Nasty Letters To Crooked Politicians

As we enter a new era of politics, we hope to see that Obama has the courage to fight the policies that Progressives hate. Will he have the fortitude to turn the economic future of America to help the working man? Or will he turn out to be just a pawn of big money, as he seems to be right now.

Saturday, November 29, 2003

Bush Flashes Our Troops the Bird

Bush's PR stunt in Baghdad underscores US crisis

...Political aides such as Karl Rove engineered the public relations stunt, hoping the televised images of cheering troops and the president serving out turkey dinners would boost Bush’s standing in the polls. But the circumstances of the trip, with Bush stealing in and out of Baghdad like a thief in the night, only demonstrate the fragility of the US grip on the occupied country.

Bush told his audience of 600 soldiers at Baghdad International Airport that his government would not “retreat before a band of thugs and assassins.” But the security measures taken for the trip suggest that the armed opposition to US control of Iraq is far more substantial than a handful of terrorists or Saddam Hussein loyalists.

Air Force One flew into Baghdad under conditions of secrecy so total that air traffic controllers at the airport did not know the identity of the plane. Bush was taken from his ranch in Crawford, Texas in an unmarked car, and Air Force One flew under a false call signal, with its lights off and escorted by US jet fighters. Bush spent 27 hours in the air in order to spend only two-and-a-half hours on the ground in Iraq....Link...

California Governor Schwarzenegger: Another Rightie HIding behind his Leftie Wifes Panties

California Governor Schwarzenegger launches right-wing agenda

...The character of Schwarzenegger’s administration was foreshadowed by the manner in which he gained office. He obtained the governorship through an anti-democratic effort launched by right-wing Republicans to remove Davis. The recall effort, which was financed by Republican multi-millionaire Darrell Issa, started only three months after Davis was elected to a second term and barely a month after he had taken office.

Issa and his allies hired canvassers to amass the signatures necessary to get the recall onto the ballot, capitalizing on widespread disgust with Davis’ right-wing policies and disillusionment with the Democratic Party. Schwarzenegger ran a demagogic campaign, portraying himself as a tribune of “the people” rather than a tool of “special interests.” He refused to spell out his program and instead relied on Hollywood-style photo-ops and empty slogans to hide the reactionary character of his political agenda.

Just as it proved incapable of fending off the recall effort, the Democratic Party is proving itself incapable of mounting any opposition to the policies of the Schwarzenegger administration. The Democrats have no alternative social program to offer, since they are themselves beholden to the same corporate interests that stand behind the new Republican administration.

Schwarzenegger’s initial actions as governor and the prostration of Democrats underscore the need for the working class to build a mass political party independent of the two big business parties. These developments vindicate the socialist perspective advanced by John Christopher Burton, the candidate of the Socialist Equality Party in the recall election....Link

Friday, November 28, 2003

War Criminal Visits troops Bearing Bird--THE TURKEY HAS LANDED

Yahoo! News - U.S. Soldier Killed in Iraq Hours After Bush Visit

The Price WE pay for Chimp Photo-ops

Let's see, the "Mission Accomplished" photo op, wherein elChimpo's press people lied and said the USS Abe Lincoln was 500 miles out to sea and they needed a jet to deliver him, when it was only 35 and had to be turned about, burning 5000 gallons of fuel, so as not to reveal the California skyline--that made too much farce, ignorance, and accented the lies, to use in an effort to get elected for the first time. (The Lying Press Whores who reported that President Clinton's haircut stopped air traffic in Washington International didn't even raise an eyebrow about this!)

And the Cap'n Bunnypants outfit elChimpo wore that day has been donated to the Action Comics museum. No photo op there anymore.

The much ballyhooed disaster of elChimpo's England trip, along with 500 heavily armed SWAT, 3 BlackHawk helicopters in the air at all times for three days, and three different bulletproof motorcades (all going in different directions to fool 'terraists') to drive the coward from #10 back to his heavily fortified and nearly destroyed room in the centuries old Buckinham Palace...no, can't use those pictures. Too much chickenhsit cowardice evident there. No handshaking the loving crowds like Clinton. Hell, the English HATE bush and his junta, just as most Americans do.

The Queen wouldn't even look elChimpo in the eye! She hated the little bastard and, like guests that your family arranged and you couldn't escape, she wore a little bell that gave her reason to get away from the court fool and his pretzel wielding wife at every opportunity.

No photo op there. And Tony Blair wouldn't PRAY with elChimpo! What a slap! "We don't do prayer for politics," Blair's press people would say.

So--how 'bout a bold, exciting surprise for the journalists of the whore mongering press in the USA? Put the pantywaist to sleep in AF1, spend $250,000 on fuel, and another $400,000 on security, to fly elChimpo to Baghdad! Wake him up, slip him the Turkey, and then fly him out.

The stunt got the best press coverage from England, with a picture of elChimpo...and the caption: THE TURKEY HAS LANDED!

ROFLMAO!

Thursday, November 27, 2003

Michael Moore Asks Chimp_bastard if he is the 9-11 killer

Time To Realize that the One Who Profited from 9-11 is George W. Bush. The Bastard_prince and criminal unelected junta must be stopped.

Making a case for 9/11 skepticism

...Official reports note that the engineering of the World Trade Center was unique in the history of American architecture. Toward the centre in both towers supports were concentrated and physical stress directed. The burning jet fuel melted the steel girders at the centre of each tower, officials claim, so that all it took was for one floor close to the point of impact to collapse onto the floor below it, in order to set off a chain reaction of smooth and methodical implosion...

Link to whole, deadly serious commentary...America is under siege from within. Make no mistake...it is do or die for our democracy, and Bush_junta must die.

Wednesday, November 26, 2003

What Has America Come To Be? What Horrors Can Chimp_junta Deliver That Haven't Been Yet Announced? Read This and Cringe...

The New York Times: a proposal for ethnic cleansing in Iraq

By Bill Vann
26 November 2003

With popular resistance mounting to its military occupation of Iraq, the Bush administration is casting about in increasing desperation for a new strategy to salvage the principal aims of its war—the seizure of oil resources and the establishment of a US client regime in a strategically vital region.

While plans have been announced for Washington to erect a “sovereign” Iraqi regime by the middle of next year, this hollow exercise holds little prospect for ending a bitter conflict that is claiming the lives of American soldiers daily and creating growing political unrest in the US itself.

Enter the New York Times with a modest proposal for a bloodbath. It advances what it terms a “three-state solution,” based on the partition of Iraq along ethnic and religious lines.

The proposal appeared in a November 25 column by Leslie Gelb, a former editor and senior columnist for the Times. Gelb calls for dividing Iraq between the “Kurds in the north, Sunnis in the center and Shiites in the south.”

He continues: “Almost immediately, this would allow America to put most of its money and troops where they would do the most good quickly—with the Kurds and Shiites. The United States could extricate most of its forces from the so-called Sunni Triangle, north and west of Baghdad, largely freeing American forces from fighting a costly war they might not win. American officials could then wait for the troublesome and domineering Sunnis, without oil or oil revenues, to moderate their ambitions or suffer the consequences.”

Gelb’s proposal is a clear manifestation of another triangle—a reactionary nexus between the US State Department, Israeli intelligence and the editorial board of the New York Times.

Until recently, Gelb headed the Council on Foreign Affairs, the influential Washington think tank that provides a forum for corporate executives, CIA and State Department officials, and a select group of establishment journalists and academics with intimate ties to these camps. Gelb himself followed stints at the Pentagon and the State Department with his position as columnist and editor at the Times. There is no doubt that his piece on Iraq gives voice to policies that are under active consideration within the top levels of the US government.

The obvious attraction for Washington in the partition proposal advanced by Gelb is that by dismembering Iraq it would allow the deployment of US troops in the areas that are of the greatest strategic concern: the oilfields in the predominantly Shiite south and the largely Kurdish north, while the Sunni population, which has dominated Iraqi political life since the days of Ottoman rule and has been the most hostile to the US occupation, would be left stranded in an isolated mini-state stripped of its resources.

Just as Iraq’s boundaries were artificially drawn by the British after World War I to further colonial ambitions and establish control over oil reserves, so, according to Gelb’s thesis, they can be redrawn by the region’s new US imperialist master to further similar aims.

It is not only in Washington, however, that this proposal finds support. The partition of Iraq has long been a strategic objective of the Israeli regime. An article that appeared in the World Zionist Organization’s publication Kivunim in 1982, on the eve of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and in the midst of the Iran-Iraq war, spelled this out. Written by Oded Yinon, an official in the Israeli foreign ministry, the article was entitled, “A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s.” It stated, in part:

“Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel’s targets. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel. An Iraqi-Iranian war will tear Iraq apart and cause its downfall at home even before it is able to organize a struggle on a wide front against us. Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon. In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible. So, three (or more) states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, and Shiite areas in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north. It is possible that the present Iranian-Iraqi confrontation will deepen this polarization.”

Israel actively sought to promote this agenda, offering covert support both to the Khomeini regime in Iran and the Kurdish separatist movements in Iraq itself.

Washington had previously opposed such a partition on the grounds that it would destabilize the entire region and remove a strategic counterbalance to Iran, which in the wake of the 1979 revolution was seen as the greater threat to US interests. Clearly, however, if the US is planning to maintain permanent military bases on Iraqi soil and preparing further wars in the region, these calculations have changed.

What is most breathtaking about Gelb’s proposal is its utter indifference to the welfare of the Iraqi population, not to mention international law.

He warns that the Sunni population in central Iraq “might punish the substantial minorities” left out of the ethnic states to be created in the north and south. “These minorities must have the time and the wherewithal to organize and make their deals, or go either north or south,” he writes. “This would be a messy and dangerous enterprise, but the United States would and should pay for the population movements and protect the process with force.”

What is proposed here is the uprooting of masses of people and the igniting of an ethnic bloodbath the likes of which has not been seen since the British partition of India 55 years ago, when a million Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs were slaughtered and some 14 million people were driven from their homes.

