Friday, May 07, 2004
Iraq Nightmare: Sy Hersh:
Hersh, our Treasure, is doing follow-up to his story-breaking New Yorker article. Hersh’s many articles have chronicled the unethical, the outrageous, the incompetence, the lies of this Invasion/Occupation. decision to go to war based on falsehoods, exposed the Pakistan nuclear connection (w/ North Korea, amongst others), and broke this story.
From an interview w/ Bill O’Reilly:
First of all, it's going to get much worse. This kind of stuff was much more widespread. I can tell you just from the phone calls I've had in the last 24 hours, even more, there are other photos out there. There are many more photos even inside that unit. There are videotapes of stuff that you wouldn't want to mention on national television that was done. There was a lot of problems.
There was a special women's section. There were young boys in there. There were things done to young boys that were videotaped. It's much worse. And the Maj. Gen. Taguba was very tough about it. He said this place was riddled with violent, awful actions against prisoners. http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/
Juan Cole, Middle East expert at the U. of Michigan, offers:
The prison abuse scandal has deeply harmed the political standing of the Americans, who have been campaigning against Muqtada and his movement on the grounds that they are thuggish and abuse people and harm Iraqi human rights. Hamza Henawi reports. ''For those who thought the United States respected human rights and championed freedom, the picture should be very clear now,'' Abbas al-Robai, a close al-Sadr aide, said about the Abu Ghraib scandal. Iraqis' aversion to the United States, he added, was somewhat reduced after Saddam's removal but ''now, it's stronger than any time before.'' '
Meanwhile, former Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani warned the Americans via al-Hayat not to invade Najaf. He said if the Americans would agree to leave Iraq, Iran would pledge to cooperate in ensuring stability as it had done, he said, in Afghanistan. www.juancole.com
Comment from Sidney Blumenthal:
Bush has created what is in effect a gulag. It stretches from prisons in Afghanistan to Iraq, from Guantánamo to secret CIA prisons around the world. There are perhaps 10,000 people being held in Iraq, 1,000 in Afghanistan and almost 700 in Guantánamo, but no one knows the exact numbers. The law as it applies to them is whatever the executive deems necessary. There has been nothing like this system since the fall of the Soviet Union. The US military embraced the Geneva conventions after the second world war, because applying them to prisoners of war protects American soldiers. But the Bush administration, in an internal fight, trumped its argument by designating those at Guantánamo "enemy combatants". Rumsfeld extended this system - "a legal black hole", according to Human Rights Watch - to Afghanistan and then Iraq, openly rejecting the conventions. http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1210588,00.html
Rummy-
Though the Acting Pres should’ve been impeached, (whoops, that’s Nader’s position), for now, the call is for Rumsfeld to resign. Some conservatives have deserted him, war advocate Tom Friedman called for resignation in Thursday’s Times.
Bush, though, has a quandary. The Democrats would hopefully use a confirmation process for a new Secretary to be an opportunity to review the whole sickening policy failure- the lies, the lack of preparation /incompetence, etc. So, Bush-Cheney may want to ‘tough it out.’
Republican congressional “action”
It was almost humorous to see the House of Representative being pushed to pass a resolution that would condemn “those few” who mistreated/abused/tortured Iraqi prisoners. So much for investigations!
The Republican-controlled House of Representatives hoped to pass a resolution condemning "those few" who mistreated Iraqi prisoners, said U.S. Rep. Deborah Pryce of Ohio, a member of the Republican leadership. http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=Z3KZOO0BQ5YS0CRBAEKSFFA?type=worldNews&storyID=5051590§ion=news
White House and the Press
Former sports journalist Keith Olbermann, now of MSNBC’s Countdown, reports that the White House has sought to shape his program by dispatching questions that should be asked of his guest, Joseph Wilson, new author and former ambassador whose wife was outed as a CIA agent by as yet undetermined Administration figures. (The investigation continues.)
Olbermann asked Wilson if he was surprised that such interference had occurred.
No, I‘m not surprised at all. I tell you this administration has tried to manage and direct the news from the very beginning. As I point out in the book, they have made the lives of journalists very unpleasant. One journalist said he was afraid to go to print because he might end up in Guantanamo, which I take to be a metaphor for being cut out. Another journalist said, "I‘ve got kids in a private school and a mortgage to pay." So I‘m not surprised at all. http://www.suburbanguerrilla.blogspot.com/2004_05_02_suburbanguerrilla_archive.html#108378937009777210
One Such Prisoner, Amer al-Saadi
Jonathan Steele of the Guardian chronicles what happened to one noteworthy captive. Amer al-Saadi is the British-educated scientist who had been Iraq’s link to the UN inspectors prior to the invasion. When captured, he stated that the Iraqis had destroyed its WMDs in the 1990’s. Since then he’s been held in solitary confinement.
