May 2003

May 29, 2003

I Only Joined Up for the College Money

Ages ago, in the pre-Rational Enquirer days, the old newslog occasionally linked to the killer remixed propaganda posters by Micah Wright, who I thought was just some smartass kid with mad Photoshop skillz. Turns out Mr. Wright is a former Army Ranger.

Yesterday he put on a good interview with Democracy Now! (Real Audio | 16:00), to talk about his posters and his experiences as a Ranger, which included witnessing the carnage America unleashed on Panama in 1989.

Mr. Wright's poster collection is now available in a book entitled You Back the Attack, We'll Bomb Who We Want. Just $11.17! Add to cart.

May 27, 2003

Media Whore

For those 1/2 dozen or so people interested in the Judy Miller Watch segment of this site, go read Howard Kurtz's Media Notes column. Miller's bullshit stories from Iraq are starting to make sense.

The Times should continue suspending Pulitzer Prize winning writers.

[link via Cursor]

May 20, 2003

The Envelope, Please

The award for most overlooked major news story of recent memory goes to the Christian Science Monitor's smash-up expose of the radioactive legacy left by the United States' "Depleted" Uranium munitions.

Just a few days after the Pentagon insisted, of the DU remains, that, "There is not really any danger, at least that we know about, for the people of Iraq," and that, "If somebody needs to go into a tank that's been hit with depleted uranium, a dust mask, a handkerchief is adequate to protect them -- washing their hands afterward;" the Monitor found "significant levels of radioactive contamination from the US battle for Baghdad," even while it "saw only one site where US troops had put up handwritten warnings in Arabic for Iraqis to stay away."

The story paints a grim picture of the environmental and public health horrors awaiting the brave people of Iraq (as well as "coalition" forces), and should have landed on the front page of every major paper in the country.

Weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, you ask? The Monitor has found the smoking gun, all right. Yet four days later, a search of Google News finds that only Common Dreams has picked up the story.

Gotta love that free press...

The other nominees? How about Martin Luther King III's and Greg Palast's "Jim Crow Revived In Cyberspace", the LA Times' survey of hospitals finding that the war killed at least 1,700 civilians in Baghdad alone (which dovetails with the jump of Iraq Body Count's running total to over 4,000), and the UN's recent warnings that Iraqi agriculture is "on the brink of collapse" and that more than twice as many children -- to 300,000 -- as before the invasion "face death from acute malnutrition".

May 16, 2003

Still A Saddamite

Donald H. Rumsfeld, whose ties to the Saddam regime he now purports to have despised have been well documented, and who was earlier this year proselytising for Saddam to be granted immunity from prosecution for the crimes in which he, Donald H., was complicit; has explained away Iraqi anarchy by surmising that, "Every jail in that country was emptied, so on the street are looters, hooligans, and bad people. They have to be rounded up and put back in," and promising that, "The forces there will be using muscle."

So while Human Rights Watch's 2002 country report noted the regime's "arbitrary arrest of suspected political opponents and members of their families" and Amnesty International is tacitly accusing the Bush and Blair Administrations of, "A failure to treat" the issue of "disappeared" victims of Saddam's regime "properly and as a matter of urgency"; Donald H. -- rather than addressing the dearth of electricity, food, potable water, medicine, petrol (!), basic services, police, and paid employment (from whence the anarchy has clearly sprung) -- is spouting off about the need for a good old-fashioned "round up".

It isn't, surely, any wonder that the Bush Administration would be neglecting the task of making a full accounting of Saddam's crimes -- we were, after all, fully in support of those crimes. But at least it looks as though the Bush Administration is keeping its promise to model Iraqi democracy after American democracy: all niggers into the slammer.

May 14, 2003

Voodoo Foreign Policy

In the aftermath of Monday's Saudi bombing, Vice President Dick Cheney launched his own preemptive strike against the "Roadmap for Peace," and set the stage for the next attack in the "War on Terror":

The only way to deal with this threat ultimately is to destroy it. There's no treaty can solve this problem. There's no peace agreement, no policy of containment or deterrence that works to deal with this threat. We have to go find the terrorists.

While this approach may be good at winning elections, it's lousy at actually reducing terrorism. In the 20 months since 9/11 we've fought two wars, spent tens of billions of dollars, dropped tens of thousands of bombs, killed thousands of civilians and yet Al Qaeda is "as great of a threat as it was before September 11." (And the occupation of Iraq is just getting started!) Fighting a War on Terror from the supply side, as Cheney is advocating, is as hopeless as fighting, say, a War on Drugs from the supply side. Just like you can't kill all the poppies, you can't kill all the terrorists. Just ask the Israelis.