Baghdad’s largest neighborhood, Sadr City, a sprawling slum named after a Shiite leader killed under the Saddam Hussein regime, is home to some 2 million residents, most of them Shiites. These impoverished masses, the vast majority of whom have never lived anywhere else, are supposed to “make their deals” or move south. The same presumably holds true for the substantial Assyrian and Turkoman populations in the north.

It should be recalled that in the mid-1990s Gelb, together with Times columnist Anthony Lewis, was one of the principal media advocates for US intervention in the Balkans, demanding that Washington punish the Serbs for “ethnic cleansing.” Now it is precisely such a bloody process that Gelb advocates for Iraq.

Indeed, Gelb cites the dismemberment of the Yugoslav federation along ethno-nationalist lines beginning in 1991 as a “hopeful precedent” for what his plan envisions in Iraq. The column makes clear once again that—the human rights propaganda used to justify the 1999 US/NATO attack on Serbia notwithstanding—the attitude of US policy makers towards ethnic cleansing is quite flexible. It depends upon who is doing it and whether it furthers Washington’s strategic interests.

“Overwhelming force was the best chance for keeping Yugoslavia whole and even that failed in the end,” Gelb writes. “Meantime, the costs of preventing the natural states from emerging had been terrible.”

Here the former official of the Pentagon/State Department and Times editor offers a false and self-serving explanation for Yugoslavia’s disintegration, while providing a glimpse of the reactionary conceptions underlying what Washington depicts as a crusade for democracy in Iraq. Yugoslavia’s breakup was not the triumph of “natural states” against “overwhelming force.” It was the byproduct of economic “shock therapy” policies imposed by the International Monetary Fund and other world financial institutions that led to the collapse of the country’s national economy and the destruction of the jobs and living standards of masses of working people.

In an attempt to divert the resulting social unrest, Stalinist bureaucrats and communalist demagogues fomented nationalist sentiments while seeking patrons among the major powers. The principal aim of Washington and the other imperialist powers became the transformation of the splintered territories of the former Yugoslavia into a collection of semi-colonies.

A carve-up of Iraq will similarly be a process imposed by US imperialism against the interests of all Iraqi people, rather than any realization of pent-up demands for ethnic “self-determination.”

The idea that Iraq is no more than a collection of “natural states” composed of different ethnic groups yearning to live separately is not only backward but also, from the standpoint of US policy in the region, wholly inconsistent.

If Washington were truly to embrace this conception of “natural,” i.e., ethnic states, then it could not but welcome the unification of the Kurdish people, presently divided by the borders separating Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria. Likewise, it would have to support the unification of the Shiites of southern Iraq with their coreligionists in neighboring Iran, not to mention eastern Saudi Arabia, in one contiguous state. But, in fact, the Bush administration has made it clear it is prepared to use overwhelming military force against anyone daring to attempt such a “natural” form of statecraft.

The proposal to dismember Iraq along ethnic lines is a stark expression of the predatory character of the US intervention. Notwithstanding the Bush administration’s rhetoric about “liberating” Iraq and turning it into a “beacon of democracy” for the Middle East, the conceptions advanced by Gelb demonstrate that Washington has no answers to the complex historical and political problems posed in Iraq. Its only aim is to exploit existing divisions to further the profit interests of the oil conglomerates and other US-based corporations and banks.

An ethnic carve-up of Iraq would have far-reaching implications throughout the Middle East, where the boundaries of none of the existing states are a “natural” reflection of ethnic identity, but rather are the legacy of the previous division of the region between British and French imperialism. Any number of these states could also be dismembered, and proposals already exist to do just that. Within the civilian leadership in the Pentagon, for example, there has been discussion of the US fostering a breakaway Shiite “Muslim republic of east Arabia,” as a means of prying loose the vast oil reserves of Saudi Arabia from the crumbling monarchy.

Such policies have an attraction for the Israeli regime that goes well beyond its security concerns and regional ambitions. The principle that borders should be drawn according to ethnic and religious identity finds direct expression in the demand by elements within Israel’s right-wing Likud government for a policy of “transfer,” i.e., the forced expulsion of the Palestinian population from both the occupied territories and Israel’s pre-1967 borders so as to realize the exclusively Jewish character of the Zionist state. Should the US begin massive population transfers in Iraq, the Israelis could well be emboldened to follow suit.

For its part, the New York Times’ publication of its former editor’s recommendation to the Bush administration for the carve-up of Iraq represents the continuation of its promotion and justification of the illegal war, as well as its long-standing defense of Israeli interests. With the Gelb column, however, the newspaper has abandoned its pretense of liberal humanitarianism to openly promote a war crime of world-historic proportions.

Link to this insightful, extraordinary article...

Chimp_junta, GOP Bastards Rig Vote to Pass Medicare bill--This is Greed. This is Despicable. Your Parents, Grandparents, and Grandchildren Suffer

Bush, House Republicans rig vote to pass Medicare bill

By Shannon Jones
26 November 2003

Flouting parliamentary norms and democratic procedures, the Bush White House and Republican leadership of the House of Representatives rammed through passage of the Republican Medicare bill in the early morning hours of Saturday, November 22. Without their recourse to parliamentary larceny, the business-backed legislation that paves the way for the privatization of the government-run health care program for seniors would have failed. Instead, it moved on to the Senate, where it was passed with significant Democratic support on Tuesday, November 25.

Members of the House rejected the Medicare bill on a roll call vote by a margin of 218-216. However, the Republican House leadership, working in tandem with the White House, refused to close voting, even though, according to House rules, roll call votes are supposed to last only 15 minutes.

Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Majority Leader Tom DeLay used their leadership powers to hold open the vote for two hours and fifty-one minutes. It took that long to strong-arm right-wing Republican House members who had voted against the bill—considering it insufficiently reactionary—and convince them to switch to the “yes” column.

The House Republican leaders were directly aided by President George W. Bush, who was flying back from London on Air Force One and telephoned recalcitrant congressmen from his plane. Karl Rove, Bush’s chief political adviser, also worked the phones, while Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson went to Capitol Hill to twist arms.

The Republicans had forced a vote on the bill, whose final version was drafted in a closed House-Senate conference, just one day after the full text became available. Voting began at 3 am, and the Republican leadership came up two votes short. Finally, at about 6 am, the vote was closed and the rigged result was recorded as 220-215 in favor.

House Democrats denounced the maneuver, but that did not prevent eleven of their Senate colleagues from voting in favor the legislation three days later. Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts said, “I don’t mean to be alarmist, but this is the end of parliamentary democracy as we know it.”

The thuggery employed to ram through the Medicare bill is only the most recent in a series of incidents highlighting the contempt of the Bush administration and the Republican leadership for democratic norms and principles. On July 21, Congressman Bill Thomas of California, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, called the Capitol police against Democratic legislators who were caucusing in a House meeting room to discuss their opposition to a Republican workers compensation bill.

Earlier this month, the White House notified the House and Senate Appropriations committees that Bush would no longer answer questions submitted by members of the Democratic minority. The memo, which flouted longstanding procedures, was a further attack on the legitimacy of any form of political opposition.

Link...

Just When You Thought there Was Only Paul Krugman...Along Comes another HERO!

Pending the freezing of hell . . .

Ah, man, I ought to resist this. It’s going to cause more trouble than it’s worth . . . .

No, there’s a way. Let’s try this:

What follows is a blatant anti-Republican screed, unless it’s a diatribe. Diatribe, I guess. The dictionary says a screed has to be both long and tiresome; a diatribe only has to be abusive.

I realize it’s one-sided and that many patriotic Americans will be offended by it. Since I already realize that, it isn’t necessary for any patriotic Americans to tell me about it.

I’m going to use it anyway, because it’s pretty funny. I got it under the heading, “Things you have to believe to be a Republican today.”

o Being a drug addict is a moral failing and a crime, unless you’re a conservative radio host. Then it’s an illness and you need our prayers for your recovery.

o The United States should get out of the United Nations, and our highest national priority is enforcing U.N. resolutions against Iraq.

o Government should relax regulation of Big Business and Big Money but crack down on individuals who use marijuana to relieve the pain of illness.

o “Standing Tall for America” means firing your workers and moving their jobs to India.

o A woman can’t be trusted with decisions about her own body, but multi-national corporations can make decisions affecting all mankind without regulation.

o Jesus loves you, and shares your hatred of homosexuals and Hillary Clinton.

o The best way to improve military morale is to praise the troops in speeches while slashing veterans’ benefits and combat pay.

o Group sex and drug use are degenerate sins unless you someday run for governor of California as a Republican.

o If condoms are kept out of schools, adolescents won’t have sex.

o A good way to fight terrorism is to belittle our long-time allies, then demand their cooperation and money.

o HMOs and insurance companies have the interest of the public at heart.

o Providing health care to all Iraqis is sound policy. Providing health care to all Americans is socialism.

o Global warming and tobacco’s link to cancer are junk science, but creationism should be taught in schools.

o Saddam was a good guy when Reagan armed him, a bad guy when Bush’s daddy made war on him, a good guy when Cheney did business with him and a bad guy when Bush needed a “we can’t find Bin Laden” diversion.

o A president lying about an extramarital affair is an impeachable offense. A president lying to enlist support for a war in which thousands die is solid defense policy.

o Government should limit itself to the powers named in the Constitution, which include banning gay marriages and censoring the Internet.

o The public has a right to know about Hillary’s cattle trades, but George Bush’s driving record is none of our business.

o You support states’ rights, which means Attorney General John Ashcroft can tell states what local voter initiatives they have a right to adopt.

o What Bill Clinton did in the 1960s is of vital national interest, but what Bush did in the ’80s is irrelevant.

o Trade with Cuba is wrong because the country is communist, but trade with China and Vietnam is vital to a spirit of international harmony.

