who assiduously court them) want to do it. One should read Revelation to see how it can be used, and to see what sort of worldview the book encourages.I thought this was a striking article "Apocalypse Now: Why the Book of Revelations is Must Reading," reflecting on Bush's pandering to the apocalyptic fanatics and such. Also it linked to this insane prophetic/war type page. Also the PBS page "frontline: apocalypse!" has a number of serious scholarly perspectives. I also ended up at Frederick Engels' "On the History of Early Christianity," which had some weird excerpts:It is truly a godsend to those in the administration who want to transform the Muslim world, acquiring strategic control over Southwest Asia while enhancing Israel's security situation, that a considerable portion of the U.S. population consists of persons who take the book seriously. The neocons and patrons manipulate the Christian devout who adulate Ariel Sharon like a rock star, believe Israel (miraculously reconstituted half a century ago, in fulfillment of Ezekiel 37:12-14) can do no wrong, have little concern about Arabs' rights, and think Islam is a teaching of the Devil. Rev. Jerry Falwell calls the Prophet Muhammed a "terrorist." Rev. Franklin Graham calls Islam "a wicked, evil religion" and says its God is not the Christians' God. These reverends' followers are very useful supporters of the war on the human mind that is the "war on terrorism," the focus of which shifted so swiftly from al-Qaeda to Iraq (alike in little save their Muslimness), and could shift to Syria or Iran or Pakistan suddenly tomorrow. When you mix the anti-Islam pronouncements with Bush policy decisions and millenarian faith, you have an explosive combination.
We therefore see that the Christianity of that time, which was still unaware of itself, was as different as heaven from earth from the later dogmatically fixed universal religion of the Nicene Council; one cannot be recognized in the other. Here we have neither the dogma nor the morals of later Christianity but instead a feeling that one is struggling against the whole world and that the struggle will be a victorious one; an eagerness for the struggle and a certainty of victory which are totally lacking in Christians of today and which are to be found in our time only at the other pole of society, among the Socialists.In fact, the struggle against a world that at the beginning was superior in force, and at the same time against the novators themselves, is common to the early Christians and the Socialists. Neither of these two great movements were made by leaders or prophets -- although there are prophets enough among both of them -- they are mass movements. And mass movements are bound to be confused at the beginning; confused because the thinking of the masses at first moves among contradictions, lack of clarity and lack of cohesion, and also because of the role that prophets still play in them at the beginning. This confusion is to be seen in the formation of numerous sects which right against one another with at least the same zeal as against the common external enemy. So it was with early Christianity, so it was in the beginning of the socialist movement, no matter how much that worried the well-meaning worthies who preached unity where no unity was possible.
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So here it is not yet a question of a "religion of love," of "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you," etc. Here undiluted revenge is preached, sound, honest revenge on the persecutors of the Christians. So it is in the whole of the book. The nearer the crisis comes, the heavier the plagues and punishments rain from the heavens and with all the more satisfaction John announces that the mass of humanity will not atone for their sins, that new scourges of God must lash them, that Christ must rule them with a rod of iron and tread the wine-press of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God, but that the impious still remain obdurate in their hearts. It is the natural feeling, free of all hypocrisy, that a fight is going on and that -- à la guerre comme à la guerre.
A peculiar antithesis to this was the religious risings in the Mohammedan world, particularly in Africa. Islam is a religion adapted to Orientals, especially Arabs, i.e., on one hand to townsmen engaged in trade and industry, on the other to nomadic Bedouins. Therein lies, however, the embryo of a periodically recurring collision. The townspeople grow rich, luxurious and lax in the observation of the "law." The Bedouins, poor and bence of strict morals, contemplate with envy and covetousness these riches and pleasures. Then they unite under a prophet, a Mahdi, to chastise the apostates and restore the observation of the ritual and the true faith and to appropriate in recompense the treasures of the renegades. In a hundred years they are naturally in the same position as the renegades were: a new purge of the faith is required, a new Mahdi arises and the game starts again from the beginning. That is what happened from the conquest campaigns of the African Almoravids and Almohads in Spain to the last Mahdi of Khartoum who so successfully thwarted the English. It happened in the same way or similarly with the risings in Persia and other Mohammedan countries. All these movements are clothed in religion but they have their source in economic causes; and yet, even when they are victorious, they allow the old economic conditions to persist untouched. So the old situation remains unchanged and the collision recurs periodically. In the popular risings of the Christian West, on the contrary, the religious disguise is only a flag and a mask for attacks on an economic order which is becoming antiquated. This is finally overthrown, a new one arises and the world progresses.
Dramatic CounterPunch stuff tonight: "The Rise of Global Resistance" by Omar Barghouti. Rather top-to-bottom leftie roundup of this that and the other thing, etc, etc....
If the fall of the Berlin Wall signaled the decisive beginning of the end of the East-West opposition, the illegal, immoral and criminal war on Iraq, waged by the new Rome of our time, might well announce the baptism of a new world community opposed to empire, any empire, and based on the precepts of evolving international law, human rights and the common principles of universal morality that are emerging.Almost everyone with conscience fears and resents the megalomaniac cult sitting on the throne in Washington. It is the product of a strategic alliance between the omnipotent military-industrial complex (with a lion's share for the oil industry), the fundamentalist-Christian and the Zionist ideologies. It is a cult that has amassed colossal financial, political and media power, enough to rekindle its deep-rooted disposition and ambition to become the master of the universe. A century and a half after officially abolishing slavery in the U.S., the new-old masters have a diabolic agenda to resurrect it, except this time on a worldwide scale.
Being able to detect this phenomenon, a great majority of nations, including an impressively increasing number of conscientious and mentally-liberated Americans, wish to see this cult of "neo-conservatives" and its agenda humbled, at the very least, if not altogether defeated.
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At the very heart of this strategy is control over oil supplies. Robert E. Ebel, director of the energy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington think tank whose advisers include Kissinger and Brzezinski, among other dignitaries, explains: "Oil fuels military power, national treasuries, and international politics. It is no longer a commodity to be bought and sold within the confines of traditional energy supply and demand balances. Rather, it has been transformed into a determinant of well-being, of national security, and of international power."
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The rest of the world truly hopes that Americans may themselves rise up to the occasion and renounce the empire from within; that they may opt for the status of relatively less privileged citizens of a more just and peaceful world, rather than the loathed masters of a bludgeoned, bullied, and oppressed world; that they may shed their role as uncritical, even submissive, subjects of a reviled, racist and morally bankrupt empire. With conscientious Americans on board, the world has a chance to defeat the mad beast with nuclear fangs, before it takes us all under. With concerted mobilization and global activism, we may well celebrate one day the withering away of empire.
"Iraq, According to Edgar Allen Poe: Now it's coffin bombs in Baghdad," a column from Iraq by Robert Fisk. "The Dogma of Richard Perle" is an interesting piece because I have absolutely no idea why this was written, a free-floating polemic, if you will.