Yet, astonishingly, Dr Saadi does not know of their change of mind or of the political fallout their views have caused in western countries. He is like a lottery winner who is the last person to be told he has hit the jackpot. Held in solitary confinement in an American prison at Baghdad's international airport, Dr Saadi is denied the right to read newspapers, listen to the radio, or watch television. http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1209418,00.html
Expensive (Peaking) Oil-Krugman
Columnist Krugman begins to address the oil issue, pointing out that growing demand and peaking production means trouble. He doesn’t address what must be done to avoid major world-wide disruption, only noting that oil will be more expensive.
The collision between rapidly growing world demand and a limited world supply is the reason why the oil market is so vulnerable to jitters. Maybe we'll get through this bad patch, and oil will fall back toward $30 a barrel. But if that happens, it will be only a temporary respite.
In a way it's ironic. Lately we've been hearing a lot about competition from Chinese manufacturing and Indian call centers. But a different kind of competition — the scramble for oil and other resources — poses a much bigger threat to our prosperity.
So what should we be doing? Here's a hint: We can neither drill nor conquer our way out of the problem. Whatever we do, oil prices are going up. What we have to do is adapt. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/07/opinion/07KRUG.html?pagewanted=print&position=
To learn more about the realities of what’s coming, Terry Gross [Fresh Air] had a revealing interview with the informative Paul Roberts, author of The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World. Listen at http://freshair.npr.org/day_fa.jhtml;jsessionid=LB3T141OQARLNLA5AINSFFQ?todayDate=current
Rising Cost of Utilities:
Buried in the business section of Friday’s Washington Post comes this warning of significant rises.
The electricity bills that arrive at many large offices, condominium and apartment buildings in the Maryland suburbs in August will carry stunning price increases of 30 to 50 percent, adding to the region's burden of higher energy costs, utility and industry officials confirm
The sharp rise in electricity rates is adding to a general escalation in energy prices over the past two years that has shown up most obviously at gasoline pumps. The cost of fuels purchased by U.S. consumers in March was 39 percent higher than in March 2002, with no immediate relief in sight, economists say. The reasons include war-fed tensions in the Persian Gulf, a stressed energy infrastructure of pipelines and transmission networks, and shrinking output from aging U.S. natural gas reservoirs. No corner of the energy market has escaped the rising tide. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6893-2004May6.html
9/11 Oddity:Taped ‘testimony’ destroyed
What to make of this? Fodder for paranoia, or just incompetence?
At least six air traffic controllers who dealt with two of the hijacked airliners on Sept. 11, 2001, made a tape recording that same day describing the events, but the tape was destroyed by a supervisor without anyone making a transcript or even listening to it, the Transportation Department said in a report today.
The taping began before noon on Sept. 11 at the New York Air Route Traffic Control Center, in Ronkonkoma, on Long Island, where about 16 people met in a basement conference room known as "the Bat Cave" and passed around a microphone, each recalling his or her version of the events a few hours earlier.
But officials at the center never told higher-ups of the tape's existence, and it was later destroyed by an F.A.A. official described in the report as a quality-assurance manager there. That manager crushed the cassette in his hand, shredded the tape and dropped the pieces into different trash cans around the building, according to a report made public today by the inspector general of the Transportation Department.
The tape had been made under an agreement with the union that it would be destroyed after it was superseded by written statements from the controllers, according to the inspector general's report. But the quality-assurance manager asserted that making the tape had itself been a violation of accident procedures at the Federal Aviation Administration, the report said. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/06/national/06CND-TAPE.html?hp
Polls and Spin: It’s not been as bad as in 2000, but the double standard- the press being more kindly to Bush than Kerry, is most evident. Remembering that, one might be surprised to see that Kerry is not in such ‘trouble’ as has been portrayed.
The Rasmussen Reports Presidential Tracking Poll has had Kerry ahead for the past four days, unprecedented in these weeks. The Quinnipiac national poll has a dead heat, the Wall Street Journal/NBC poll has Bush’s negatives at an all-time high, etc.
It’s only May.
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/Presidential_Tracking_Poll.htm http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB108380597660303603-IJjeoNmlaN3mpupanmGbquGm4,00.html http://www.dailykos.com/user/Paleo
Advice for Kerry:
(1) Stop targeting the tax cuts for those with incomes of $200,000 and up. Instead, chase the super rich, the top 1/10 of the top 1%.. That’s where the real theft has occurred. http://www.fairnessintaxes.org/pages/howthemegarich.html
(2) Iraq: If you mirror Bush’s ‘stay the course’, then you encourage support for Nader or any other alternative voice that recognizes this policy to be a failure; if you call for less troops, you are a ‘quitter’. So, recall 1952 when Eisenhower promised to end the Korean stalemate- ‘I will go to Korea’.- with incumbent Truman about 10 points below Bush’s level of approval, and opponent Stevenson trapped into merely echoing Truman.