I would, of course, print a comparable list of things you have to believe to be a Democrat, if I had one, and if it were funny, and if . . . .No. You send one, and I’ll print it even if hell doesn’t freeze over.

Cory Farley can be reached at (775) 788-6340 or cfarley@rgj.com.

Copyright © 2002 The Reno Gazette-Journal

Link....

Tuesday, November 25, 2003

Oh How The Right Wing Nut Neo Cons Hate Paul Krugman--And He Is So Damn Good!

Monday, November 24, 2003

Chimp_junta terrorists Refuse to Release Information On 911 to Commission--Traitors, Criminals; a Dictatorship of Wing-Nut Killers Run Awry

Terrorism commission caves in to White House over 9/11 documents

By Patrick Martin
24 November 2003

The independent commission charged with investigating the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington has backed down in the face of White House intransigence and agreed to let the Bush administration determine what information it will turn over to the panel.

An agreement reached November 13 between the White House and the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States provides very limited access to the Presidential Daily Briefs (PDBs), the daily summaries of all US intelligence reporting that are the most important documents being withheld from the commission.

The Bush administration has refused to turn over the PDBs, although it has no legal claim of executive privilege, since the independent commission is not part of the legislative branch, but was set up jointly by Congress and the White House.

It was a PDB dated August 6, 2001, that reportedly informed Bush and his top aides, more than a month before the destruction of the World Trade Center, that Al Qaeda terrorists were planning terrorist attacks within the continental US using hijacked airplanes.

One of the 10 members of the commission and one staff member will review hundreds of PDBs during the period leading up to September 11, covering both the Clinton administration and the first eight months of the Bush administration. They will prepare summaries of relevant passages of the PDBs, which the White House will review and edit before they are given to the other members of the commission.

The two top leaders of the commission, Republican chairman Thomas Kean, former governor of New Jersey, and Democratic vice-chairman Lee Hamilton, a former congressman from Indiana, agreed to this White House-controlled procedure rather than issuing subpoenas for the material.

Administration foot-dragging has already compelled the commission to issue subpoenas for Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and Air Force records on the movement of air defense fighters on September 11. The White House instructed the FAA and Pentagon to comply with the subpoenas, but it vowed to fight any subpoena for the Presidential Daily Briefs, threatening a lengthy court battle.

The commission has also subpoenaed the tape recordings of New York City police and fire communications on September 11, after Mayor Michael Bloomberg refused to release them, citing privacy concerns.

Kean and Hamilton chose the two who will review the PDBs: staff director Philip Zelikow, a Republican, and commissioner Jamie Gorelick, a Democrat. Both are safe choices from the standpoint of protecting the US military/intelligence apparatus.

Zelikow is a University of Virginia professor with close ties to the Bush administration. He co-authored a book with national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and worked on the National Security Council’s transition from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration. Gorelick served eight years in the Clinton administration, first as general counsel to the Pentagon, then as deputy attorney general.

Representatives of the families of September 11 victims denounced the agreement limiting access to White House documents, calling it a violation of the commission’s mandate to investigate what US intelligence agencies and government officials knew in advance of the terrorist attacks.

The Family Steering Committee issued a statement saying the agreement would “prevent a full uncovering of the truth and is unacceptable... The commission should issue a statement to the American public fully explaining why this agreement was chosen in lieu of issuing subpoenas to the CIA and executive branch.”

A spokeswoman for the group, Kristen Breitweiser, whose husband Ronald was killed at the World Trade Center, told the press, “I think this entire deal needs to be explained to the public. This is an independent commission that is supposed to be transparent, that is supposed to be open.”

Breitweiser singled out the role of staff director Zelikow, saying, “Phil Zelikow has a very large conflict of interest. He is very close friends with Condi Rice, he was on the transition team, and some of these documents are going to pertain to that. It’s very disturbing. This was supposed to be an independent commission, not a presidential commission.”

Two Democratic members of the committee also condemned the agreement. Former Indiana congressman Timothy Roemer said that with the power to edit the PDBs before turning them over to the commission, the White House could remove the context of any references to terrorist threats and hide “smoking guns.” Under the agreement, he said, “Our members may see only two or three paragraphs out of a nine-page report.”

Max Cleland, a former senator from Georgia, called the agreement “unconscionable” and said the work of the committee was being “deliberately compromised by the president of the United States.”

“If this decision stands, I, as a member of the commission, cannot look any American in the eye, especially family members of victims, and say the commission had full access,” Cleland said.

Cleland is a conservative Democrat and triple-amputee from the Vietnam War who once headed the Veterans Administration. But last month he issued a warning that White House stonewalling was making it impossible for the commission to meet its May 27, 2004, deadline for a final report on the September 11 attacks. He claimed that the delays were politically motivated, aimed at allowing the Bush administration to “run out the clock” and avoid accountability before the 2004 elections.

In a remark little noted by the media at the time—but extraordinary in its implications—Cleland declared, “As each day goes by, we learn that this government knew a whole lot more about these terrorists before September 11 than it has ever admitted.”

The American media has reported the agreement between the September 11 commission and the White House in largely uncritical terms. There has been no outcry over the refusal of the Bush administration to cooperate with an investigation into the largest single act of mass murder in US history—in sharp contrast to the media frenzy over Clinton’s foot-dragging in the independent counsel investigation into his sex life.

The Washington Post portrayed the agreement as a remarkable concession by the White House. It wrote, on November 16, that the deal “marks a departure for an administration that frequently has fought attempts by Congress and government investigators to review other sensitive executive branch documents.”

The newspaper quoted Zelikow praising the administration: “Neither we nor the White House are aware of any precedent for this in the history of the republic. That is true not only for our access to these items, but for many of the other kinds of access to highly sensitive materials that we have been granted.”

The Post added its own benediction for the cover-up, with an editorial on November 17 headlined “Adequate Access.” The newspaper declared, “The Bush administration has provided a mountain of material to the commission. The latest negotiations concern especially sensitive material, and it is appropriate to take precautions to protect it... Our sense is that the agreement, though imperfect, should secure for the commission the access it needs.”

In its news article on the agreement, however, the New York Times commented, “Administration officials have acknowledged that they are concerned that intelligence reports received by Mr. Bush in the weeks before 9/11 might be construed to suggest that the White House failed to respond to evidence suggesting that Al Qaeda was planning a catastrophic attack.”

Link...

There should be outrage...the whore news oligarchy should have headlines in every newspaper: 9-11 COVERUP--MASS MURDER IN AMERICA GOES UNINVESTIGATED WHILE WHITE HOUSE COVERS ITS OWN ASS

Sunday, November 23, 2003

Gephardt Fucks Up The Little Guy and Then Plays Like The Hurt Puppy

Hey Gephardt: Why Did You Screw Us?

Dear Dick:

For the last four years you have cozied up to the banks and credit card companies and tried to push thru their edition of ANTI-CONSUMER bankruptcy laws.

They asked you, Dick, to screw the little guy who was trying to get a fresh start on life and YOU DID IT.

For instance, Dick, the banks and credit card companies ponied up $500,000 to your reelection campaigns so you would support the criminally misnamed CONSUMER CREDIT REFORM ACT OF 2000 (THEN 2001) AND NOW (2002).

Tell us, DICK, what did you try to REFORM?

Let me share what you tried to reform, you bastard:

Anyone trying to get their lives back on track with Chapter 7 Bankruptcy would have to have a lawyer. That's what Tom DeLay wanted, too.

Anyone who was trying to clean up their credit would have to subject themselves to a lifetime of harassment from creditors, DICK. That's what Tom DeLay wanted, too.

Anyone who wanted to file for a simple Chapter 7, in addition to hiring a lawyer, would have to have the lawyer guarantee that he had promised recovery of all the ufcking debt that his client was crushed by. What the uf ck good is filing Chapter 7 if all it does is delay repayment, DICK? That's the same thing Tom DeLay got paid off by the banks to do. That's the same thing ufcking MORAN (d-va) promised to do. That's just the tip of the iceburg, you bastard.

You don't care about anything but DICK.

And we don't care about you. We want our country back. We want Dr. Howard Dean. Take your greedy, corrupt ass back to wherever and shut the ufck up, mofo.

Very truly yours.
Houston, Texas

Chimper Wants You! (to think he's a real wartime 'preznit')

Hypocrite Chimper_junta: Scaring Up Votes

Maureen Dowd: Scaring Up Votes

First came the pre-emptive military policy. Now comes the pre-emptive campaign strategy.

Before the president even knows his opponent, his first political ad is blanketing Iowa today.

"It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known," Mr. Bush says, in a State of the Union clip.

Well, that's a comforting message from our commander in chief. Do we really need his cold, clammy hand on our spine at a time when we're already rattled by fresh terror threats at home and abroad? When we're chilled by the metastasizing Al Qaeda, the resurgent Taliban and Baathist thugs armed with deadly booby traps; the countless, nameless terror groups emerging in Turkey, Morocco, Indonesia and elsewhere; the vicious attacks on Americans, Brits, aid workers and their supporters in Iraq, Afghanistan and Turkey? The latest illustration of the low-tech ingenuity of Iraqi foes impervious to our latest cascade of high-tech missiles: a hapless, singed donkey that carted rockets to a Baghdad hotel.

Yet the Bush crowd is seizing the moment to scare us even more.

Flashing the words "terrorists" and "self-defense" in crimson, the Republican National Committee spot urges Americans "to support the president's policy of pre-emptive self-defense" — a policy Colin Powell claimed was overblown by the press.

Link...


Saturday, November 22, 2003

Fucking Chimp_junta mimics Israel Driving Tanks over Homes--Bombing Innocent Iraqis

Rights group questions house demolitions in Iraq, Pentagon denies collective punishment

Where is American Whore Media Reporting On This Catastrophe? Where are the Dem Politicians? We know the fucking repuglikens don't give a shit...