This article in CounterPunch poses the idea that there is no neutral position available in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I'm not sure if that's really an honest thing to say, but I can certainly see where the "neutral" media fuzzes things out and legitimizes them.
[Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun] also has a puzzling tendency puzzling for someone clinging to the middle to refer to the Palestinians as "the Other". Although he uses the term in a friendly context of having respect for "the Other" for instance the terminology actually gives away the true nature of his neutrality. No matter how conciliatory, Lerner clearly deep down thinks of himself and Israel as residing on "this" side of that imaginary middle path between "us" and "them", and therefore his first interest is Israel.I blame the media more than the activists, really. It is hard to keep perspective in such a dizzying topic, but then again, isn't this article rather dogmatically claiming that a spectrum of acceptable positions doesn't even exist, and yet again the writer is the only one who can pick out the Safe Spot?? Sounds like a copout to me.
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The immorality of the center is that this middle path has helped create a deathly silence about the destruction of lives and property that goes on every day in the occupied territories. Because they refuse to see realities on the ground, centrists cannot even imagine the scale of the oppression that Palestinians face at Israel's hands. They cannot imagine the grotesque miscarriage of justice represented by taking a middle position between the oppressor and the oppressed. The checkpoints, the roadblocks, the sniper shootings, the aerial bombardments, the assassinations, the settlements and Israeli-only bypass roads, the land confiscations, the bulldozing of olive groves, the demolition of homes and entire residential neighborhoods, the foul labyrinth of walls and fences that have imprisoned entire Palestinian villages, halted all movement, separated farmers from farmland, children from schools, the sick from hospitals, brothers from brothers: all of these separate aspects of Israel's oppressive system, and the magnitude of their totality, have escaped the rosy view of those who only follow a middle way. Their silence and averted gaze grease the wheels of oppression and are in no way balanced by the occasional suicide bombing.Their silence clears the way for ever greater Israeli violence, making it easier for Israel to swallow more of Palestine while the world looks elsewhere. Certainly the centrists are not alone responsible for enabling continued Israeli oppression; they are themselves fighting a valiant uphill struggle against vocal mainstream pro-Israeli sentiment on the near right and the far right, among Jewish organizations, Christian fundamentalists, the media, and politicians of both major parties. But the peace movement represents a substantial minority voice that could have a major place in public discourse if only it would speak out against oppression. Its determination merely to be a voice of sweetness and light, rarely criticizing, always accentuating the positive, severely diminishes its own impact and allows Israel to be wanton while the rest of the world is silent.
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Public discourse in general, and many in the vocal pro-Israel community in particular, are tuning in to the public relations benefits of appearing balanced and open to the Palestinians. The rightwing pro-Israel advocacy group The Israel Project, led by Republican consultants Frank Luntz and Jennifer Lazlo Mizrahi, has recently been holding seminars to train activists in how to get the Israeli message across most effectively and is emphasizing the importance of being optimistic and not demonizing the Palestinians. It's hard to distinguish this kind of false, deliberately deceptive appearance of "balance" from the balance advocated by the centrists of the peace movement, and in terms of how the situation on the ground plays out, there is no difference. As it works out in actuality, neutrality is an endorsement, at least implicit and often explicit, of all Israel's policies; it results in a virtually total obliviousness to how those policies affect Palestinians, their daily lives, and their national prospects. Centrist peace activists have helped make this possible.
I got the documentary "Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear and the Selling of American Empire" a couple weeks ago, and I've watched it several times over with various people. Here's a review from the SF Gate and Variety. This short documentary might be the "Fahrenheit 9/11 for the rational mind" that we've been missing. It's a direct, stripped down kind of documentary, outlining the Wolfowitz doctrine of global domination by force from its origins in the 1993 Defense Planning Guidance document, through to the Project for a New American Century's work and the famous "catalyzing event...like a new Pearl Harbor" license for action. Noam Chomsky makes a few brief, very down-to-earth statements, Norman Mailer makes a few cracks, Chalmers Johnson illustrates the Sorrows of Empire, and such characters as Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkoski, Stan Goff and weapons inspector Scott Ritter each have fascinating 30 minute interviews available on the DVD. (Pentagon Papers star Daniel Ellsberg and Canadian neocon attacker Shadia Drury have DVD interviews too). Medea Benjamin, Tariq Ali, Normon Solomon and William Hartungg from the World Policy Institute all get some time that's been so carefully denied them by the mainstream media.
Narrated by NAACP honcho Julian Bond, this documentary even covers the origins of the "Shock and Awe" doctrine as the Wolfowitz doctrine of domination operationalized. The quotes from Harman Ullmann's original Shock and Awe study are juxtaposed with war casualty photos. In its "Sorrows of Empire" section, the documentary masterfully outlines the true fiscal cost of the new imperial project. As Chalmers Johnson says, (paraphrasing), "The first and sixth amendments of the Constitution are dead letters, habeas corpus has been suspended, etc. but these are political problems. They don't spell the end of the United States. Financial bankruptcy does." An incredible pivot.
I would criticize this movie for not linking the neocons more closely with Israel, particularly since in their interviews, Goff, Ellsberg, and Kwiatkowski all articulate information about ties to the Israeli right, and Kwiatkowski's digestion of the Clean Break is probably the best I've seen on video. Too bad it wasn't in the final documentary. Dicey territory that Moore bailed from altogether.
This documentary articulates the connections that remain sadly unaddressed in Fahrenheit 9/11. If you see Moore's flick, this documentary and Control Room, that visual triangle should be enough to put anyone on a firmly informed, critical footing. Everyone who's seen this has really enjoyed it, and I strongly recommend that y'all check it out.
I found this film a very cathartic visual explanation of the many accumulated facts and horrors that I've read about for so long, and finally the video appearance of central people like Kwiatkowski makes a huge impact. Thank you Media Education Foundation!!!
There's Mac grad in Bulgaria, Issidor Iliev, who is looking to score some cash to deal with going to the Stern School of Management. He's got the website going:
So give the man a break, assist Bulgaria and all that!
I was recently accepted to Stern School of Management, New York University and the primary reason for this web site is to help raise funds for my education there. As an international student, I have limited access to funds in the U.S. and unfortunately Stern does not have arrangements with U.S. banks to fund the full cost of education at the school. Now, after years of hard work, I have the amazing chance of being able to study in this top management school, and it would be unfortunate not to attend just because of my birth place. How will you benefit in all this? How will the world benefit?I trust there are people who believe in giving others a chance and in helping others overcome hindrances and better themselves. As a matter of fact, I am such a person – whenever I have had the means, I have helped non-profit organizations, either through volunteering or financially. The Wilder Foundation for Children, Magen David Adom, Macalester College, groups fighting bigotry, are among the organizations I have assisted. I would like to assure you as a potential donor, that contributing funds for an MBA will be one of your most constructive donations, a donation that will keep on giving. Receiving an MBA will increase my personal and professional opportunities, which in turn will help me achieve my philanthropic ideas. And any charitable and volunteer work I will perform during my life will indirectly be influenced by you – with a small contribution now, you will advance a lifetime of giving. How can you help? You can go to the donate/loan section and donate any amount of funds you find appropriate. Along with getting listed in the supporters section of the site anyone who donates more than $15 will receive an Issidor.com T-shirt. You can also loan me an amount.