What's the solution? At the risk of being labeled some kind of anarchist loon for quoting Chomsky, he suggests a stark choice in a piece written at the outset of the war on Iraq:

There are two ways for Washington to respond to the threats engendered by its actions and startling proclamations. One way is to try to alleviate the threats by paying some attention to legitimate grievances, and by agreeing to become a civilized member of a world community, with some respect for world order and its institutions. The other way is to construct even more awesome engines of destruction and domination, so that any perceived challenge, however remote, can be crushed – provoking new and greater challenges.

Chomsky? Or Cheney?

May 05, 2003

Has Michael Isikoff Spilled the Beans?

On December 11, 2002 Senator Bob Graham, Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, appeared on the News Hour and told interviewer Gwen Ifill that some of the 9/11 terrorists were assisted by a sovereign foreign government.

Ifill's eyes nearly popped out of her head, but Graham's shocking claim was roundly ignored by the media, and the 10-or-so viewers watching that night were left wondering, "Who is it?" As The Memory Hole points out:

It obviously wasn't any nation that the US government hates and would love to demonize. If it had been Iraq, for example, the report would not have been classified; it would've been personally faxed by Donald Rumsfeld to every reporter in the nation. No, the one or more facilitators of 9/11 were obviously allies, friendly countries, nations that the US doesn't want to alienate.

Fast forward six months. Newsweek's Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball write an article entitled "The Secrets of September 11" that draws quite a lot of attention, and Isikoff makes the rounds to discuss the piece, including an interview on Democracy Now!. Isikoff:

There is also a lot else in the (classified) report, including information about the role of suspected Saudi intelligence agents and Saudi diplomats in providing support, whether advertent or inadvertent for the hijackers, and the role of Saudi financing for the operations of September 11th. That, of course, is also diplomatically enormously sensitive for the administration which sees Saudi Arabia as a key ally for the war on Iraq ...

Shooting Private Lynch

On the heels of The Times' story that debunks the myth of Jessica Lynch's rescue as told by the U.S. military, the Toronto Star writes that Iraqi doctors tried to give Jessica back to the Americans, but the ambulance she was traveling in was shot at as it approached an American checkpoint. Luckily for Hollywood, Lynch apparently has amnesia.

(Hat tip: Steve)

May 01, 2003

OK, So Maybe This Is 'Judith Miller Watch'

Today the New York Times publishes a somewhat shocking (well, maybe not so shocking) article that says Wolfowitz pal Ahmad Chalabi is concerned about how the U.S. is turning to senior Baath Party officials to run Iraq's "transitional" government. Yesterday Chalabi made the wild claim that Iraqi intelligence has "completely infiltrated" Al-Jazeera, but he may have a point on this one: Garner has met with director generals from Hussein's ministries, and the INC claims the CIA has retained Saad Janabi -- former assistant to Saddam's dead son-in-law-weapons-programs-head Hussein Kamel -- as a "key advisor."

What's most interesting about the article isn't the content, but the author: Judy Miller.

Rather than report on the ho-hum power struggle for leadership of Iraq's "transitional" government, shouldn't she be embedded with Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha, Beta, or Omega, ready to break the next big WMD story?

Or has that story gone cold?

It's been 11 days since the Times published Miller's bombshell page 1 article, and the only article resembling a follow-up was the story on former biological warfare scientist Nissar Hindawi, who is looking more and more like Miller's "silver bullet."

But Hindawi isn't even a smoking pop gun.

Let's review. Miller's original article made three bombshell claims. The Iraqi "scientist":

• witnessed the burying and destroying of precursors and other sensitive material in the lead-up to the war,
• said Iraq secretly sent unconventional weapons and technology to Syria, and
• said Iraq was recently cooperating with Al Qaeda.

If Nissar Hindawi is Miller's "silver bullet," then there's some explaining to do. Hindawi:

• says "they destroyed some" liquid anthrax and botulinum toxin but only has firsthand knowledge of Iraq's biological weapons program from 1986 to 1989,
• says he was not aware of Syrian-Iraqi cooperation on unconventional weapons, and
• makes no mention of recent Al Qaeda-Iraq cooperation.

Of course, there could be more to the story (perhaps another bombshell to be published in Monday's Times?) but Miller's original article -- which has been called the biggest story of the war -- is looking like what the early critics of her reporting suspected it as: complete and utter bullshit.