Briefs:
Disney did Michael Moore a favor by refusing to release his new movie. However skillful his Fahrenheit 911 is (cataloguing the links between the Bushes and some notable families in Saudi Arabia, including the bin Ladens), it now has additional buzz.
Pat Tillman: A football player quits to go to Afghanistan and Iraq. Call him noble (not a typical footballer), call him naïve (fodder for the Bush policy based on lies), but don’t make him a hero. As his brother noted at his service, "Pat isn't with God. He's f -- ing dead. He wasn't religious. So thank you for your thoughts, but he's f -- ing dead.'' And, as Charles Pierce (msnbc.com) noted, “iconization can be the worst form of forgetting.”
-R
Hersh, our Treasure, is doing follow-up to his story-breaking New Yorker article. Hersh’s many articles have chronicled the unethical, the outrageous, the incompetence, the lies of this Invasion/Occupation. decision to go to war based on falsehoods, exposed the Pakistan nuclear connection (w/ North Korea, amongst others), and broke this story.
From an interview w/ Bill O’Reilly:
First of all, it's going to get much worse. This kind of stuff was much more widespread. I can tell you just from the phone calls I've had in the last 24 hours, even more, there are other photos out there. There are many more photos even inside that unit. There are videotapes of stuff that you wouldn't want to mention on national television that was done. There was a lot of problems.
There was a special women's section. There were young boys in there. There were things done to young boys that were videotaped. It's much worse. And the Maj. Gen. Taguba was very tough about it. He said this place was riddled with violent, awful actions against prisoners. http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/
Juan Cole, Middle East expert at the U. of Michigan, offers:
The prison abuse scandal has deeply harmed the political standing of the Americans, who have been campaigning against Muqtada and his movement on the grounds that they are thuggish and abuse people and harm Iraqi human rights. Hamza Henawi reports. ''For those who thought the United States respected human rights and championed freedom, the picture should be very clear now,'' Abbas al-Robai, a close al-Sadr aide, said about the Abu Ghraib scandal. Iraqis' aversion to the United States, he added, was somewhat reduced after Saddam's removal but ''now, it's stronger than any time before.'' '
Meanwhile, former Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani warned the Americans via al-Hayat not to invade Najaf. He said if the Americans would agree to leave Iraq, Iran would pledge to cooperate in ensuring stability as it had done, he said, in Afghanistan. www.juancole.com
Comment from Sidney Blumenthal:
Bush has created what is in effect a gulag. It stretches from prisons in Afghanistan to Iraq, from Guantánamo to secret CIA prisons around the world. There are perhaps 10,000 people being held in Iraq, 1,000 in Afghanistan and almost 700 in Guantánamo, but no one knows the exact numbers. The law as it applies to them is whatever the executive deems necessary. There has been nothing like this system since the fall of the Soviet Union. The US military embraced the Geneva conventions after the second world war, because applying them to prisoners of war protects American soldiers. But the Bush administration, in an internal fight, trumped its argument by designating those at Guantánamo "enemy combatants". Rumsfeld extended this system - "a legal black hole", according to Human Rights Watch - to Afghanistan and then Iraq, openly rejecting the conventions. http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1210588,00.html
Rummy-
Though the Acting Pres should’ve been impeached, (whoops, that’s Nader’s position), for now, the call is for Rumsfeld to resign. Some conservatives have deserted him, war advocate Tom Friedman called for resignation in Thursday’s Times.
Bush, though, has a quandary. The Democrats would hopefully use a confirmation process for a new Secretary to be an opportunity to review the whole sickening policy failure- the lies, the lack of preparation /incompetence, etc. So, Bush-Cheney may want to ‘tough it out.’
Republican congressional “action”
It was almost humorous to see the House of Representative being pushed to pass a resolution that would condemn “those few” who mistreated/abused/tortured Iraqi prisoners. So much for investigations!
The Republican-controlled House of Representatives hoped to pass a resolution condemning "those few" who mistreated Iraqi prisoners, said U.S. Rep. Deborah Pryce of Ohio, a member of the Republican leadership. http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=Z3KZOO0BQ5YS0CRBAEKSFFA?type=worldNews&storyID=5051590§ion=news
White House and the Press
Former sports journalist Keith Olbermann, now of MSNBC’s Countdown, reports that the White House has sought to shape his program by dispatching questions that should be asked of his guest, Joseph Wilson, new author and former ambassador whose wife was outed as a CIA agent by as yet undetermined Administration figures. (The investigation continues.)