It is genuinely funny how many Bulgarians we have around here this summer. And the other day I saw a professor wearing a Bulgaria T-shirt. Too bad I don't know any Bulgarian expressions.
First a correction to the CENTCOM story: Kat's sister wrote the program WeatherPop start to finish. Can't stomp on a programmer's rep here. Seriously.
Categorize this under both "Groupthink" and "Israeli-American Hegemony theory." This is not exactly a small matter: Senate Report on Iraq Intel Points to Role of Jerusalem, as reported in the Jewish New York weekly journal Forward:
Cooperation between Israel and the United States helped produce a series of intelligence failures in the lead up to the Iraq war, according to separate reports issued by members of the Senate and the Knesset.The Senate Intelligence Committee, in its report issued last week, blasted the Central Intelligence Agency for poor intelligence gathering and analysis, and concluded that the U.S. "intelligence community depended too heavily on defectors and foreign government services" to make up for America's lack of human intelligence in Iraq. The credibility of these outside sources was difficult to ascertain and, as a result, the United States was left open to manipulation by foreign governments, the Senate report concluded.
In particular, the Senate report claimed, America had become completely dependent on foreign sources to evaluate Saddam Hussein's ties to Hamas, Hezbollah and other Palestinian terrorist organizations. On this front, the Senate committee concluded that the foreign intelligence was "credible." On the issue of weapons of mass destruction, however, the Senate report concluded that the United States relied on incorrect intelligence to argue that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Any direct references to Israel were blacked out of the published version of the Senate report, but an earlier report issued in March by a Knesset committee made it clear that U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies were working together and exchanging information.
"In this particular case, nobody had hard, on-the-ground intelligence information," said Gerald Steinberg, a professor at Israel's Bar Ilan University and an expert on American-Israeli security relations.
Intelligence agencies, Steinberg said, were relying on a combination of data collected from Iraqi defectors, as well as radio monitoring or signal intelligence. The intelligence community, Steinberg said, "looked for the signal intelligence to verify what they got from the defectors. When you're doing that, and you don't have ground truth, you can usually find enough information to apparently verify what you're looking to verify."
Along similar lines, the Senate report criticized what it described as the creation of an "assumption train" — a chain of false assumptions based on faulty, unscrutinized intelligence. Judging from the Knesset report, issued in March by an investigative committee appointed by the Israeli parliament's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, several of the assumption train's cars were made in Israel.
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In turn, the Knesset report stated, foreign intelligence services relied on intelligence passed on by Israel that actually originated from operatives working for other governments. The result, according to the Israeli report, was "a vicious cycle of sorts in the form of a reciprocal feedback, which at times was more damaging than beneficial. It very well may be that the assessments given by an Israeli intelligence organization, or any other organization, to a fellow organization, were passed from hand to hand, played a central role in making up the assessments of that foreign organization, and then eventually returned to the original organization as an assessment of a different intelligence organization. That assessment, in turn, was immediately perceived as a reinforcement and validation by a reliable source, of the original Israeli assessment."
Meanwhile, Israel has completed its rehearsals to bomb the Iranian nuclear facilities.
Is it that the U.S. is losing its grip on the Shiites altogether? Of course, that's the scratch. We never had a handle on what Iran was doing. Initially, after 9/11, I heard about Al-Qaeda problems in Iran, which seemed obvious enough, as people would have been circulating around Afghanistan. However, Iran was invested against the Taliban by supporting the Tajik (heroin-funded) warlord Ismail Khan of Herat.
Iran has a decentralized power structure, with competing blocs protecting Byzantine budgets and managing giant state-owned foundations, the ancient bazaar projected on a modern scale. So some people that we would list as Al-Qaeda would obviously have slipped through such a huge and discombobulated state, with sympathetic help from the Revolutionary Guards or other random cats. The Iranian frontier with Afghanistan is part of one of the world's largest heroin routes, so all kinds of weird people are around...
Juan Cole is all over the Sunni-Shiite questions, the whole bit:
For all we know, there is an Iranian Chalabi who is behind these reports, hoping to get the US to overthrow the regime in Iran so that he can take over. As for the al-Qaeda detainees or those under electronic surveillance, the letter of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has already made it clear that some radical Sunni elements that fought in Afghanistan dream of provoking a Shiite-American struggle. Al-Qaeda detainees are notorious for providing the US with disinformation aimed at furthering their plots. Iran is a notorious enemy of Wahhabism and al-Qaeda and the Taliban. How sweet it would be to provoke a war between the US and Iran by hanging 9/11 on Tehran! (It should be remembered that NSA intercepts also showed that Saddam had biological and chemical weapons, presumably because Saddam ordered his officers to talk them up in the vain hope of deterring a US attack).
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Another problem is that Iran does not have a tight, unified government. The Iranian state consists of a number of competing power centers. In recent years the president, Mohammad Khatami, has supported more civil liberties and an opening to the West. The Supreme Jurisprudent, Ali Khamenei, is an old-style Khomeinist who revels in puritanical theocracy and hates the US. Even Khamenei, however, is not implicated in ever having planned direct action against US soil. Then there are the Basij and Revolutionary Guards and Quds Brigade paramilitaries, and it is unclear how much central control the state has over them. So even if some official in the Revolutionary Guards did let al-Qaeda operatives in (and this is by no means proven), it would not necessarily say much about the stance of the Iranian government(s).
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Iran has admitted to having taken some al-Qaeda operatives captive after September 11, but it is holding them for some quid pro quos from the United States. In particular, Iran wants to ensure that the US does not allow the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) terrorist organization to continue to hit Iran from its bases in Iraq, and the al-Qaeda detainees are among its only bits of leverage over Washington in this regard. (Amazingly enough, there are political forces in Washington, including the Neocon-dominated, pro-Israeli "Washington Institute for Near East Policy," that support the MEK terrorist organization and want the Bush administration to, as well. Even scarier, WINEP, this supporter of a notorious terrorist group, is highly influential in Washington and US military and State Department personnel are actually detailed there to learn about the Middle East!).