It is one thing for the right-wing press/Faux/CNN to look the other way at the destruction of homes in the occupied areas of Israel.

That is the Israeli Army...not the American Military.

Now we see that the hated occupiers of Iraq--made up of our brothers, sisters, mothers, and fathers--are being ordered to do Nazi-type deeds. Destroying the homes of farmers and locals as a warning to the 'terrorists,' i.e., the native redskins.

We will burn their teepees, machine gun their women and children, and make the Nazi reqime look like the Red Cross before it's over. Why does our Army and Marines take these orders from War Criminals chimp_junta? They have the legal and ethical right to NOT ENGAGE IN WAR CRIMES.

This stinking chimper_junta, international war criminals--a cabal of oil and energy greed, Saudi princes, and the Bush Family Crime Empire--must be dragged down, shackled, arrested, and hauled in front of war crimes tribunals. Shot by firing squad at dawn. Feed their corpses to the pigs.

Warrants have been issued for the arrest of bush, cheney, powell, rumsfeld, rice, wolferwizz, perle, franks, chemical tom delay...all killers, international marauders and bombers. Barbarian hoardes that have descended on Iraq and are blitzkreiging it one decimating shock-and-awe blitz at a time.

But mainly FUCKING COWARDS AND CHICKEN HAWKS put into OUR White House by felonious 'supreme' court motherfuckers. Chimp can't even go to our best friend England without taking his own private army to keep his stinking, cowardly bunny-pants ass alive (at nearly a billion taxpayer dollars) so he could take some photo ops for his first election campaign. He's just gotta go.

Hate goppers. Hate them proudly.

Friday, November 21, 2003

Wanted War Criminal, Gen. Tommy Franks, Sees Military Rule in America. Believe if Bush is Selected Again

Gen. Franks Doubts Constitution Will Survive WMD Attack

John O. Edwards

Friday, Nov. 21, 2003: (NewsMax) Gen. Tommy Franks says that if the United States is hit with a weapon of mass destruction that inflicts large casualties, the Constitution will likely be discarded in favor of a military form of government.

Franks, who successfully led the U.S. military operation to liberate Iraq, expressed his worries in an extensive interview he gave to the men’s lifestyle magazine Cigar Aficionado.

In the magazine’s December edition, the former commander of the military’s Central Command warned that if terrorists succeeded in using a weapon of mass destruction (WMD) against the U.S. or one of our allies, it would likely have catastrophic consequences for our cherished republican form of government.

Discussing the hypothetical dangers posed to the U.S. in the wake of Sept. 11, Franks said that “the worst thing that could happen” is if terrorists acquire and then use a biological, chemical or nuclear weapon that inflicts heavy casualties.

If that happens, Franks said, “... the Western world, the free world, loses what it cherishes most, and that is freedom and liberty we’ve seen for a couple of hundred years in this grand experiment that we call democracy.”

Franks then offered “in a practical sense” what he thinks would happen in the aftermath of such an attack.

“It means the potential of a weapon of mass destruction and a terrorist, massive, casualty-producing event somewhere in the Western world – it may be in the United States of America – that causes our population to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country in order to avoid a repeat of another mass, casualty-producing event. Which in fact, then begins to unravel the fabric of our Constitution. Two steps, very, very important.”

Franks didn’t speculate about how soon such an event might take place.

Already, critics of the U.S. Patriot Act, rushed through Congress in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, have argued that the law aims to curtail civil liberties and sets a dangerous precedent.

But Franks’ scenario goes much further. He is the first high-ranking official to openly speculate that the Constitution could be scrapped in favor of a military form of government.

Link to story..

Loser, Senator Kerry Shoots at Winner, Dr. Howard Dean--Again. I Blog his Blog:

Posted on blog johnkerry com:

You know, Senator Kerry has 2 problems here.

First, he is trying to couch his attacks on frontrunner Dr. Dean by saying 'anger' won't win.' Anger comes from an old Norse word, angr. Loosely translated it means that we democrats/independents have a feeling that something is very wrong in America tugging at our emotions. It does NOT mean we are millions of ANGRY people, the way Senator Kerry would have the voters he courts believe.

This is a cheap shot at Dr. Dean, as well as myself who, originally a Kerry supporter, has switched irrevocably to Dr. Dean.

It is hard for Washington insiders, such as you, Senator, to see that 'anger' doesn't mean "ANGRY"...

Still, why not try coming up with something to appeal to voters, such as your voting record in the Senate; how many votes you have misssed in the last year...something truthful that voters can use to see how good a candidate you really are...

And they will also see that you are NOT ANGRY, and you don't have any anger, are more dispirited and sad than you should be, and therfore, you are unable to lead.

You are angry, tho, Senator Kerry. Angry at Howard Dean. That is an ugly anger that you can't wipe off of your face.

A. J. Franklin
Clear Lake City, Texas

Terror blasts in Istanbul: Bush/Blair Blame Al Caida Almost Before the Buildings Hit the Ground(?)

Terror blasts in Istanbul: atrocities aid Bush's "war on terror"

By Justus Leicht and Peter Schwarz
21 November 2003

On Thursday, the Turkish capital of Istanbul with its 12 million inhabitants was rocked by violent explosions for the second time within the space of a few days.

Bombs exploded in front of the British consulate in the Istanbul district of Beyoglu and before a branch of the major Anglo-Asian bank HSBC, situated in the Levent district of the city. Initial reports speak of 27 dead and over 450 injured. The casualty figures will very likely increase. Amongst the dead is the British Consul General in Istanbul, Roger Short.

Witnesses spoke of a bloodbath. An employee of the German Goethe Institute, which has its offices just 100 metres from the British consulate, spoke to Spiegel-Online of “people covered in blood” on the streets. A delivery van drove into the British consulate, and there followed a “violent explosion.” The bomb set off in front of the HSBC bank shook a nearby shopping centre that was packed with thousands of ordinary citizens, both Turks and tourists.

Two similar attacks were carried out last Saturday morning against the synagogues of Beth Israel and Neve Schalom. The latter is the largest synagogue in Istanbul. It is situated on a busy street that was filled with observers on the Sabbath, the Jewish day of rest.

The two bomb blasts took 24 lives. Most of those killed were Muslims, who were employed as security personnel in nearby mosques or worked in nearby shops. Over 300 were wounded in the explosions.

Turkish authorities and representatives of the Israeli, British and American governments immediately assigned responsibility for both series of bombings to Al Qaeda. On Thursday, British Foreign Minister Jack Straw made a press statement blaming Al Qaeda for that day’s blasts before the dust had even settled on the sites of the explosions.

Later, an anonymous person called the Turkish news agency Anadolu to claim that Al Qaeda and the Turkish Islamist group IBDA-C (Warriors Front for an Islamic Great Middle East) were responsible for the bombings. The caller said the attacks on Thursday were the result of a “joint action” by the two groups. The group IBDA-C also claimed responsibility for the earlier synagogue attacks.

Some time later on Thursday, an Arabic newspaper received an email in which a group affiliated with Al Qaeda named “The Martyrs Brigade of Abu Hafs el Masri” also claimed responsibility for the attacks.

Turkish authorities assert that on the basis of genetic tests they have been able to definitively establish the identity of the two suicide bombers from last Saturday. They are alleged to be two Turkish men from the eastern city of Bingöl who have links to radical Islamist groups. The television channel NTV claims that one of the men had travelled to Iran on six occasions to receive training as an explosives expert.

However, the reports that have been issued up to now are full of contradictions. The Turkish interior minister, Abdulkadir Aksu, said that claims of responsibility by IBDA-C were not credible. He said no Turkish organisation was in a position to carry out attacks of such a magnitude.

This raises the question, however, how it was possible for foreigners to smuggle such large amounts of explosive into Turkey, and then situate and explode the bombs almost simultaneously at two different locations.

Some security experts have expressed doubts regarding the participation of Al Qaeda. The Turkish Daily News quoted the Israeli anti-terror expert Boaz Ganor, who said, “At this time (there is) no indication of Al Qaeda involvement.”

Mustafa Alani from London’s Royal United Services Institute told Reuters: “There is no history of Al Qaeda operating in Turkey. It’s very hard to say Al Qaeda is involved in this attack. I think the activities of Al Qaeda now are concentrated on two states—Saudi Arabia and Iraq.”

It remains unclear who is really responsible for the terror attacks in Istanbul. On the other hand, it is very clear that the attacks come at a highly opportune moment for both the American and British governments, as well as sections of the Turkish military.

Against a background of growing resistance to the occupation of Iraq, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George Bush used the bloodbath in Istanbul to justify the terror they are carrying out against the Iraqi people. At a joint press conference on Thursday held only a few hours after the attack on the British consulate, President Bush vowed to “finish the job we have begun,” and Blair stated: “I can assure you of one thing: that when something like this happens today, our response is not to flinch or give way or concede one inch. We stand absolutely firm until this job is done, done in Iraq, done elsewhere in the world.”

Turkish military uses attacks

The Turkish military are using the wave of terror to reassert their influence over the government. Immediately after the latest attack, soldiers appeared on the streets of Istanbul, blocking a motorway and providing security alongside Turkish police. A dozen soldiers in helmets, wearing camouflage gear and armed with machine guns, were seen in the proximity of the explosion at the HSBC building.

The military have regarded the government of the moderate Islamist AKP (Justice and Development Party) with mistrust since its overwhelming election victory. Since then, there have repeated rumours of a possible military putsch.

Tensions between the government and the military have grown considerably since the beginning of the Iraq war. The military campaigned vigorously for participation in the war, but in an initial parliamentary vote the majority of AKP deputies refused to allow the US to use Turkish territory as a second front in its war against Iraq. After the vote, and during a visit to Ankara, US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz encouraged the Turkish military to take a “stronger leadership role” in relation to the elected government.

