April 2003

April 30, 2003

The Dictator Formerly Known as Saddam Hussein

Dr. Germ	Missile Man
Chemical Ali	Comical Ali

???????

* Probably not an evildoer per se, since W has called him "my man."

April 28, 2003

Veering Towards Geraldo

Honestly, I don't want to turn this pseudo-blog into Judy Miller Watch, but her latest article, "Leading Iraqi Scientist Says He Lied to U.S. Inspectors," really has me scratching my head.

Is 61-year-old Nissar Hindawi, "a leading figure in Iraq's biological warfare program in the '80s," the "silver bullet" she reported on last week? Remember? He's the guy in nondescript clothes and baseball cap who pointed to several spots in the sand where chemical precursors were buried. If so, Miller says he "was not aware of Syrian-Iraqi cooperation on unconventional weapons" -- precisely the opposite of what her original article claimed -- and there is no mention of recent Al Qaeda-Iraqi cooperation, something she also said the "scientist" told her military minders.

If Hindawi is not the "scientist," then WTF is this this article doing in yesterday's Times? Hindawi has only firsthand knowledge of Iraq's biological weapons program -- and alleged lies to U.N. inspectors -- from 1986 to 1989, the a period in which the U.S. was illegally arming Saddam Hussein.

UPDATE: Embedded super-reporter Judith Miller reveals Raiders won 2003 Super Bowl

A respected accountant who is a member of the Sausalito chapter of the Oakland Raiders Fan Club has told a friend who told his cousin who told this reporter that he (the respected accountant) has provided evidence to the National Football League that the Raiders nipped the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the 2003 Super Bowl.

April 25, 2003

Follow Along

• On Monday, April 21, the New York Times publishes an unsourced and unconfirmed front page story by Judith Miller claiming an Iraqi "scientist" -- or some guy in nondescript clothes and a baseball cap -- has told an American military team that Saddam's weapons of mass destruction were destroyed or sent to Syria, and that Iraq was recently cooperating with Al Qaeda. The article raises some eyebrows in the journalistic community, with once source inside the Times calling it a "wacky ass piece," adding that there were "real questions about it and why it was on page 1."
• Miller's wacky ass article is republished in dozens of newspapers and web sites. Rush Limbaugh calls Miller's piece "a big, huge, very important story," focusing on the alleged Al Qaeda-Iraq "cooperation." Hours after Miller's original article makes the rounds, the AP quotes a senior defense official as saying the baseball player's claim of Al Qaeda-Iraq cooperation is "highly skeptical," and that no new discoveries have been made in Iraq that link Saddam to Al Qaeda.
• On Tuesday's NewsHour, Miller upgrades the guy in nondescript clothes and a baseball cap from a "smoking gun" to a "silver bullet," though she has yet to interview him. While wet with excitement, her story remains unconfirmed and unsourced. Critics rightly howl, with one saying Miller "was blowing more smoke than a Ford that has thrown a rod at 80 miles an hour."
• On Thursday, April 24, President Bush speaks at a tank factory in Ohio and suggests Iraq's WMD may have already been destroyed. Afterward, the Associated Press reports: "A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Bush's remarks were based on information from at least one Iraqi scientist who has led coalition forces to materials used in the production of weapons of mass destruction and who has said some weapons were destroyed before the war, others perhaps afterward."

Rumsfeld: Not Free To Make That Mistake

April 11, 2003
... freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes ...

April 24, 2003
... if you are suggesting how would we feel about an Iranian type government, with a few clerics running everything in the country. The answer is, that ain't gonna happen ...

April 24, 2003

More On Miller

While the New York Times' Judith Miller continues to file unconfirmed, weakly sourced dispatches, now buried by the Times, that increasingly signal the decline and fall of American journalism, she's likely blissfully unaware of the hammering she's taking back home, most effectively at the hands of Slate's Jack Shafer:

Miller retreats from the candor of her NewsHour discussion with another piece in today's New York Times: "Focus Shifts From Weapons to the People Behind Them" (April 23). If the April 21 story was about "the most important discovery to date in the hunt for illegal weapons," today's story is about reducing the inflated expectations created by that scoop—and never mind that cheerleading NewsHour proclamation that a "silver bullet" has been found.