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Here is the Common Sense test: Usama Bin Laden is a fanatical Sunni Muslim surrounded by other fanatical Sunni Muslims and was nested in the Taliban, who are fanatical Sunni Muslims. Iran is Shiite, a branch of Islam that fanatical Sunni Muslims absolutely hate. In Afghan politics, 1996-2002, at the time it was dominated by the Taliban and al-Qaeda, Iran was allied with the Northern Alliance against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Iran was trying to overthrow the Taliban and crush them and al-Qaeda.Iran's allies in Afghanistan were the Tajiks, the Uzbeks and especially the Hazaras. The Hazaras are Afghan Shiites. They form about 15% of the Afghan population. The Hazaras' main political vehicle was the Hizb-i Vahdat or Unity Party, which was and is closely allied with Iran. Tajik warlords in the Northern Alliance like Ismail Khan, who are Sunnis, also have strong ties of language and patronage to Iran. Basically, Persian speakers in Afghanistan tended to side with Iran, especially Shiite Persian speakers. Whereas Pushtu speakers and immigrant Arabs tended to side instead with Pakistan.
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Pakistan's Sunni fundamentalist-dominated military, especially its Inter-Services Intelligence or military intelligence, had more or less created the Taliban and heavily supported them with equipment, training, fuel and other goods.Iran and Pakistan were engaged in a regional struggle for influence in Afghanistan and Central Asia, in which Iran's Shiism and Pakistan's Sunnism were ideological tools. This struggle spilled over into Pakistan itself. The radical Sunni Sipah-i Sahabah or Companions of the Prophet, originating in Jhang Siyal in northern Punjab, has conducted a terrorist campaign of assassination against Shiites in Pakistan. Sipah-i Sahabah was one of the jihadi groups that got training in al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and was allied with al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
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The second test is Who is Helped by these Crazy Allegations?- The Likud lobby in Washington, especially Michael Ledeen, Michael Rubin and other warmongers. They want the Tehran regime overthrown in part because it stands in the way of an Israeli annexation of southern Lebanon, with the Litani river as the long-sought prize. Iran is allied with Hizbullah in southern Lebanon, which forced the Israelis back out of Lebanon with a nearly 20-year long guerrilla struggle. They also want to force Hizbullah to pull back its support of the Palestinian uprising. Since Iran has substantially cut back on its support for Hizbullah, however, overthrowing Tehran would have little effect on such local political dynamics. (The Likud's Ariel Sharon should never have invaded Lebanon in 1982, which is what created Hizbullah, suicide bombings as a tactic, and radicalized Lebanese like 9/11 hijacker Ziad Jarrah).
- Old-time US intelligence and diplomatic officials who have a grudge with Iran over the Hostage Crisis and other Iranian actions against the US in the 1980s
- The US military-industrial complex, which is frustrated at not being able to extract money from the potentially wealthy Iranian market
- Iranian expatriates from families formerly allied with the deposed Shah of Iran, who are enormously wealthy and influential and are eager to play Chalabi in Tehran. Watch them as key sources of disinformation.
- Al-Qaeda, which is seeking to "sharpen contradictions" by provoking serial fights between the US and Muslim powers. It would especially like to see a US- Shiite struggle, so that its two major enemies would both be weakened and pre-occupied with each other rather than Bin Laden.
The hawks are marshalling their forces to start justifying the bombing of Iranian nuclear sites, whether by the U.S., Israel, or why not, Kurdish guerillas? A new Committee on the Present Danger has slithered from the dankest cubicles of Washington. There have been two of these propaganda beasts before. The last CPD harassed Jimmy Carter, issuing a more alternative, hawkish foreign policy stream of exaggerations and paranoia, suggesting the need for ever-more military spending at all times. Many of the same people got involved with the very similar Project for the New American Century scheme.
Fortunately the chairman of the new blob has been forced to resign because he had been working with Austrian quasi-Nazi Joerg Haider. Justin Raimondo is all over this one.
As a random side link I picked up somewhere, let's step back and look at NSC 68, a national security directive issued in April 1950 that really sent us off into the cold war. What kinds of NSC 68s have been drafted by geniuses like Douglas Feith and thrown into our system, and what would a new CPD try to put in? In other words, what operational doctrines would cause the issues above to completely flare out of control?
It sounds like Allawi knows how to cap some insurgent ass, for better or worse. They say he shot six captured rebels, but that's the way it goes these days...
Spencer Ackerman's blog Iraq'd is back up and he has no idea if the man is a "cold-blooded murderer." eh....
Good piece from Hoaglund on the 'perception gap' on Iraq, pointing out that Allawi has a tendency to make pronouncements aimed at the beltway, and that whole attitude could cause even more divergent pointless thinking about Iraq:
There is some new stuff in the Valerie Plame case. So Wilson didn't actually debunk the Iran-Niger story? And wives pull all the strings, rendering a man worthless, or so they say in the WaPo.
Iraq and the world will benefit if Allawi can deliver on his promises to establish stability and democracy. Wish him well. But a dangerous gap is opening up between the determinedly upbeat pronouncements in Washington and from Allawi, and more disinterested reports from the field.Last Friday, Jim Krane of the Associated Press quoted unnamed U.S. military officers saying that Iraq's insurgency is led by well-armed Sunnis angry about losing power, not by foreign fighters. They number up to 20,000, not 5,000 as Washington briefers maintain, Krane added in his well-reported but generally overlooked dispatch.
The point is not 5,000 vs. 20,000. The insurgency's exact size is unknowable. The point is that enough officers in the field sense that what they see happening to their troops in Iraq is so out of sync with Washington's version that they must rely on the press to get out a realistic message. That is usually how defeat begins for expeditionary forces fighting distant insurgencies.
Josh Marshall is hacking through the details as usual but I found the following via Raimondo:
Washington journalist Laura Rozen is exploring the echo theory on intel distortions, that is, the same spoofers spoofed many different agencies, creating the appearance of truth such as WMDs all over the place.
Fafnir is a broken-hearted Fafnir. For I was deceived. Deceived by the story of Joe Wilson who as it turns out lied about absolutely everything he said to anyone ever because there in the Washington Post last Saturday exists definitive proof that somebody somewhere has said that his wife, exposed CIA agent Valerie Plame, got him his job checking out if Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium from Niger.Poor foolish Fafnir! I had thought somehow this was all about how exposing the identity of a covert CIA agent is a federal crime but apparently it is really about how her husband is a big fat jerk who got a job by ridin his wife's coattails. I don't quite understand what that has to do with a criminal investigation but hipublican intellectual Jonah Goldberg does so that's OK.*
Found a nifty Mesopotamian blog Iraq the Model, that I don't think I'd seen before.
Older news that polygraph tests have been done in the Chalabi-Iran leak investigation.
Look out, the NAACP says that Bush treats black people like prostitutes. What more can I say? A man with 8% of the black vote can't be wrong, can he?
A pretty dramatic development at hand as the 9/11 commission pins a great deal of Al Qaeda activity on Iran's government. It is not too hard to believe, surely, that Iran's intelligence services might have helped some dudes get around between the Afghan frontier, Pakistan and so forth. It's a rather more plausible casus belli than we stomped into Iraq with, which is a great part of why the war was so perplexing. Via a DKos thread here are some news links about the Iran strategic situation:
Starting at the top, a delightful headline: "Report: Israel's 'first strike' plan against Iran ready" from the JPost. Ex-neoconservative William Lind heard the hit might come this year. Tehran here we come... America or the Israelis. A mysterious report from July 1 about "Iran Reacts to U.S. Power Loss." Last December, Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski opined about the pipeline politics in Central Asia.