The IBDA-C, which has reportedly admitted responsibility for the attacks, is playing a very dubious role. The origins of the group go back to the 1970s. The group brought together Islamists with former Maoists and was characterised by extreme anti-Semitism and hostility to Christians. Significantly, however, the group displayed no sympathy for Iraq in its publications.

The group gained notoriety in the 1990s with a series of bombing attacks. In 1994 alone the group is alleged to have carried out 90 attacks. These were aimed principally against critical intellectuals and religious minorities rather than against the police, army or western targets.

Among its victims, the IBDA-C was said to have been responsible in 1993 for the murder of the reporter Ugur Mumcu, who had written articles on the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), the growth of Islamic radicalism and drug rings. In 1994, the group was involved in the murder of the renowned film critic and writer Onat Kutlar. Other victims included members of the Jewish community.

There is much to indicate that the activities of the IBDA-C are manipulated by provocateurs from the Turkish intelligence forces. After the military putsch of 1980, the generals of the so-called “Turkish-Islamic Synthesis” called for an ideological amalgam of Islam and right-wing nationalism, aimed at bringing together fundamentalists and nationalists in a block against left-wing tendencies and Kurdish nationalist forces. Against this background, Islamist organisations were able to grow and flourish. Parliamentary investigations have since provided evidence of close collaboration between the Islamic Hezbollah and police special forces.

When it became clear in 1994 that Islam could develop into a potential political threat to the state, the security forces intensified repressive measures against Islamic organisations. By the time of the capitulation of the PKK to the Turkish state in 1999, these groups had been largely destroyed, with their leaders arrested or killed. Since then, no more attacks have been ascribed to these organisations.

In light of this situation, it is unlikely that the IBDA-C would be able on its own to assemble the resources and manage the logistics necessary to carry out the two series of terror attacks in Istanbul. Even if members of this group were involved in the bombings, there could well have been others pulling the strings while remaining in the background.

As for the political beneficiaries of the bombings, virtually all of the commentaries in the Turkish press agree that the result of the attacks will be even closer collaboration between Turkey and the US and Israel. Turkey was already the only country in the region with a majority Muslim population to share close diplomatic and military links with Washington and Tel Aviv.

The commentary in the newspaper Turkiye is typical. It reads: “The message to Turkey and the world is as follows: ‘If you continue to cooperate with the US, you will suffer such misfortunes. You should adopt a clear stance against Israel and cease being interested in Iraq.’ If this is really the message, in Turkey it will actually have the opposite effect. As we can’t make concessions to terrorism, we can only align our policy with Washington’s that much more closely. In addition, this anti-Semitic attack—something unfamiliar and alien to Turkey—will cause a greater rapprochement with Israel.”

Hurriyet commented in similar fashion: “Thus, this terrorist action might include a warning for Turkey not to act alongside the US. However, these attacks might cause an opposite effect, because they could move Turkey further into the same axis as the US and Israel. Turkey will consider itself in the same boat as the US, which sees terrorism as its chief threat.”

The series of terror attacks in Istanbul are a reactionary provocation. It remains unclear who is really behind them, but even if there is no direct involvement by the Turkish secret service or Western intelligence services, in the final analysis, it is the policies of the US, Israel and Great Britain that are responsible for this catastrophe.

The military conquest and subordination of Iraq, together with the suppression of the Palestinians by the Israeli regime, have unleashed new ethnic tensions and encouraged reactionary forces across the globe. What the Bush and Sharon governments cynically refer to as the “war against terror” has led to an escalation of terror attacks throughout the Middle East.

This also affects members of the Jewish faith. Despite the fact that the majority of the Turkish population is Muslim, the country has never been regarded as anti-Semitic. Since the times of Sultan Beyazit II, who in 1492 accepted more than 100,000 Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition, the Jewish community has been able to live unhindered in the country. Jews fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe and the Nazi terror were also able to take up residence in the country. Now the community has been plunged into insecurity and fear as a consequence of the Iraq war.

Link....

Also Read: The Saudi Bombing: Who Benefits from This Tragedy?

Thursday, November 20, 2003

Chimp_junta States They will Kill, Maim, Bomb, and Destroy any one who isn't "WITH US."

Bush's London speech: A defense of aggression and lawlessness

By Patrick Martin
20 November 2003

President Bush’s speech Wednesday to a London audience, the highlight of his three-day state visit to Great Britain, was an uncompromising defense of the conquest of Iraq and Afghanistan. He made it clear the US would not hesitate to employ whatever level of violence was necessary to suppress the Iraqi resistance, and left no doubt that his administration remained opposed to ceding political control of the occupied country to the United Nations.

The US would maintain its occupation of Iraq—with Britain as a very junior partner—without regard to public opinion, either in Iraq, Britain, or America itself.

Bush made token references to multilateral institutions and to the UN, as a gesture in support of the beleaguered government of his closest ally, Prime Minister Tony Blair. But the essence of his remarks was that the United States would do as it pleases in foreign affairs—waging war, staging invasions and toppling governments without brooking interference from anyone.

The bulk of the speech rehashed remarks Bush delivered last week to the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, proclaiming a global US war for democracy. This vision of unchecked American domination was presented as the realization of “freedom” on a world scale. Bush’s apocalyptic language, with references to God, faith and religious belief, gave the address a messianic tone—rendering its lies all the more brazen and absurd.

As in every speech by Bush, whose speechwriters apparently assume that his audiences are as intellectually challenged as Bush himself, contradictions and non-sequiturs abounded. The basic premise—that Bush is a tribune of global democracy—overlooks the fact that he is an unelected president, selected not by American voters, but by the far-right majority on the US Supreme Court, which intervened in the 2000 election to halt vote-counting in Florida and place Bush in the White House.

The US-British invasion of Iraq was itself a flagrant violation of democratic principles, since the decision to go to war and seize control of Iraq was made in defiance of public opinion worldwide. Bush allies like Blair in Britain, Aznar in Spain and Berlusconi in Italy gave their support to the war despite the opposition of the overwhelming majority of their own people. Tens of millions around the world participated in demonstrations against the war, the largest global protests in history.

“In some cases,” Bush declared, “the measured use of force is all that protects us from a chaotic world ruled by force.” Who is it that distinguishes between the force that is “measured” and the force that represents chaos? Bush did not spell this out, but clearly in his view it is the president of the United States who makes that determination, no one else. He did not refer in his speech to international law, despite claims a year ago that the central issue in targeting the Iraqi regime was its alleged violation of UN Security Council resolutions.

He acknowledged what he called “good-faith disagreements in your country and mine over the course and timing of military action in Iraq,” but this bow to the right to dissent was purely for show. Now that the US and Britain are in control of Iraq, he proclaimed, there could be no legitimate argument against maintaining the occupation. “Whatever has come before, we now have only two options: to keep our word or to break our word,” he said.

In a potted review of the 20th century, Bush presented the United States as the consistent protagonist for democracy, skipping over nearly a century of aggressive military intervention in Latin America to prop up pro-American dictatorships, as well as the Cold War alliances with such tyrants as the Shah of Iran, Suharto in Indonesia, Mobutu in the Congo and military rulers in many other countries.

He repeated one of the standard nostrums of US foreign policy, that “democratic governments do not shelter terrorist camps or attack their peaceful neighbors.” This commonplace is never challenged by the ignorant and servile US media, but it is flagrantly untrue.

Besides the bloody experience of World War I, waged by parliamentary governments on both sides of the trenches, there is the prime counter-example of the United States itself. In the course of the last century, democratic America has invaded or attacked Mexico, Nicaragua, Haiti, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Grenada and Panama—to speak only of neighbors—as well as waging war in Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan and Iraq, and sponsoring dozens of military coups and guerrilla insurgencies (including the Afghan mujaheddin from which the Al-Qaeda terrorists emerged).

Despite his paeans to democracy, Bush chose not to address the House of Commons, the proverbial “Mother of Parliaments,” because of concern that antiwar MPs might disrupt the speech or heckle him. Instead, he spoke before a carefully vetted audience assembled under the auspices of the Royal United Services Institute and the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Bush made only the most passing reference to the issue of weapons of mass destruction, and he did not allude to past claims that Iraq possessed huge stocks of chemical and biological weapons and an active nuclear weapons programs. This was the principal reason given to the American and British people to justify the war, but no such weapons have been found during the seven months of US-British occupation of Iraq.

Perhaps the most shameless lies came in Bush’s closing comments, in which he attempted, unsuccessfully, to square his doctrine of universal democracy with US policy in the Middle East, which consists largely of propping up oil sheiks and backing Israeli oppression of the Palestinians.

The US president expressed the hope that “the greater Middle East joins the democratic revolution that has reached much of the world”—and then demanded that the European powers cut off relations with the only elected leader in any Arab country, Yasser Arafat.

He spoke of an “arc of reform from Morocco to Jordan to Qatar”—all countries ruled by more or less absolute monarchs, who are nonetheless classified as “reformist” by the US State Department because they are aligned with American foreign policy.

Even more bizarre was Bush’s denunciation of the region’s corrupt elites, since US policy—and the Bush family’s own personal financial interests—have long been intimately bound up with those elites, above all the Saudi princes.

Bush should be careful about targeting corruption and “old elites,” since his own government is the personification of the most criminal elements within the US ruling elite. His trip to London coincides with the final push in Washington for congressional passage of two pieces of legislation that could be entitled “the corrupt elites’ compensation acts.”

The energy bill, pushed through the House of Representatives Tuesday, will pump more than $100 billion in tax breaks and government subsidies to oil, gas and coal companies and utility monopolies. The misnamed Medicare reform legislation will guarantee an estimated $137 billion in windfall profits to the giant drug companies. Only two weeks before, the administration secured passage of the bill funding the US occupation of Iraq, which will funnel $87 billion into the coffers of corporate America.

Link......

Wednesday, November 19, 2003

Baghdad Burning--Girl Blog from Iraq

Baghdad Burning

This is "Girl Blog from Iraq." I hope you find it as heart-rending as I do.