Miller quotes an unnamed MET Alpha source who says the "paradigm has shifted" in the search for weapons of mass destruction. At first, the United States was trying to locate the vast stores of WMD that were described in Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation before the U.N. Security Council. Finding none in 75 of the 150 suspected sites, it pared back its search to WMD precursors. Now, says the MET Alpha source, the investigators are concentrating on finding scientists who worked on WMD programs. She writes:

Based on what the Iraqi scientist had said about weapons being destroyed or stocks being hidden, military experts said they now believed they might not find large caches of illicit chemicals or biological agents, at least not in Iraq.

Paradigm shift, my ass! Powell's intelligence report insisted there were tons of WMD and now the military—and Miller—are preparing us for their complete absence. That's what I call the most important discovery to date in the hunt for illegal weapons!

We can assume today's dispatch wasn't reviewed by military censors because Miller is silent on that score. But we can also safely assume Miller has been told a lot more than she's writing and is actively self-censoring. What isn't she telling us? That some Iraqi Dr. Evil found a way to convert George Foreman grills into WMD machines that transmogrify Bisquick and toluene into sarin, and the ubiquity of this technology makes the Iraqi WMD program invisible to military investigators?

Read the whole story.

April 23, 2003

A Person, an Iraqi Individual, a Scientist

Following up on Monday's very odd front page bombshell, the New York Times' Judith Miller inches further out on a limb, telling the NewsHour's Ray Suarez that the yet-unnamed Iraqi "scientist" isn't just a smoking gun, but a silver bullet.

It's pretty clear from her talk with Suarez that she's yet to interview the scientist -- or as she says, "a person, an Iraqi individual, a scientist, as we've called him" -- and can still probably only recognize him from 100 paces as a guy in "nondescript clothes and a baseball cap."

For his part, Suarez drops the ball big-time and fails to ask Miller about the scientist's claim, reported in her original article, that Iraq was recently "cooperating with al Qaeda." That juicy tidbit has been picked up by Rush Limbaugh and broadcast to millions of head nodders as proof of an al Qaeda-Iraq connection, but a follow-up AP story said the Pentagon was "highly skeptical" of the scientist's claim, and that "no new discoveries have been made in Iraq that link Saddam to al Qaeda."

So, to recap, the mysterious scientist whose claims about al Qaeda-Iraq cooperation are dismissed by the Pentagon -- the guys who want to create their own intelligence unit to more easily make these kinds of connections -- is a "silver bullet" who has the goods on Saddam's deceit and deception? Maybe. Or he could just be some guy in nondescript clothes and a baseball cap interested in the $200,000 reward.

UPDATE: For a stinging critique of the Miller-Suarez interview, see what Sam Hamod has to say. "... tonight, on the NewsHour, Ray Suarez allowed Judith Miller of the NY Times to go on and on and on and on with speculation, exaggeration, hyperbole and just plain nonsense about the "silver bullet" (an Iraqi scientist) who told the American troops all about Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction."

April 21, 2003

Who Will Rule?

Over the weekend I planned on writing a half-assed, half-baked, half-correct roundup of the Shiite clerics emerging to fill Iraq's power vacuum, but the Daily Telegraph did it on Sunday, in a piece that's required reading on the question of "Who will rule Iraq?"

It's becoming obvious that just about anyone associated with Chalabi's INC is more effective at attracting a hail of gunfire than popular support, and at least some Iraqis don't seem too hot on American-backed clerics, preferring instead to hack them to pieces.

And what's America's tolerance for Iraq turning into an Islamic state based on sharia law, one that forbids television, dominoes, and women wearing makeup? Sorry, dumb question.

Given the unpleasant prospect of Iraq becoming Iran Lite, is it conceivable that the U.S. turn to a "reformed" group of Ba'athists -- some of whom have apparently regained control in Baghdad -- to make the oil pump on time?

