To always err on the side of life

One year after the death of Terri Schiavo, and one day after the release of Jill Carroll, it is perhaps worth remembering the shooting of journalist Giuliana Sgrena, and the death of Italian secret agent Nicola Calipari in March of 2005, by U.S. troops. Imagine the reaction if Carroll had been shot by heroic U.S. forces after her release. How would this fit with the statement by George W. Bush that we should try “to always err on the side of life?”

200,000 dead from Bush’s war of unprovoked aggression in Iraq, a top (war crime) ally slaughtered, and he recommends trying “to always err on the side of life.”

Always err on the side of life: I guess that was what Cheney was doing when he blasted his hunting buddy in the face with his Italian shotgun.

Terror B U.S.

Let us recall today the Casey/CIA-organized car bomb assassination attempt against Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah in Lebanon, in March of 1985. It killed 80 and wounded nearly 200 innocent civilians. Exactly the sort of thing that most people mean by terrorism.

80 people murdered under the auspices of the U.S. government, and no (public?) investigation.

According to Bob Woodward in his book The Veil, this was outsourced through the offices of then Saudi ambassador to the U.S., Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and contracted through the then head of Saudi intelligence, (and now Saudi ambassador to the U.S.) Prince Turki bin Faisal al Saud.

Under the doctrine that those who harbor terrorists are just as guilty as the terrorists, it follows that both the U.S. and the Saudis are guilty for harboring Prince Turki, and that the U.S. is guilty of terrorism for continuing to "harbor" the C.I.A.

U.S. immigration as a right of return

With 1 million demonstrating in L.A. against making felons of illegal immigrants, and 300,000 in Chicago, and with the senate now taking up the issue, it is worth considering that Latino(a) presence in the U.S. can be viewed as a “right of return”, given that nearly 90% of Mexicans are of Amerindian descent. Americans have no business excluding the original inhabitants of the country from the country.

(From the wikipedia: “Mexico is racially and ethnically diverse. According to the CIA World Factbook, about 60% of the population is mestizo (mixed Amerindian and European), and another 30% is Amerindian or predominantly Amerindian.”)

Potemkin Puppet

In his recent book of interviews with David Barsamian, Imperial Ambitions, Noam Chomsky reiterates several of the central arguments he’s been making now for decades:

1. That mass media in the U.S. function as a highly effective propaganda system.

2. Within the propaganda system, the sins of the powerful are either excused or positively praised, whereas the sins of state enemies are denounced vehemently.

3. One of the central functions of the intellectual in a system like ours is to practice the hypocrisy mentioned in point 2.

A case in point: contrast the media’s handling of the Abdul Rahman, the Afghan convert to Christianity, and that of Abdur Sayed Rahman, (see the CIC post for March 8, 2006) who has spent years in the U.S. torture facility at Guantanamo Bay for the crime of having a name similar to the terrorist Abdur Zahid Rahman (not really all that different from the Christian convert.)

The case of Abdur Sayed Rahman has already been consigned to the media Gulag of human rights organizations.

This example is tricky since Hamid Karzai has been deputized to sainthood by American Power, and so it is the Afghan judiciary that must be to blame for possibility of executing Abdul Rahman, not Karzai.

Karzai is not only an American puppet, but oddly exerts little control beyond Kabul. In effect, Karzai is a Potemkin Puppet.

Death and Taxis

Why doesn't the press report all the good things that are happening in Iraq?

Perhaps, because when they are not busy getting their heads blown off a la Bob Woodruff, they can't afford the cab fare (i.e. $35,000 for the 6 miles from Baghdad to the airport.)

Weapons of Mass Destruction Used in Terrorist Attack on America after 9/11

There is a widespread misperception that "there has not been another terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11." (For example CNN, 2004. New York Review of Books, 2006.) This, or a similar formulation, is repeated so often one could be forgiven for believing it.

The problem is, it is totally untrue.

There is, to my knowledge, only one time that the U.S. has been attacked by terrorists with weapons of mass destruction: the anthrax attacks on the U.S. Senate, prominently on Senators Daschle, and Leahy. It should be emphasized that the senate attacks used weaponized anthrax, constituting a weapon of mass destruction. This was in October of 2001.

You would think people would remember.

Why has this attack virtually vanished from public consciousness?

Perhaps because it was proven early on that the source of the attack was the U.S. government, specifically, "the original source [of the terrorist material] had to have been USAMRIID" (U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease in Fort Detrick, Maryland.)

At a bare minimum USAMRIID failed to adequately police its own stockpiles of WMD, for which then, the U.S. government and the U.S. military are explicitly responsible.

A remarkable exercise in enforced amnesia.

His Cluelessness-in-Chief in Cleveland

On the same day Juan Cole described U.S. involvement in Tal Afar as one the ten worst catastrophes to befall Iraq in the past year, GW (his Cluelessness-in-chief) Bush hailed it as a U.S. success. Who's right? My money is on the guy who did not give a "Mission Accomplished" speech on May 1, 2003.

Cole excerpt:

"4. The US military used Kurdish and Shiite troops to attack the northern Turkmen city of Talafar in August. Kurdish troops, drawn from the Peshmerga militia, were allowed to paint lasers on targets in the city, which were then destroyed by the US air force. Entire neighborhoods were destroyed, and much of the population was displaced for some time. Shiite troops and local Shiite Turkmen informants were used to identify and interrogate alleged Sunni insurgents. Turkey was furious at the attack on ethnically related Turkmen and threatened to halt its cooperation with the US. Although the attack was allegedly undertaken to capture foreign forces allegedly based in the city, only 50 were announced apprehended. The entire operation ended up looking like a joint Kurdish-Shiite attack on Sunni Turkmen, backed by the US military. Turkmen and Kurds do not generally get along, and Turkmen accuse Kurds of wanting to ethnically clense them from Kirkuk. The entire operation was politically the worst possible public relations for the US in northern Iraq, and seems unlikely to have put a signficant dent in the guerrillas' capabilities."