Bush's visit to London: Is a state provocation being prepared? Are Blair & Bush ready to "Hurt" Innocent Protestors?

Bush's visit to London: Is a state provocation being prepared?

Unprecedented security measures are being put in place for President George W. Bush’s visit to London this week.

Between November 18 and November 19, Bush will stay at Buckingham Palace as the guest of Queen Elizabeth. His itinerary includes a meeting with Prime Minister Tony Blair at Downing Street on November 18, when mass protests against the war on Iraq and the ongoing occupation are expected. The president will make just one visit outside of London—a stage-managed visit to Blair’s Sedgfield parliamentary constituency.

The state visit was first planned in September last year, but recent events have amplified its political importance for both leaders. Mounting resistance by the Iraqi people and the rising number of casualties have fuelled domestic opposition to the colonial takeover of Iraq, causing Bush’s itinerary to be heavily curtailed.

The visit has reignited popular anger towards the war in Britain, which saw two million people gather in London as part of the international protests held last February 15. Relatives of British troops killed in Iraq have condemned Bush’s visit and tens of thousands are expected to join protests against the two leaders.

The response of the US and British governments has sinister overtones. Media reports are filled with warnings of the possibility of terrorists using the protests as a cover for their activities. Most significantly, British police have made an explicit link between the protests and a possible attack on Bush by Al Qaeda.

A senior Scotland Yard spokesman told the Times, “We are not so concerned about some anti-war protester throwing rotten fruit at the president. Our worry now is the more dangerous elements who may be here.”

The linkage of the protests with a possible attack by Al Qaeda raises serious concerns that a state provocation is being prepared against the demonstrations. There are no details of the supposed terrorist threat and the Home Office has refused to comment. But London is being placed under a virtual state of siege. Some £19 million is being spent on security measures and all of Scotland Yard’s armed units and up to 5,000 police officers will be on duty, with all leave cancelled.

Bush will be escorted by 250 heavily armed secret service agents, up to 150 national security officials and 50 White House aides. Two 747s and a specially chartered jumbo are to make the journey to the UK. Once in Britain, Bush will be accompanied by a specially converted black hawk helicopter and a motorcade of 20 armoured vehicles.

According to reports, US security officials had originally demanded the closure of London’s underground rail network. The Observer reports “the British authorities agreed numerous concessions, including the creation of a ‘sterile zone’ around the president with a series of road closures in central London.”

A no-fly zone is being established over Whitehall, “with the RAF on standby to shoot down unidentified planes,” the Mirror reported. Britain has been put on its second highest terror alert, reportedly following warnings by Al Qaeda supporters from North Africa.

The police have also said they reserve the right to close roads at a moment’s notice. Britain’s senior police officer, John Stevens, admitted that security for the visit will be “unprecedented,” but said that this was necessary because of “one, the level of terrorism threat and two, the nature of the president’s visit.”

In such circumstances, and with tensions already running high, it would be entirely possible for the police or some other British or US state agency to create a security incident—possibly through the use of provocateurs in the crowd. This would serve the dual purpose of identifying opposition to the war with the activity of terrorist groups and lending a veil of legitimacy to the occupation of Iraq and the general offensive against democratic rights that has been mounted under the pretext of the pursuing the “war against terrorism.”

Link...

Looking at the unprecedented army of armed body guards the hated chimp must take with him to our FRIEND, England, we must think that this coward would use unusual methods to hurt the people who rightously hate the little bastard but do not have a thousand body guards watching over their asses.

Undoubtedly he will use hundreds of photo-ops from this taxpayer funded disaster to put his ugly, war-criminal countenance in front of the voter in a few months. Will we also see the hundreds of thousands of protestors, and the burning effigy of elChimpo?

Only 360 days of "America Held Hostage to Bush" left and we can have Dr. Howard Dean in our White House. A genuine duly elected President instead of a fraud_chimp_junta.

Chimp_junta becomes Judge, Jury, and Executioner...But Instead will someone Kill Bremer?

Bremer Says Saddam Is Voice of Past, Must Be Killed

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, on Monday described former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein as a "voice from the wilderness" and said the ousted president needed to be captured or killed. Asked about a new audio tape aired by an Arabic television station on Sunday that was purported to be by Saddam, Bremer said the toppled leader had no support in Iraq except among his "band of thugs."

"This is a voice from the wilderness here. This is a man who is followed by a small band of murderers and they have no vision for the future of Iraq. They have a vision of the past, a past of violence and corruption," Bremer said in an interview with NBC's "Today" show.

He added: "He is around and we need to capture or kill him but he has no future here."

Link...

This article highlights the cowardice, the hypocrisy, and the arrogance of Bremer, Bush, Cheney--the entire fraudulent chimp_cabal.

The littlest mother-fucker bush travels to England with a THOUSAND FUCKING BODY GUARDS THAT WE ARE PAYING FOR to keep his stinking ass in $10,000 suits and cowboy boots, and BREATHING!! But his little Nazi henchman, Herr Bremer, speaks out for the unelected fraud in the illegal war saying the plan for Saddam is to "capture or kill him but he has no future HERE."

Where the fuck is HERE, you totally maniacal idealogue? YOU are in HIS country! YOU are the FUCKING INVADER. THEY HATE YOU. They will KILL YOU. And you will not be missed, you little dick-sucking coward.

Let's see what kind of future Herr Bremer has in Iraq. Maybe they should post another thousand troops around his new office, the Saddam Palace, and put two more BlackHawk helicopters circling overhead to keep him alive. No One Needs You, Herr Bremer. You are just a cheap little pants-pissing neo-con bureaucrat thug sucking the life out of a foriegn country.

You are the univited Mongul hoards. You and chimp shame all of us with your cowardice and hypocrisy. You dirty little bastard.

You just got to hate goppers. Hate em all and hate em proudly.

The day to be happy is when the world captures the whole fucking chimp_junta, puts them against a wall, and shoots them all. Heil der firing-squad...SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS.

But that eventuality is why elChimpo needs to take his own fucking small army whereever he goes. What if the Queen is packing IRON?? She could kill him and be the HEROINE of the FREE WORLD!! Afterwards she could plead SANITY!! Who would find her guilty of wrong doing?

It would be such a better world. And the Queen would really make the history books in a special way ;-)

Gutless New York Times, Without Mentioning Mass Murders and Detentions of Iraqis by War-Criminal Chimp_junta, now "sours" on Bush's new plan for Iraq

The New York Times "sours" on Bush's new plan for Iraq

By Bill Vann
19 November 2003

In its lead editorial of November 16, entitled “Iraq Goes Sour,” the New York Times decries the decision of the Bush administration to move up its time-table for handing over political power to a US puppet regime in Iraq. Voicing the fear that American forces might be pulled out of Iraq “prematurely,” the newspaper advances its own recommendations for salvaging the US occupation.

The editorial reflects the mood of crisis that is gripping the American ruling elite as it confronts the prospect of a debacle in the face of a growing movement of national resistance in Iraq, combined with mounting opposition to the war at home.

“It’s a bit cynical to say that the plan is to toss the whole hot potato to whatever Iraqis are willing to grab it. But the White House thinking is veering close,” the Times writes.

Instead, the newspaper proposes that the White House “toss the whole hot potato” into the lap of the United Nations. It chides the Bush administration for “doggedly refusing to take the only realistic next step—asking the United Nations to take over nation-building.”

In reality, the US administration is unwilling and unable to divest itself of the Iraqi quagmire. It is stuck in a morass of its own making, confronting insoluble contradictions that flow from a predatory war carried out on false pretenses and in violation of international law. The price for this criminal enterprise is being paid by the Iraqi people, whose dead and wounded number in the tens of thousands, and by American soldiers, whose casualties number close to 9,000, including at least 422 dead.

The Times’ characterization of the new US plan as “tossing” power to the Iraqis is part of a disingenuous campaign by the administration and the media to create the illusion that the Bush administration is on the verge of extricating itself from the Iraqi morass by ceding authority to a new provisional government.

Pressure for the Bush White House to initiate a change in course has come from a number of directions. First and foremost is the mounting losses that the Iraqi resistance has inflicted on US forces—nearly 60 US troops killed in the first two weeks of November alone, with the downing of two Black Hawk helicopters claiming the lives of 17 soldiers on Saturday—and their impact on the US public’s support for the war. Bush’s handlers increasingly fear that unless the US offers at least the illusion of an “exit strategy,” the administration could be defeated at the polls next year.

Secondly, the Quisling “Governing Council” that Washington installed in Iraq has proven not only useless, but an outright impediment to US policy. Divided among themselves and without any substantial support among the Iraqi people, the constituent elements of the council could agree only on their desire to continue the US occupation and, if possible, get a share of the nearly $20 billion that Washington intends to spend in the “reconstruction” of the country.

The council declared itself at an impasse in the principal task assigned by its US patrons—the preparations for the drafting of a new Iraqi constitution. Moreover, it cut across US aims when it rejected the deal that had been reached by Washington and Ankara to deploy Turkish troops.

Far from a restoration of Iraqi sovereignty and an end to the occupation, the new plan would install an unelected regime utterly dependent on US firepower and funding. The process by which the new regime is to be created—a complicated series of town and provincial council meetings—is to unfold under the thumb of the US occupation authorities, ensuring that their chosen Iraqi agents are selected.

The first aim of this exercise is to declare that the occupation has ended and US forces have been transformed into a “military presence” requested by the new “sovereign” government.

A second, though by no means unimportant, consideration is that a supposedly sovereign regime will have legal authority to sign off on deals already prepared in Washington to auction off privatized sectors of the Iraqi economy to US-based multinationals and turn over effective control of Iraq’s oil fields to US energy conglomerates.