The almighty neocon mastermind Michael Ledeen wrote about Iran for the millionth time. It's kind of funny ("Are you sitting down? Iran is a terrorist state.") but obviously this man should be regarded with as much suspicion as any mullah you might find.
Back in 2001, Asia Times reported that Bin Laden had been traced to Iran. In 1999, Shell oil put together an oil deal with Iran and some companies defied U.S. sanctions.
There's some complex demand problems among growing Asian nations, who are looking to Iran to fill energy needs. A Pakistani paper said that "Japan must ensure its Iranian oil supply" today.
For rather ugly leftie resource sites, look no further than oilempire.us.
In other misc mideast news, apparently Egypt's cabinet resigned on July 9th and no one noticed. Does this have anything to do with the flare-up in Gaza??
I enjoyed this feature, "Sightseeing in Oman? You Mustn't Miss the Smugglers" in the Times but sadly, its disappeared into the pay archives.
The classic movie Network, which I inexcusably haven't seen yet, was on Bravo today, full of bleeped words. Yet the scene where the anchor says that we are the illusion rings more true today than ever.
The Britons are flustered over complaints from viewers that Fox News' horrible John Gibson made a bunch of rash statements about the BBC hating America back in January, etc. etc. The government found against Fox, ruling that
Nice. I just wish some section of the American government might at least comment on the regular stream of misrepresentations issuing from the idiot box. (news bit via the DKos)
We recognise how important freedom of expression is within the media. This item was part of a well-established spot, in which the presenter put forwards his own opinion in an uncompromising manner. However, such items should not make false statements by undermining facts. Fox News was unable to provide any substantial evidence to support the overall allegation that the BBC management had lied and the BBC had an anti-American obsession. It had also incorrectly attributed quotes to the reporter Andrew Gilligan.Even taking into account that this was a ‘personal view’ item, the strength and number of allegations that John Gibson made against the BBC meant that Fox News should have offered the BBC an opportunity to respond.
Fox News was therefore in breach of Sections 2.1 (respect for truth), 2.7 (opportunity to take part), and 3.5(b) (personal view programmes - opinions expressed must not rest upon false evidence) of the Programme Code.
Heh, I just ran my server logs for the first time in ages. Seems that my May-June logs went down the memory hole somewhere, which is too bad... The results for the past few weeks have been spectacular, despite my incredible laziness in keeping the site up.
Military surfers took their fiercest interest yet, as I got hits from korea.army.mil, as well as nipr.mil, a mysterious firewall developed by the DoD, as detailed in this blog. andrews.af.mil and eglin.af.mil, maxwell.af.mil, Andrews, Eglin and Maxwell Air Force bases I would presume, also stopped by. gate5-sandiego.nmci.navy.mil, the Navy Marine Corps Intranet, also came thru to the site. blackhawk.goodfellow.af.mil is the most badass sounding. Multiple mach blog surfing??
It looks like all three branches of the federal government, the Australian defense department and several bits of the military think that HongPong.com is just fantastic!! Considering I'm so lazy, that's one hell of an impact.
From further afield in the .mil we get even more interesting entries:
walker-cache.korea.army.mil
gateway5.osd.mil - Office of Secretary of Defense??!?!?
iern.disa.mil Defense Intelligence Services Agency
And the granddaddy hit of hits:
cache1.iraq.centcom.mil
Ladies and gentlemen, CENTCOM was here. Thank you.
denver-254.blm.gov - Bureau of Land Management?!
gov.calgary.ab.ca - Government of Calgary
housegate4.house.gov - The House is in the house.
gk-central-100.usps.gov - Post Office too. What agency isn't hanging out here?!?
gtwy.uscourts.gov - Ahh, the federal courts.
defence.gov.au - And the fine Australian defense department.
nhtsa.dot.gov - The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (they are watching my driving!)
ssa.gov - Social Security Administration
sherman.state.gov - State Department!!
I would like to pull a couple lines from my server logs.... evidence of a technological victory, if not a moral one. The entire contents of my Iraq page was downloaded by the CENTCOM Iraq computer...
[IP deleted] - - [15/Jul/2004:18:16:34 -0500] "GET /hp-archives/topics/iraq/index.html HTTP/1.1" 200 688128 "http://www.hongpong.com/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)"
Meanwhile, we determine that the person at the State Department ran a search for "Chalabi" and "Zell" back in April!
[IP deleted] - - [23/Apr/2004:14:25:19 -0500] "GET /hp-archives/000104.html HTTP/1.0" 200 11699 "http://www.google.com/search?q=chalabi+zell&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&c2coff=1&start=10&sa=N" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)"
This is quite surprising, and I'm not sure how to feel about it. On the whole, I feel I've been brutally as honest as I could have been. I am glad that they got the page and looked at it... or didn't. Who knows? I have removed the IP numbers, despite their public nature, as I wouldn't want to anger the ECHELON system too much today.
As long as everyone is paying attention, I should quickly point out that Kat has an ethereal nightvision picture on the apparently rabbit-run blog fury & frost, itself a side project of Kat's sister at Glucose who helped develop the weather popup menu WeatherPop.
Here's to my growing community of national security readers!! Huzzah! If I'm not a particle in the grand conspiracy yet, at least I may influence some other particles...
In front of the theater on Friday there was a guy with a table set up handing out flyers and talking to people. He turned out to be one Thomas Harens, new pre-candidate for President here in Minnesota. He's started the Christian Freedom Party, a group opposed to the Christian right that would supposedly strip votes from Bush's right in Minnesota, perhaps a reverse Ralph Nader. Gotta love the beret on his campaign site.
There's something uniquely American about such a scene, that our system permits a guy from St. Paul to form a party, collect some signatures and get on the ballot. In Minnesota, the threshold is only 2,000 signatures, lower than most. Along with Alex Legge, we signed his petition to the Secretary of State. It's quite improbable to find a third-party presidential candidate getting started virtually on my doorstep. I talked with the guy, and I hope to get some interesting news out of this one...
There have been a lot of strange reports from the wasteland of mirrors lately. Some of these are in registration-required type websites like the LA Times. Therefore as a handy tool for everyone I suggest BugMeNot.com, a repository of logins for news sites that should let everyone duck the hassle of giving those shady corps our email addresses. I have not looked at my server traffic logs in a while, but I suspect things have slacked off during this low-volume time of mine, and that's fine with me. I have been trying to get some exercise, get a life, get outside while the weather's good, and take two classes and work. So sue me.
I've got a lot of stuff referring to the CIA's Anonymous man. He's one solid character. Angry, yes, but clear enough to understand what a crazy detour Iraq was...
On a random note, keep reading Prof. Juan Cole every day.