His Cluelessness-in-Chief in Cleveland

On the same day Juan Cole described U.S. involvement in Tal Afar as one the ten worst catastrophes to befall Iraq in the past year, GW (his Cluelessness-in-chief) Bush hailed it as a U.S. success. Who's right? My money is on the guy who did not give a "Mission Accomplished" speech on May 1, 2003.

Cole excerpt:

"4. The US military used Kurdish and Shiite troops to attack the northern Turkmen city of Talafar in August. Kurdish troops, drawn from the Peshmerga militia, were allowed to paint lasers on targets in the city, which were then destroyed by the US air force. Entire neighborhoods were destroyed, and much of the population was displaced for some time. Shiite troops and local Shiite Turkmen informants were used to identify and interrogate alleged Sunni insurgents. Turkey was furious at the attack on ethnically related Turkmen and threatened to halt its cooperation with the US. Although the attack was allegedly undertaken to capture foreign forces allegedly based in the city, only 50 were announced apprehended. The entire operation ended up looking like a joint Kurdish-Shiite attack on Sunni Turkmen, backed by the US military. Turkmen and Kurds do not generally get along, and Turkmen accuse Kurds of wanting to ethnically clense them from Kirkuk. The entire operation was politically the worst possible public relations for the US in northern Iraq, and seems unlikely to have put a signficant dent in the guerrillas' capabilities."

Nayirah. Lemmings. WMD: No News is Good News.

"Lemming" populations go through rapid growths and subsequent crashes that have achieved an almost legendary status, largely because of the Walt Disney Pictures film, White Wilderness, which was produced in 1958 and reappeared on television at regular intervals for many years afterwards. White Wilderness popularized, using staged footage, the myth that during population booms Norway Lemmings become suicidal and leap en masse off cliffs into the sea. For this reason, the term "lemming" is often used in slang to denote those who mindlessly follow the crowd, even if destruction is the result."

Nayirah. Hill and Knowlton. Al Haideri. Rendon. Lemmings. Truth.

World Oil's Corrupt Control

According to Robert Baer (former CIA), "five extended dysfunctional families own about 60 percent of the world's oil reserves..."

A back of the envelope calculation puts the value of this at $100 trillion (assuming $50 a barrel oil.) By way of comparison, that amounts to about 9 years of U.S. total economic output.

This fact suggests a degree of political and economic power that is barely imaginable.

Stealing Iraqi Oil --- liberating Iraq

CBS/60 Minutes noted that nearly $9 billion was totally unaccounted for in the "reconstruction" of Iraq. Custer Battles was found guilty for $3 million of this in fraud. To put this in perspective, imagine that $9,000 had been stolen. The whereabouts of $3 worth of that total has now been located. Now what about the missing 99.9% of the money.

Also, since much of the missing money was from Iraqi government oil revenues, it looks like this war really was about stealing Iraq's oil (albeit circuitously.)

"Liberating Iraq" was Bush code for liberating Iraqis from their oil.

Illegal British nuclear shipments to Israel

This story is not getting nearly as much coverage as Iran's nuclear programs, but it is unclear why. Apparently, the entire British government was subverted in the process of providing plutonium, among other things, to Israel. The world needs to know exactly how unauthorized nuclear shipments could take place in order to safeguard against such unauthorized shipments, potentially to terrorists, in the future.

A free press would be all over this story.

Woodruff news blackout eases

Only three days after CIC's call for the news blackout to end, good news. Woodruff is starting to walk and talk. Let's hope the blackout is over.

Republicans support forced abortion

Pity the poor people on the Christian right who think they are opposing abortion when they are in fact supporting it in the guise of DeLay/Abramoff and congressional Republicans.

The larger point is that any government that has the right to force a woman not to have an abortion claims, in that act, the right to force women to have abortions.

Pro-choice is the only true pro-life position.

United States of Unpersons

The case of Abdur Sayed Rahman renews the term "unperson".

Dubai Ports World's terrorism against workers

One facet of the Dubai ports deal (DPW’s takeover of several major U.S. ports) that has been little considered is that unions and strikes are banned in the U.A.E., and that 80% of the population of the U.A.E. are foreigners, i.e. not citizens. Many of these are “virtual prisoners.”

Stop the news blackout on Bob Woodruff

I’m just so worried about Bob Woodruff, and the news blackout on him has only increased my fears.

Shortly after the bombing and ambush that injured him about a month ago, it was reported that he “will be weaned off a breathing tube”: but subsequent news reports have never actually stated that he is now off the breathing tube. Early reports said he “has increasingly shown signs of consciousness,” but subsequent reports have never mentioned him actually regaining consciousness (based on Google News searches, March 3, 2006., only 3 hits for Bob Woodruff and consciousness, only 6 for "breathing tube.")

The news blackout on this story should be lifted in order to ease people's fears about this widely loved and admired news anchor, the first in American history to be severely imaged in a war zone.

It's worth remembering, Israel created Hamas

Bit hypocritical of Israel not to deal with Hamas, given that they created it.

Iraq: The Bottom Line

How many people realize the Iraq war was fought to put the people responsible for the bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon (the Dawa party) in charge of Iraq?

They say 90% of U.S. troops think we're there to punish Saddam for his role in 9/11. What if they realized we're really there to reward Jaafari and company for murdering 240 Marines?