This political charade is to be accompanied by a massive intensification of violence and repression—a process that is already underway in Iraq. For the first time since Bush declared an end to “major combat” last May, US F-16 fighters carried out air strikes Tuesday, hitting targets near the town of Samara in central Iraq. In other areas of the country, satellite-guided bombs, attack helicopters, AC-130 Specter gunships, tanks and heavy artillery have been unleashed against what Pentagon spokesmen refer to as “terrorist lairs” and hideouts—in reality, people’s homes, industrial facilities and businesses.

This use of inordinate and largely ineffectual firepower—designed in large part to boost the plummeting morale of the US soldiers—has succeeded only in antagonizing wider layers of the Iraqi population. But it is only the first step. Washington is preparing to utilize combined detachments of US troops, newly trained Iraqi paramilitaries and the militias of the collaborationist groups to carry out a killing spree along the lines of the infamous Operation Phoenix in Vietnam.

This is the real content of what has been dubbed “Iraqification.”

In the Times’ editorial indictment of the present course of the Bush administration in Iraq, it should be noted, there is not even a hint of opposition to the turn by the US military to mass murder and repression.

What of the “only realistic next step” proposed by the Times editorial board—turning over “nation-building” to the UN? The Times’ editors overlook the fact that the Iraqi resistance has already forced the UN to evacuate virtually all of its personnel from the country. After the August suicide bombing of its Baghdad headquarters, the international body has shown little inclination to return any time soon.

Nor is there any reason to believe that the UN’s formal assumption of political oversight would dampen nationalist resistance. For most Iraqis, such a transfer would amount to putting lipstick on the pig, providing an international cover for a continuing US occupation.

For its part, the Bush administration has steadfastly opposed UN control both as a matter of principle—resisting any international interference in its unilateral use of military force and its right to wage “preemptive” war—and out of regard for the mercenary interests of its corporate backers like Halliburton and US oil and telecommunications companies. The administration does not want any international body determining who gets the contracts for exploiting Iraqi oil or who assumes control of other profitable sectors of the country’s economy.

For the Bush White House to turn control over to the UN now would be an admission that its entire policy in Iraq has failed. It knows, moreover, that such a handover could be consummated only at the price of significant concessions to economic rivals that opposed the war, particularly France, Germany and Russia.

Thus the Times’ “only realistic next step” reveals itself to be little more than whistling in the dark.

Much of the Times editorial consists of a rambling and utterly dishonest rehashing of the “weapons of mass destruction” claims advanced by the Bush administration as the pretext for the war. “It’s useful, at this point, to look back and see how we got here,” it states.

The problem, if the editorial is to be believed, was primarily a matter of intelligence failures. Both the Clinton and the Bush administrations, we are told, operated on the basis of CIA reports that “were basically worst-case scenarios of what the Hussein regime might have been up to.” It adds: “That was apparently a mistake, if an understandable one.”

Under the Bush administration, the editorial continues, the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction “seems to have been hyped further.” The newspaper blames this largely on the Pentagon’s reliance on information from Iraqi exiles, most notably Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress. Similarly, the failure of the Pentagon to prepare for the resistance US forces have faced since the invasion is blamed on the fact that “the Defense Department and the president’s security advisers believed the reassurances of Mr. Chalabi...”

This is self-serving nonsense. The problem with US intelligence was not that it was faulty, but that it was falsified. Had such “errors” at the CIA and the Pentagon cut across US geopolitical interests, they would have been swiftly corrected.

What the Times account deliberately obscures is that the Bush administration and decisive sections of the US ruling elite wanted a war against Iraq to secure control over the second-largest oil reserves in the world and create a firm base for the projection of US power throughout the Middle East. They set out to browbeat and terrorize the US population into accepting their war, using phony scare stories about terrorist ties and WMD.

As for Chalabi, if the convicted bank embezzler turned Iraqi patriot had not existed, the warmongers in the Pentagon would have had to invent him—and they largely did. It was widely recognized that the “intelligence” provided by the Iraqi National Congress was worthless, but it was promoted because it fed the propaganda drive for a war that had already been decided on.

In their potted review of the lead-up to the war, the Times editors evince a remarkable degree of false modesty. They entirely leave out their own role in the dissemination and even concoction of phony intelligence, as well as their prominent part in providing rationalizations for the criminal enterprise.

The Times senior correspondent, Judith Miller, was a leading journalistic source for stories about alleged Iraqi WMD. The Times published her lurid stories, even when they could only cite US military officials who subjected them to prior censorship. It was later revealed that the “exclusive” source for most of Miller’s scoops was none other than Ahmed Chalabi.

The newspaper’s foreign affairs columnist, Thomas Friedman, spent the months leading up to the war as well as the seven months since providing every conceivable justification and alibi for the conquest and occupation of Iraq. He has lied with abandon, apparently not noticing that his assertions in one column contradicted those in another. Thus he wrote prior to the invasion that the war was justified by America’s need to control Iraqi oil, and declared in the war’s aftermath that it had nothing to do with oil. He claimed in one of his pre-war screeds that military action was justified by Iraqi development of WMD—which he proposed to uncover through the abduction of Iraqi scientists—and declared in a post-war piece that the failure to find WMD was besides the point, because it was really a “war of choice” to spread democracy.

The hands of the editorial writers are no less dirty. In the run-up to the war they justified a US invasion, while advising the Bush administration to seek United Nations sanction for the attack.

In an editorial published February 23, a month before the invasion, the newspaper stated: “Although many Americans are puzzled about why the Bush administration chose to pick this fight now, it’s not surprising that in the wake of September 11, the president would want to make the world safer, and one of his top priorities would be eliminating Iraq’s ability to create biological, chemical and nuclear weapons.”

Barely six weeks ago, the same editorial board was echoing the Bush administration line that the war was waged for the benefit of the Iraqi people. As a result of the US occupation, the Times wrote, Iraq might become “a freer and happier country in coming years,” and a “focal point for the evolution of a more peaceful and democratic Middle East.”

Now the Times bemoans the disaster resulting from the very policies it previously supported. Iraq has gone “sour,” it declares, inadvertently admitting that it once considered the US invasion and occupation of a defenseless country to have been “sweet.”

The inevitable path ahead involves deepening tragedy and increased bloodshed for both the Iraqi people and the young Americans in uniform forced to carry out the Bush administration’s criminal policy. The Times and its editors bear no small share of responsibility for this catastrophe. Their complicity is shared by the Democratic Party and the erstwhile liberal establishment as a whole.

The only realistic alternative to the present carnage in Iraq—the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all US troops—can be realized only through the emergence of an independent political movement of the masses of working people in struggle against the political and social system that gave rise to this war.

Link...The New York Times "sours" on Bush's new plan for Iraq

Monday, November 17, 2003

Fucker Tarlson (CNN Crossfire Liar) Eats a Little Canadian Crow! (What a Fucking Liar!) "End Quote"

***Angry viewer writes to CNN's Crossfire program***

Dear Crossfire/Paul Begala or James Carville:

I took part in a recent online "chat" with Dr. Howard Dean where the question about improving relationships with our foreign allies and Canada was asked. On November 6, Crossfire's Tucker Carlson thought he could mangle the reply Dr. Dean provided, take it out of context, and get a few chuckles!

It worked. A few laughs! But a liar always being a liar, just as a rat can always smell his own hole, Fucker's unethical approach to journalism and slapstick commentary can be expected to be only good for one thing: Laughs!

Worse, it would seem that Begala let the little son of a bitch get away with it!!

The Exchange follows, along with the facts. An actual transcript of both events. No one expects any lying pubbies to apologize or to suck up to what they do. I believe, at the very least, Paul and James can fight fire with fire.

I would hope you two gentlemen, on the left, get with the program and start lying, misquoting, quoting out of context, and using sheer gibberish to grab a laugh here and there at the expense of the most mendacious, criminal cabal ever to be placed in our White House by the black vote (Clarence Thomas).

Here, the tricky, arrogant Fucker Tarlson cracks funny:

CARLSON: Well, not every successful presidential candidate in American history has had extensive foreign policy experience. Bill Clinton didn't. Neither did George W. Bush. It didn't seem to matter at the time.

This year, though, with a war against terrorism under way, it does matter, which may explain why Democratic front-runner Howard Dean has spent so much time recently trying to convince voters that he knows something about the rest of the world. This morning, for example, Dean participated in an online chat with Washington Post.com.

Asked how he'd repair relations with Canada and the rest of the world, Dean replied this way -- and, keep in mind, this is a verbatim quote -- "I have a long-standing relationship with Canada, both because my kids have spent numerous weekends playing hockey there and because I have appeared on Canadian talk shows many times" -- end quote. <----Liar Carlson's 'end quote'
(LAUGHTER)

And now the real question and answer from the WashingtonPost.com transcript:

Montreal, Quebec, Canada: U.S. relations with Canada have gone through some tough times under the Bush administration. How do you feel you can repair relations between the U.S. and their neighbor to the north, and for that matter the whole international community?

Howard Dean: I have a long standing relationship with Canada both because my kids have spent numerous weekends playing hockey there and because I have appeared on Canadian talk shows many times. Repairing our relationship with Canada requires the same solution that repairing our relationships with the rest of the world requires, and that is the removal of a president whose arrogance and contemptuousness for others overrides the respect that is necessary between parties to conduct international relations.

(The Real and Honest-->END QUOTE)

As an educator and English professor, I have very little use for the kind of idiotic hyperbole the righties utilize to create their ignorant humor. But if that is the game they want, Paul and James should deliver!

And as for Mr. Fucker Tarlson, your transition to PBS may be somewhat rocky. They don't take as well to right-wingers who LIE as does CNN. Take off your polyester poptop and let's see if that will make you shine.

Dan McCleod, PhD

Pearland, TX 77581


US WHORE media Supports Death Camps, Mass Murder, and MORE Shock & Awe in Iraq--OH yea. That's how to win!