April 19, 2003

Donald Spills The Jellybeans

Donald H. Rumsfeld, referencing the fabled Iraqi WMDs, doesn't "think we'll discover anything", because, "It is not like a treasure hunt where you just run around looking everywhere, hoping you find something." (Dubya will surely become cross upon learning of this piss-poor display of Easter spirit!) He says that we'll instead "discover people who will tell us where to go find it."

Right, well, this squares nicely with the Administration's repeated pre-war assertions that U.S. intelligence had proven (to the Administration, if not to its own agents, nor to anybody else) that Saddam had "failed to disarm" -- thus the critically urgent need to for the second time in a decade blast the holy fucking shit out of the country's beleaguered millions.

U.S. Brig. General Vincent Brooks insists that, "We remain convinced that there are weapons of mass destruction inside Iraq and we remain unwavering about that." But he doesn't say why they remain convinced. It must be based on some evidence, right? If so, then, what is the evidence, and where are the weapons? Maybe the Bush Administration is now tangling its feet in the inverse of its, "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" axiom. Existence of evidence is not evidence of existence, apparently.

It is, in fact, now fairly widely assumed that WMD will not be found in Iraq unless planted there by the United States. Given that the U.S. is unwilling to allow the UN inspectors back into the country, preferring its own "more muscular" inspections, one could hardly be blamed for this suspicion. But here's a question for scientist-types. Can the U.S. really hope to get away with planting weapons? If a few weapons are uncovered in the absence of an active programme or facilities, won't it be pretty obvious that something isn't quite adding up? And even if Saddam had air-mailed his entire arsenal to Syria, evidence of an ongoing programme capable of producing such an arsenal would stick out like a sore thumb, yes?

While it's an issue this author has discussed before now, it may be worth noting that expression of the glaringly obvious logical corollary to the widespread assumption that the "legitimacy" of the war could only be retroactively "repudiated" (that'll make the hurt go away) by a failure to unearth an Iraqi weapons programme -- viz., a devastating military attack and occupation of the United States would be a legitimate avenue for dealing with its weapons programmes -- has not yet found purchase in the mainstream media.

April 17, 2003

'Why's he always call me "Meat"? I'm the guy driving a Porsche.'

Since the Baseball Hall of Fame cancelled a 15th anniversary celebration of the film Bull Durham because of his antiwar criticism, Tim Robbins has been making the rounds, speaking Tuesday at the National Press Club, yesterday on Democracy Now!, and even getting a minute last night on Jennings' World News Tonight.

Robbins is probably best known for his roles in Bull Durham and Shawshank Redemption, but his best work is the script he penned for Bob Roberts (1992), the story of a right-wing folk singer running for U.S. Senate. Roberts' opponent is Senator Brickley Paiste (Gore Vidal), a Ted Kennedy-esqe character with some timeless insights on the importance of enemies:

It's the "enemy of the month" club again. Saddam Hussein, I believe, what is he, the most evil man, what did the president say, since Adolph Hitler? Before that there was Noriega, he was the most evil man since Fu Man Chu. And there was Quadaffi, and there was Castro, and these figures are thrown out through the media and made into great monsters. Why? Because we must justify the military budget. In order to do that you must have enemies. So we blow up these local thugs into these huge Hitler-like figures and pretend it's World War II all over again.

Mo Media

I haven't followed much of the hubbub over Eason Jordan's op-ed in last Friday's Times, but he's been getting airtime this week taking calls (Real Video | 24:49) on CSPAN, and on PBS calmly dismantling The New Republic's Franklin Foer, author of the "devastating" Wall Street Journal op-ed critical of CNN's actions in Iraq.

April 16, 2003

False Positives

Last week when the 101st Airborne discovered nerve agents that were pesticides, Brig. Gen. Benjamin Freakly warned that the tests "sometimes show false positives."

Just like a certain general.