The New Republic has learned that Pakistani security officials have been told they must produce HVTs [high-value targets] by the election. According to one source in Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), "The Pakistani government is really desperate and wants to flush out bin Laden and his associates after the latest pressures from the U.S. administration to deliver before the [upcoming] U.S. elections." Introducing target dates for Al Qaeda captures is a new twist in U.S.-Pakistani counterterrorism relations--according to a recently departed intelligence official, "no timetable[s]" were discussed in 2002 or 2003--but the November election is apparently bringing a new deadline pressure to the hunt. Another official, this one from the Pakistani Interior Ministry, which is responsible for internal security, explains, "The Musharraf government has a history of rescuing the Bush administration. They now want Musharraf to bail them out when they are facing hard times in the coming elections."The point here, assuming this is even close to true, is that the Bush administration--shockingly--views the war on terror as an ATM machine, where they can buy votes by withdrawing from the Pakistan account. The country is teetering on some sort of tribal war, but the administration's persistent evasion of really dealing honestly with the problems in that country has been put off for so long that when they try to symbolically whack the hornet's nest again because of domestic politics, what kinds of things might fly out?A third source, an official who works under ISI's director, Lieutenant General Ehsan ul-Haq, informed tnr that the Pakistanis "have been told at every level that apprehension or killing of HVTs before [the] election is [an] absolute must." What's more, this source claims that Bush administration officials have told their Pakistani counterparts they have a date in mind for announcing this achievement: "The last ten days of July deadline has been given repeatedly by visitors to Islamabad and during [ul-Haq's] meetings in Washington." Says McCormack: "I'm aware of no such comment." But according to this ISI official, a White House aide told ul-Haq last spring that "it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July"--the first three days of the Democratic National Convention in Boston.
[........]
But there is a reason many Pakistanis and some American officials had previously been reluctant to carry the war on terrorism into the tribal areas. A Pakistani offensive in that region, aided by American high-tech weaponry and perhaps Special Forces, could unite tribal chieftains against the central government and precipitate a border war without actually capturing any of the HVTs. Military action in the tribal areas "has a domestic fallout, both religious and ethnic," Pakistani Foreign Minister Mian Khursheed Mehmood Kasuri complained to the Los Angeles Times last year.Some American intelligence officials agree. "Pakistan just can't risk a civil war in that area of their country. They can't afford a western border that is unstable," says a senior intelligence official, who anonymously authored the recent Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror and who says he has not heard that the current pressures on Pakistan are geared to the election. "We may be at the point where [Musharraf] has done almost as much as he can."
In any case this one will come to a head in a few weeks. More on how Iraq situation puts a "squeeze" on Musharraf. And Iraq is "A failure without borders" according to William Lind, who if I recall is a deserter of the neocon movement. This article describes the key idea of dar al-Islam and dar al-harb, or the abode of Islam and the abode of war as elements in Islamic 'fundamentalist' thinking, although Lind relishes his own rhetoric a little too much:
It is all one war, one battlefield. State boundaries mean nothing. Of course, it is not going very well on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan either. But in this war, events in those places are in effect merely tactical. The strategic centers of gravity are in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Egypt. Al-Qaeda, I think, understands this. Washington does not. That fact alone suggests we have only seen the opening moves in what promises to be a very long war.
The latest from Dr. Khalidi: in an excellent piece condensed from his remarks at the UCLA International Institute, Rashid Khalidi describes something I've personally heard before from other experts, that the Bushies told all the real regional experts to go straight to hell:
Everything taking place in U.S. policy in the Middle East since 9/11 is not grounded in real knowledge about the Middle East. Without a knowledge of resistance to Western control over two centuries, America cannot know how our policy is viewed in the region. We are seeing the dismissal of real history in favor of crude stereotypes.And of course if you haven't read it, check out my exclusive Mac Weekly interview with Dr. Khalidi from last fall. Talk about prescient warnings...Those who attacked the United States are very smart people who have played on real grievances in a very expert way. The Bush administration has not used the informational resources at its disposal to respond appropriately. The U.S. attack on Iraq was accompanied by an insidious attack on domestic Middle East experts. Experts can be wrong, but the dedicated professionals have often been prescient in their warnings.
Fareed Zakaria talks some sense, simply saying "Reach Out to the insurgents;" in other words the end of the CPA has opened an opportunity to define a new relationship with the opposition groups. I always firmly believe that we can't just classify such characters as "the terrorists" and leave the situation at that, for then you get nowhere. Instead, engagement... dialectic... other hopeless hopes.
The Iraqi Baathists in exile are considering forming an Iraqi government-in-exile to offer the Iraqi people. Or it could be a framework to propel a civil war. We would just need names for the sides. A basic argument from Charley Reese on the compatibility of Islam and democracy, and in particular mentioning where the U.S. recently sided with a military government against some elected Islamists in Algeria, sparking a civil war.
Once again I will cite this very fascinating up-to-the-minute perspective on the insurgents, and how well armed they are. Seems the daring journalist went out and actually talked with them for three hours. It's quite dramatic, including a rendezvous at Hotel Babel, swarming with foreign mercenaries. Take what they say with a grain of salt, but its surprisingly plain in a way:
"The Americans have prepared the war, we have prepared the post-war. And the transfer of power on June 30 will not change anything regarding our objectives. This new provisional government appointed by the Americans has no legitimacy in our eyes. They are nothing but puppets." Why have these former officers waited so long to come out of their closets? "Because today we are sure we're going to win."
[......]
We knew that if the United States decided to attack Iraq, we would have no chance faced with their technological and military power. The war was lost in advance, so we prepared the post-war. In other words: the resistance. Contrary to what has been largely said, we did not desert after American troops entered the center of Baghdad on April 5, 2003. We fought a few days for the honor of Iraq - not Saddam Hussein - then we received orders to disperse." Baghdad fell on April 9: Saddam and his army where nowhere to be seen."As we have foreseen, strategic zones fell quickly under control of the Americans and their allies. For our part, it was time to execute our plan. Opposition movements to the occupation were already organized. Our strategy was not improvised after the regime fell." This plan B, which seems to have totally eluded the Americans, was carefully organized, according to these officers, for months if not years before March 20, 2003, the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
The objective was "to liberate Iraq and expel the coalition. To recover our sovereignty and install a secular democracy, but not the one imposed by the Americans. Iraq has always been a progressive country, we don't want to go back to the past, we want to move forward. We have very competent people," say the three tacticians. There will be of course no names as well as no precise numbers concerning the clandestine network. "We have sufficient numbers, one thing we don't lack is volunteers."
[......]
Essentially composed by Ba'athists (Sunni and Shi'ite), the resistance currently regroups "all movements of national struggle against the occupation, without confessional, ethnic or political distinction. Contrary to what you imagine in the West, there is no fratricide war in Iraq. We have a united front against the enemy. From Fallujah to Ramadi, and including Najaf, Karbala and the Shi'ite suburbs of Baghdad, combatants speak with a single voice. As to the young Shi'ite leader Muqtada al-Sadr, he is, like ourselves, in favor of the unity of the Iraqi people, multiconfessional and Arab. We support him from a tactical and logistical perspective."