US media sanctions campaign of atrocities in Iraq

By Patrick Martin
17 November 2003

The visible disarray of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy, in the wake of a series of military-political disasters—the shooting down of helicopters, suicide bombings, the mortar attacks on US occupation headquarters in the “Green Zone” in central Baghdad—is a turning point in the war in Iraq.

No one should think that the administration’s “exit strategy” from Iraq will involve a precipitate withdrawal. On the contrary, all indications are that the White House and Pentagon are preparing an onslaught of military violence against the resistance in Iraq that will include the most barbaric methods, including mass killings and the establishment of concentration camps for suspected opponents.

One way of gauging the plans being discussed at the highest levels of the administration is to review certain commentaries that have appeared in the US media in recent weeks urging a more violent and wide-ranging program of counterinsurgency in Iraq. These columns and editorials are not so much aimed at American public opinion—that campaign will come when the circumstances are ripe for it—as at shoring up the administration’s own morale and preparing the ruling elite as a whole for the horrific measures that will be undertaken.

The spearhead of this media campaign is the Washington Post, the leading daily in the US capital, which has emerged as the most ferocious and bellicose supporter of victory in Iraq among those journals formerly identified with political liberalism.

In an October 29 editorial, headlined “The Ramadan Offensive,” the Post compared recent events in Iraq to the 1968 Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War, which proved to be a turning point in the US defeat. While the nationwide offensive launched during the Vietnamese new year holiday (Tet) was a military defeat for the insurgents, the Post argued, it led to a decisive loss of public support for the war. The danger was that the series of attacks launched by the Iraqi resistance during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan could have the same political significance.

“...[I]n light of the steady escalation of enemy attacks, the question is whether US forces have developed the tactics and drawn on the resources necessary for the job. More troops, or more troops able to carry out counterinsurgency operations, would surely help,” the editorial argued. “Waging a more effective campaign of counterinsurgency and reconstruction is the only responsible way to respond to the enemy’s Ramadan offensive.”

A week later, the Post published two further commentaries, one in the name of Arizona senator John McCain, the former Vietnam POW and leading advocate of sending more US troops to Iraq.


Iraq and Vietnam

“Iraq is not Vietnam,” McCain declared. “There is no popular, anti-colonial insurgency in Iraq. Our opponents, who number only in the thousands in a country of 23 million, are despised by the vast majority of Iraqis... These murderers cannot carry the banner of Iraqi nationalism, as Ho Chi Minh did in Vietnam for decades.”

(It is a notable irony that McCain and others who deny the parallels between Vietnam and Iraq invariably pay tribute to the mass support and popular legitimacy of the Vietnamese liberation fighters. However, at the time, while the Vietnam conflict was raging, US government officials generally described the National Liberation Front (NLF)/Vietcong in the same terms that Bush & Co. use for today’s Iraqi resistance—i.e., as terrorists, assassins, murderers, supporters of the “dictator” Ho Chi Minh, etc.)

McCain continued: “We lost in Vietnam because we lost the will to fight, because we did not understand the nature of the war we were fighting and because we limited the tools at our disposal.”

These are words worth pondering. In what way did the US government limit the tools employed by the military in Vietnam? These included more than 500,000 troops, thousands of warplanes, saturation bombing of both the north and south of the country, more bomb tonnage that was used in all theaters of World War II combined, napalm, Agent Orange and other toxic chemicals, and the most advanced electronic monitoring and booby-trapping available at the time.

The only weapons in the US arsenal not used—“smart” weapons, fuel-air explosives and other such weapons not yet being developed—were the atomic and hydrogen bombs. Those weapons were not used, not so much because of a self-restraint applied from Washington over their genocidal impact, but because of the clear danger that the Soviet Union and China, both possessed of similar armaments, might retaliate in kind.

McCain concludes with a correct observation about the imbecility of the administration’s claims that “Iraqization” is a viable strategy for the war. “If the U.S. military, the world’s best fighting force, cannot defeat the Iraqi insurgents, how do we expect Iraqi militiamen with only weeks of training to do any better?” he asks. His conclusion is that the Bush administration should deploy at least another full division in Iraq, “giving us the necessary manpower to conduct a focused counterinsurgency campaign across the Sunni Triangle that seals off enemy operating areas, conducts search-and-destroy missions and holds territory.”

On the same day, a column by the Post’s principal foreign columnist, Jim Hoagland, also called for such an intensive campaign of military reprisals. Hoagland bemoaned the fact that from May 1 through November 8, 149 American soldiers had been killed by hostile fire in Iraq, while zero Iraqis had been executed or imprisoned for those attacks.

Again, this remark deserves some consideration. Why should Iraqis firing on American troops be tried as criminals and imprisoned or executed? The United States invaded their country. The war never came to an official end. The government of Saddam Hussein did not surrender, it simply went into hiding. US military officials—most recently the top US commander in Iraq, General Ricardo Sanchez—routinely refer to the ongoing conflict as a war. Iraqis captured while engaged in armed resistance to the US occupation are therefore prisoners of war, entitled to treatment as POWs under international law and the Geneva Convention.

Hoagland, a longtime supporter of the exile groups like the Iraqi National Congress of Ahmed Chalabi, calls for the Pentagon to make use of these forces against the resistance: “[T]he occupation authorities should immediately empower Iraqi militias and other local security forces to help hunt down and deal with the ex-Baathists who form the core of the insurgency.” This amounts to supporting the establishment of an Iraqi version of the Latin American death squads formed under US auspices in the 1970s and 1980s to exterminate leftist guerrillas and political activists.

The Post columnist bemoans the US military’s fixation with winning over public opinion in the Sunni-populated region north and west of Baghdad, where the guerrilla attacks have been concentrated. Hoagland argues that the Sunni population as a whole must be made to take responsibility, because they “seem to have willingly become the sea in which the insurgent fish swim.”

He concludes with a piece of sarcasm directed against the military command’s alleged preoccupation with convincing, rather than coercing, the Sunnis: “Emphasizing the wonders of democracy will have much less immediate effect on them than will emphasizing the price they will have to pay for continuing to let the killer fish swim in their midst.”

Hoagland does not spell out in detail what that price will be. For that, and for sheer bloodthirstiness, one has to turn, on the one hand, to the New York Times—the erstwhile mouthpiece of establishment liberalism—and, on the other, to the media empire of Rupert Murdoch, the ultra-right proprietor of Fox television and a stable of newspapers worldwide, including the New York Post.

In its Sunday, November 16, edition, the Times carried a column by Max Boot, also a frequent contributor to the right-wing editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal.

Boot begins by acknowledging that the grievous losses suffered by US forces in Iraq this month “lends credence to critics who see parallels with Vietnam.”

He goes on to assert that the US can “learn important lessons from that earlier war about how to deal with the insurgency.”

In particular, Boot advocates that the US military occupation reprise the methods employed in Operation Phoenix in Vietnam. This CIA-Special Forces operation employed assassination squads that hunted down and killed some 26,000 suspected supporters of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front, including political activists, village leaders, workers and farmers.

In addition to mass killing, Boot proposes torture as the appropriate instrument for bringing “democracy” to Iraq.” Iraqis, he says, should be recruited for this dirty work.

“Our military—which is court-martialing an Army lieutenant colonel who fired his pistol into the air to scare an Iraqi suspect into divulging details of an imminent attack—may simply be too Boy Scoutish for the rougher side of a dirty war,” writes Boot. “Iraqis who suffered under Saddam Hussein’s tyranny likely feel no such compunctions.”

On November 5, Murdoch’s New York Post carried a column by retired colonel Ralph Peters, a military commentator who is frequently published in the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times and other major dailies.

Peters starts his column with the ritual assertion that the occupation of Iraq is going “vastly better than the media suggests,” then outlines a program of action on the ground that presupposes the opposite—that the US faces an opposition so widespread and powerful that only the bloodiest of measures can be successful.

“First,” Peters argues, “we need to stop pandering to the Sunni-Arab minority that spawns terror and revels in atrocity. Aspects of our occupation policy have been naively one-sided—all carrot, no stick.

“We need to have the guts to give at least one terrorist haven a stern lesson as an example to the others. Fallujah is the obvious choice.

“If the populace continues to harbor our enemies and the enemies of a healthy Iraqi state, we need to impose strict martial law. Instead of lavishing more development funds on the city—bribes that aren’t working—we need to cut back on electricity, ration water, restrict access to the city and organize food distribution through a ration card system.”

This program of starvation and oppression is to be applied to a city of 450,000 people—about the size of Cleveland, Ohio, or Atlanta, Georgia—with predictable consequences in terms of civilian casualties.

Peters also advocates the economic strangulation of the Sunni-dominated region—where about 5 million of Iraq’s 23 million people live—by awarding Iraq’s oil wealth exclusively to the other population groups. The northern oil fields should be handed over to the Kurds, while the southern oil fields go to the Shiites, leaving the Sunnis with “a disarmed, resource-poor” region in the center of the country.

Finally, Peters draws a broader lesson from the experience of Iraq. The United States will undoubtedly be invading and occupying other countries in the future, he says, and it must prepare accordingly.

“We’re overdue to take a lesson from the Romans and the British before us and recognize the value of punitive expeditions,” he declares. “Exemplary punishment may be out of fashion, but it’s one of the most enduringly effective tools of statecraft. Where you cannot be loved, be feared.”

Does Peters advocate the methods the Romans used against Carthage—leveling the city and sowing the soil with salt so that nothing would ever grow again? Or perhaps the tactics of the British against rebellious tribesmen in Iraq in the early 1920s, when Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill ordered the use of warplanes that machine-gunned desert oases and dropped poison gas on the insurgents?

Peters omits from his list of examples a more recent and notorious practitioner of the “punitive expedition”—the Nazi regime in World War II, which carried out atrocity after atrocity in the name of retribution against resistance fighters. But it is to methods like those of the Gestapo and the Waffen SS that the US occupation in Iraq will increasingly turn.

Link....US media sanctions campaign of atrocities in Iraq