On Monday, Freakly, convinced his boys found mobile chem-bio labs, did a remarkably good Ari Fleisher impersonation, declaring "Initial reports indicate that this is clearly a case of denial and deception on the part of the Iraqi government."

The next day, after the equipment was inspected by experts -- that is, people who actually know something about chem-bio labs -- it was determined the discovery "does not appear to be weapons of mass destruction."

April 15, 2003

The Second-Best Democracy Money Can Buy

Yesterday Greg Palast spent a few minutes with Democracy Now's Amy Goodman and gave a preview of a BBC investigation into the less-publicized winners of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The highlights:

• Hilary Rosen, hated chairman and CEO of the hated Recording Industry Association of America, is rewriting Iraq's intellectual property laws.
• Grover Norquist, connected lobbyist for American Express and Microsoft, is helping rewrite Iraq's tax laws.
• Bob Zoellick, U.S. trade representative and former advisor to Enron, wants to rewrite Iraq's trade laws to make Iraq a free trade zone.
• Barbara Bodine, ambassador to Yemen, who some say blocked the late John O'Neill's investigation into al Qaeda, will be one of Iraq's ruling triumvirate.

April 12, 2003

The Price Is Still Worth It

Madeleine Albright famously laid down the "acceptability" gauntlet in 1996 when she said on 60 Minutes, of the 500,000 Iraqi children killed to that point in time by sanctions that, "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price -- we think the price is worth it."

While Albright's sadism may be untoppable, the mind still boggles at Tony Blair's reaction to a Baghdad marketplace massacre: "We have always accepted that there will be some very regrettable civilian casualties."

What sort of depraved mind could devise such an argument, and what sort of depraved culture could accept it without comment? Is there not one commentator in the mainstream media able to point up that since Iraqis are the ones enduring the suffering, the acceptable level of suffering is theirs to determine, not ours?

An indication of the degree to which the mindset has suffused the culture could be gleaned the morning following V-S day, as a Seattle-based talk show emanating since war's inception from Doha interviewed a Qatari student strongly opposed to the war. Caller after caller regally scolded him that since the military action had freed the Iraqi people (or, alternatively, that Saddam's regime would have killed more people if left in power), then the number of concomitant civilian casualties was hunky dory. (It goes without saying that we're morally obligated to kill as many Iraqi soldiers as possible.)

No doubt the callers -- unlike Blair and Albright -- were well-intentioned, and certainly believed the pretexts. But even allowing for this, and even were both or either true (clearly not the case), we still can't escape the underlying truism evinced by the callers: niggers shan't be allowed to determine their own fates.

April 11, 2003

How Many McVeighs

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak claimed last week that the U.S. war in Iraq would create "100 bin Ladens".

American soldiers are making claims of their own: "I say we just nuke this place and make it into a parking lot," and, "I didn't know who was there, and I didn't really care. The job was to go put the bombs on target and worry about that later," and, "We had a great day. We killed a lot of people," and, "The Iraqis are sick people, and we are the chemotherapy," and, "I'm Sorry. But the chick was in the way," and, "We dropped a few civilians. But what do you do?"

Couple this destroy-anything-in-your-path inculcation with slashing of veterans' benefits (and otherwise shitty treatment of returned vets) and a stagnating economy, and it sounds like the war will in the end create some more McVeighs as well.

April 10, 2003

Doh!

Apparently an al-Jazeera news anchor and the entire Arab world weren't the only ones shocked at the sight of a zealous -- and temporarily insane -- marine unfurl the Stars and Stripes over the pre-decapitated head of Saddam Hussein. There were "gasps" at the Pentagon and in Doha, Qatar "even U.S. troops watching the screen seemed upset at seeing the use of the U.S. flag."

Rather than unnecessarily inflame people's passions and suspicions, imagine the insanely huge PR coup for The Coalition had Cpl. Edward Chin followed orders, kept Old Glory in his pocket, and hung only the Iraqi flag.

UPDATE: Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog alerts us to today's front page of Rupert Murdoch's New York Post:

April 08, 2003

Based on a True Story

A new reality game from Rockstar Games! (Shhhh. Don't tell Lieberman!)