[....]
"The attacks are meticulously prepared. They must not last longer than 20 minutes and we operate preferably at night or very early in the morning to limit the risks of hitting Iraqi civilians." They anticipate our next question: "No, we don't have weapons of mass destruction. On the other hand, we have more than 50 million conventional weapons." By the initiative of Saddam, a real arsenal was concealed all over Iraq way before the beginning of the war. No heavy artillery, no tanks, no helicopters, but Katyushas, mortars (which the Iraqis call haoun), anti-tank mines, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and other Russian-made rocket launchers, missiles, AK 47s and substantial reserves of all sorts of ammunition. And the list is far from being extensive.But the most efficient weapon remains the Kamikazes. A special unit, composed of 90% Iraqis and 10% foreign fighters, with more than 5,000 solidly-trained men and women, they need no more than a verbal order to drive a vehicle loaded with explosives
A little from Asia Times Online via their mideast page: More on the five key actors: Israel, the U.S., Iran, Turkey and the Iraqi insurgents. What will sovereignty mean to each? A moment for the great Mr. Negroponte and his Battalion 316 death squad. A fairly even look at the moral shell games being played with Saddam's trial. A book review of "Exiting Iraq: Why the US Must End the Military Occupation and Renew the War against al-Qaeda," written by Chris Preble.
Highly worth reading is a very lengthy piece on Al Qaeda by Craig Hulet looks at the CIA agent 'Anonymous' on why Al Qaeda would benefit from Bush's reelection:
The most profound assertion the author made (Anonymous), who published an analysis of al-Qaeda last year called "Through Our Enemies' Eyes", thinks it quite possible that another devastating strike against the US could come during the election campaign, not with the intention of changing the administration, as was the case in the Madrid bombing, but of keeping the same one in place. Bush is good for the Islamists the world over who want to make war on America and the West. Anonymous again:I'm very sure they can't have a better administration for them than the one they have now. One way to keep the Republicans in power is to mount an attack that would rally the country around the president. In every age ... the ultimate sources of war are the beliefs of those in power: "their idea about what is of most fundamental importance and may therefore ultimately be worth a war." - Evan Luard, International War
[......]
One must question not only what the administration is doing presently but what it will do should it return to office after the November elections; upcoming wars against other nation-states (which clearly have been targeted) are on the Pentagon's desk. Further evidence that the latter is officially on the agenda is below: This was dated Monday, February 17, 2003:US Under Secretary of State John Bolton said in meetings with Israeli officials on Monday that he has no doubt America will attack Iraq, and that it will be necessary to deal with threats from Syria, Iran and North Korea afterwards. Bolton, who is under secretary for arms control and international security, is in Israel for meetings about preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction. In a meeting with Bolton on Monday, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said that Israel is concerned about the security threat posed by Iran. It's important to deal with Iran even while American attention is turned toward Iraq, Sharon said.
[.....]
Paul R Pillar, whose book Terrorism and US Foreign Policy was a staple for reading in counterterror circles and private security specialists like myself, pre-September 11. He notes this regarding the afore mentioned arguments:More than anything else, it is the United States' predominant place atop the world order (with everything that implies militarily, economically, and culturally) and the perceived US opposition to change in any part of that order that underlie terrorists' resentment of the United States and their intent to attack it.
[....]
The Defense Science Board's 1997 Summer Study Task Force on "Department of Defense Responses to Transnational Threats" notes a relationship between an activist American foreign policy and terrorism against the United States:As part of its global power position, the United States is called upon frequently to respond to international causes and deploy forces around the world. America's position in the world invites attack simply because of its presence. Historical data show a strong correlation between US involvement in international situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States.
Apparently more Democrats are being hired as lobbyists. Should I be happy?
To hell with global Social Democracy, they say....
Ick, a National Review hack defending the torture scandal. Just here for color. Yes in fact, Cheney is a 'mixed blessing' at best. Ha.
There was a burst of rather jarring news recently about Israel's involvement with the Kurds and Israeli interrogators in secret U.S. prisons from the BBC and Sy Hersh. Hersh has an extended New Yorker piece, revealing among other things that Israeli commandoes are cruising with Kurds into Iran!!
Via BBC the thoroughly worthless Gen. Janis Karpinski now says that she saw an Israeli who claimed to help interrogate Iraqis, the first time a senior American has admitted the Israelis had security access:
The US journalist who broke the Abu Ghraib scandal told the programme his sources confirm the presence of Israeli intelligence agents in Iraq. Seymour Hersh said that one of the Israeli aims was to gain access to detained members of the Iraqi secret intelligence unit, who reportedly specialise in Israeli affairs.Wow, now the respected pubisher Jane's Security News reports exclusively on Shin Bet interrogators in Iraq. Argh!!
Some Kurdish guys justified a new sort of alliance with Israel against Syria and Iran in Haaretz:
I have mentioned before that (because the U.S. handed security in the Kurdish areas to local militia) Kurdish armed groups are purging Arabs from places like Kirkuk and the outlying cities. Kirkuk could be the next Saravejo. Really.
"The Kurdish public is not ready to take any more humiliation. As long as we thought we could persuade the Americans to support our positions, our leaders were supported by the public," he said. "The Kurdish public is disappointed and angry, it wants results. You in Israel talk of the greater Eretz Yisrael and here we talk of greater Kurdistan. Today our political war begins."The Kurd's struggle has two main objectives - to regain Kirkuk and its suburbs, and to gain a share of the power in the central Iraqi government. Both are uphill struggles.
[....]
Fridon Abed Alkadar, who was Kurdish interior minister, said: "The situation is now very strange. The U.S. told us they do not want to divide Iraq like Lebanon, for fear that what happened there would happen here. But if they don't accept the idea of a federated Iraq, the situation may be like the one that triggered off the civil war in Lebanon."
Already there are reports of Kurdish militants fighting Iran, which we had to expect at some point, I suppose. Nor is it that surprising that the Israelis would reach out yet again to the non-Arabs of the middle east, in an attempt to improve their position with the Arab regimes. I don't have a moral problem with this occurring, but it certainly illustrates a central flaw in the idea that Israel is America's unwavering ally in the Mideast. Simply put, Israel has its own interests and those don't always coincide with ours. If they want to use the Kurds now that we've nearly shattered Iraq, what use is it to get offended? It's all political expediency, the Great Game anew.
In other Israel news I would like to say "Blahhhhh" to Richard Cohen for getting so damned delighted that Israel shifted its wall slightly back, via a Supreme Court ruling. Ok, fine, then show me how that whole West Bank approach actually builds a stable democracy. Or two.
You see, it turns out that in the first days of the Intifada, Israel fired more than a million bullets into the West Bank and Gaza, without any sort of strategic doctrine that framed a peaceful resolution, in part because as I said before, the head of their military intelligence, Amos Gilad, originally set a self-fulfilling prophecy by laying out a policy that Arafat and all of Palestine was not interested in negotiation. This is groupthink, systemic insanity, folks. A nice editorial illustrating why the fence is so toxic to the Arab residents of greater Jerusalem.
Speaking of insanity, more about the talk of Palestinian ethnic cleansing emanating from the settler leaders. This piece neatly refutes the view that Israel 'won' the Intifada, because, hell, Israel is still tied down in a hot, exhausting war. Duhhh?
This is very alarming. A top rabbi went off talking about 'rodef,' the supposed religious justification for a Jew to kill another Jew. Such things appeared shortly before a religious fanatic killed Rabin, in other words pretty much direct incitement that is now being threatened against Sharon if he dares pull back from land.
More about Sharon's wedged situation, attempting to retreat from Gaza among domestic political turmoil.
Wow, confusion inside and out. But in a sense the U.S. put them in the position of having to connect with the Kurds by destabilizing Iraq. And now the effort to secure their own gambit will probably cause more tumult inside Iraq, while the symbolic implications of Israeli interrogators are just terrible. Middle East is like that.
I strongly recommend to everyone this article in the Christian Science Monitor on "Mixing Prophecy and Politics," which lays out the concrete connections between the end-of-the-world Christian fundamentalists that support Israel's colonization of the West Bank as a gateway stage to the battle of Armageddon, and their political hooks in the United States.
This whole political-religious framework is also known as 'premillennial dispensationalism,' which means that A) we live with the End Times and 'millennium' in our future and B) God dispenses goodies to good people, that is, he blesses those who bless Israel and curse those who curse Israel, in part. In other words, an interventionalist God, the type who would, as Jerry Falwell described it, punish the U.S. directly via Sept. 11. The problem with this kind of thinking, as the article makes clear, is that people who are thinking 'eschatologically' sometimes act to make their prophecies self-fulfilling, by financially supporting West Bank settlements, for example. In turn, this kind of garbage could easily incite World War III if clear-thinking politicians don't intercede. But of course this is Bush we are talking about, and he implies all the time that God intended Sept. 11 as some kind of avenging task generator. As an atheist, all this stuff scares the hell out of me, for reasons I hope are obvious. I think about it a great deal.
If you ever wanted to hear what a right-wing peacenik does when he collides with flashy left-wingers reading poetry, read the very amusing latest from Justin Raimondo. He also addressed the Hersh and BBC reports about the Israelis, leading round to his usual thesis that Israel was the only country that really stood to benefit from the war on Iraq.
I will say again that I always take Raimondo with more than a grain of salt, but has he been proven wrong thus far?
In an effort at damage control, the Israel lobby is making a concerted effort to smear whomever states the obvious: a great deal of the "intelligence" used to lie us into war came directly from Tel Aviv and was "stovepiped" into the White House by neocon White House advisors, and that, in retrospect, this war has been to the strategic advantage of one and only one nation on earth: Israel.If "Israel was never near the top of the list" when it comes to motives for this war, then how is it that Tel Aviv turns out to be the chief beneficiary in so many ways? As the Mossad infiltrates Kurdistan, demands recognition from the Iraqi "government," and even sends its skilled torturers to help the American occupiers subjugate and degrade their Arab charges more effectively, the demonstrable evidence that Israel's most loyal supporters led the way to war is not so easily brushed aside.
A hearty congratulations to Mr. Edwards for landing the job he's been gunning for all along... he's a natural choice for a folksy veepster and clearly has a great deal of support across the country, while perhaps more importantly, he looks just fantastic next to Cheney. I took this photograph, tilted like crazy, when he came to town before the caucuses. There's a whole Edwards photo gallery on the site, check it out.
Ok, ok, some substantial post is actually going to get on this site Wednesday. I have been off to evaluate where I stand in the world, what I ought to believe in (less than ever) and take these summer classes. I have a midterm exam on Thursday, AUUGH!!!! Yet I will deal with it. Much to note, but unpredictability increases as the situation complexifies.
On the Fourth, I peeked into the movie theater next door and took the following glorious pic. The theater was mostly full:
This weekend I decided to see if Fahrenheit 9/11 is downloadable from the Internet. I got it off BitTorrent in about 36 hours, and I did indeed leave my connection open for a while to 'give back' the file seed to the swarm. This essentially proves the film is available to anyone in the world with a sufficient Internet pipe, in Baghdad or otherwise....
Upon downloading (try this link via Suprnova.org if you want it) I found that there are three video files. On a Mac these all play very nicely using the great video program VLC. The main video file is suitable for burning onto a VCD that can play in most modern DVD players, using something like Roxio Toast.
The first video is a statement from Moore at a press conference describing his position on sharing the movie. He said that he was all right with it as long as no one was making profit off his labor. The second video is a short sample showing the recording's quality, a standard feature of these pirated Internet movies. There was also a text file with all the usual movie piracy ring jibba jabba ("POT" is their handle), and of course the film itself, at about 650 MB.
It was somewhat different than the theatrical release, but at least 90% of the final images are intact. (Maybe a little less: the film's edges are rather cropped but the top subtitles are generally visible, and during the wrenching scene with the bereaved Iraqi mother calling God's wrath down on the houses of America, the camera tilts down for the captions)
The section about Ashcroft and the Patriot Act, including his reading of it from the ice cream truck, was gone. The controversially 'slanted' montage of Iraqi children flying kites and other happy stuff isn't there. Instead it cuts roughly from the mechanic dude who says that ya can't trust your friends, right to the exploding government buildings in Baghdad. I was most disappointed that much of the excellent music was gone ("Roof on Fire"), or at a very low level ("Shiny Happy People"). Sadly it's missing such bits as the tense post-airport shutdown music and, in particular, the haunting back-and-forth piano line in the Florida classroom. Instead the sound levels of those clips are higher, which makes some of the Iraq scenes even more jarring. The film's credits are entirely missing after the dedication screen.
If you want the proper, immersive cinematic experience, frequent a real theater like my neighbor the St. Paul Grandview. If you resent giving Mr Moore money, have no theater within 40 miles, want to back up claims for or against the movie, or are planning to write the next great grad student paper on it, live under some repressive or un-Hollywoodified regime overseas, you should probably download this to check out what's going on. You basically have Moore's explicit permission. However, it is not authoritative and not nearly as funny without much of its music.
Well well, it's the holiday weekend and things are crackin around here. I can't find a damn place to park now because Michael Moore's movie opened at the Grandview on Wednesday, and it has been really busy day after day (although I don't think it's been selling out). Most people coming out seem to have enjoyed it, which you've got to expect in a neighborhood like this.
Here is a night shot from the front of the light rail, speeding around past the Metrodome.
I will say more and I'm sorry there haven't been a hell of a lot of postings. It's been a very busy week and I am trying to keep my life on track between a couple classes and a new advertising project. Yummay!