STEAL forklifts, Bobcats®, and donkeys. Gain experience and try for SUVs. But watch out for the hail of bullets!

LOOT houses, hotels, and hospitals. Bonus points for stealing a school's air conditioners!

MASSIVE multiplayer! Join a clan and steal shit en masse!

TRADE corrugated tin and sofas for food, water, and medicine. Don't let cholera keep you sidelined!

Order now!

April 07, 2003

Noted Without Comment

Weekend Poll #1
In a Washington Post poll, 69 percent of interviewees said that going to war with Iraq was the right thing to do even if the United States fails to turn up biological or chemical weapons, up from 53 percent in a survey taken the day after the war started.

Weekend Poll #2
A Los Angeles Times poll suggests fairly strong support for attacks on Syria (42%) and Iran (50%).

and ...

Nearly 80% accept that Hussein has "close ties" to Al Qaeda and 60% say they believe Saddam bears at least some responsibility for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Thoughts?

April 04, 2003

That Explains It

A "highly experienced" "high ranking" American officer explains that Baghdad will not fall in just a few days' time (as originally predicted) because, "There is a big cultural difference between the U.S. and the Arab World. That makes it hard."

In other words, if the shoe were on the other foot -- if a massive and technologically superior invading armada came down from Mars with the stated goal of overthrowing the Bush Administration and "liberating" the American people, in the process raining death and destruction upon us day after day after day, poisoning the continent with radioactive weapons, not allowing any other country (or planet) to try to aid us, creating absolute chaos, littering the soil with unexploded ordnance, wiping out civilian infrastructure, cutting off an existing civilian aid programme, all while "getting the message across to educated people"; then, the rest of us -- the uneducated -- would welcome the Martians with open arms.

Or if we didn't do, it would be owing to the "cultural difference", and to the fact that the uneducated among us "want to be moved by emotion", and to Ashcroft's "very powerful enforcement and repression system". Got it.

Amazingly, this officer's testimonial is a dissenting view. The prevailing view is that Iraqi hostility is "receding day by day" and that the invading troops are more and more being given a "warm welcome".

April 02, 2003

'Awe, Shocks.'

It's far too early to call this war, or the future voting of the journalists, but photographer John Moore has to be an early candidate for a Pulitzer. What's all-the-more poignant about this photograph, for me, is the fact that I spent the morning replying to yet another jackass who sent me an "Ooh-Rah!" e-mail with a patriotic slur against protesters and Arabs.

People: this shit isn't even funny during peace. It's too bad -- or, perhaps, lucky -- that I sent it before spending the afternoon on the radio with an Iraqi conscript from the first Gulf War. If it's shocking to the soldiers in battle to see a few patchouli wearing hippies carrying a peace symbol or a "BUCK FUSH" sign around campus, it'll just plain fuck 'em up forever to imply that they should do anything but cry after going through this hell of industrialized slaughter.

So let's be honest about the horror of war, admit that young Marines are going to kill people they really, dreadfully, wish they hadn't, and get this thing over as soon as possible. As for those who continue to talk shit like, "Iraq is the boy's war; Iran is the man's war," why don't you ask the three young Marines in this photo -- I'm sure they've got some very interesting questions for you.

Editor's Note: Joel Turnipseed, known here as minnesotaj, is a Gulf War 1.0 veteran and author of Baghdad Express.

April 01, 2003

Hearts and Minds

Overshadowed by the gruesome scene of liberation on Highway 9 was the coalition's continuing effort to win Iraqi hearts and minds.

Just a short time after 25mm rounds freed 10 Iraqis, and shocked and awed a surviving mom into holding the mangled bodies of her two children long after the incident, another group of 10 Iraqis approached the checkpoint, waving white flags.

Seven children, an old man, a woman, and boy in his teens were initially ordered by Army Capt. Ronny Johnson to "go away." When told that the family had their house blown up and were trying to reach the home of relatives in a safer area, Capt. Johnson reconsidered, and let them pass.