Olbermann asked Wilson if he was surprised that such interference had occurred.
No, I‘m not surprised at all. I tell you this administration has tried to manage and direct the news from the very beginning. As I point out in the book, they have made the lives of journalists very unpleasant. One journalist said he was afraid to go to print because he might end up in Guantanamo, which I take to be a metaphor for being cut out. Another journalist said, "I‘ve got kids in a private school and a mortgage to pay." So I‘m not surprised at all. http://www.suburbanguerrilla.blogspot.com/2004_05_02_suburbanguerrilla_archive.html#108378937009777210
One Such Prisoner, Amer al-Saadi
Jonathan Steele of the Guardian chronicles what happened to one noteworthy captive. Amer al-Saadi is the British-educated scientist who had been Iraq’s link to the UN inspectors prior to the invasion. When captured, he stated that the Iraqis had destroyed its WMDs in the 1990’s. Since then he’s been held in solitary confinement.
Yet, astonishingly, Dr Saadi does not know of their change of mind or of the political fallout their views have caused in western countries. He is like a lottery winner who is the last person to be told he has hit the jackpot. Held in solitary confinement in an American prison at Baghdad's international airport, Dr Saadi is denied the right to read newspapers, listen to the radio, or watch television. http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1209418,00.html
Expensive (Peaking) Oil-Krugman
Columnist Krugman begins to address the oil issue, pointing out that growing demand and peaking production means trouble. He doesn’t address what must be done to avoid major world-wide disruption, only noting that oil will be more expensive.
The collision between rapidly growing world demand and a limited world supply is the reason why the oil market is so vulnerable to jitters. Maybe we'll get through this bad patch, and oil will fall back toward $30 a barrel. But if that happens, it will be only a temporary respite.
In a way it's ironic. Lately we've been hearing a lot about competition from Chinese manufacturing and Indian call centers. But a different kind of competition — the scramble for oil and other resources — poses a much bigger threat to our prosperity.
So what should we be doing? Here's a hint: We can neither drill nor conquer our way out of the problem. Whatever we do, oil prices are going up. What we have to do is adapt. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/07/opinion/07KRUG.html?pagewanted=print&position=
To learn more about the realities of what’s coming, Terry Gross [Fresh Air] had a revealing interview with the informative Paul Roberts, author of The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World. Listen at http://freshair.npr.org/day_fa.jhtml;jsessionid=LB3T141OQARLNLA5AINSFFQ?todayDate=current
Rising Cost of Utilities:
Buried in the business section of Friday’s Washington Post comes this warning of significant rises.
The electricity bills that arrive at many large offices, condominium and apartment buildings in the Maryland suburbs in August will carry stunning price increases of 30 to 50 percent, adding to the region's burden of higher energy costs, utility and industry officials confirm
The sharp rise in electricity rates is adding to a general escalation in energy prices over the past two years that has shown up most obviously at gasoline pumps. The cost of fuels purchased by U.S. consumers in March was 39 percent higher than in March 2002, with no immediate relief in sight, economists say. The reasons include war-fed tensions in the Persian Gulf, a stressed energy infrastructure of pipelines and transmission networks, and shrinking output from aging U.S. natural gas reservoirs. No corner of the energy market has escaped the rising tide. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6893-2004May6.html
9/11 Oddity:Taped ‘testimony’ destroyed
What to make of this? Fodder for paranoia, or just incompetence?
At least six air traffic controllers who dealt with two of the hijacked airliners on Sept. 11, 2001, made a tape recording that same day describing the events, but the tape was destroyed by a supervisor without anyone making a transcript or even listening to it, the Transportation Department said in a report today.
The taping began before noon on Sept. 11 at the New York Air Route Traffic Control Center, in Ronkonkoma, on Long Island, where about 16 people met in a basement conference room known as "the Bat Cave" and passed around a microphone, each recalling his or her version of the events a few hours earlier.
But officials at the center never told higher-ups of the tape's existence, and it was later destroyed by an F.A.A. official described in the report as a quality-assurance manager there. That manager crushed the cassette in his hand, shredded the tape and dropped the pieces into different trash cans around the building, according to a report made public today by the inspector general of the Transportation Department.
The tape had been made under an agreement with the union that it would be destroyed after it was superseded by written statements from the controllers, according to the inspector general's report. But the quality-assurance manager asserted that making the tape had itself been a violation of accident procedures at the Federal Aviation Administration, the report said. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/06/national/06CND-TAPE.html?hp
Polls and Spin: It’s not been as bad as in 2000, but the double standard- the press being more kindly to Bush than Kerry, is most evident. Remembering that, one might be surprised to see that Kerry is not in such ‘trouble’ as has been portrayed.
The Rasmussen Reports Presidential Tracking Poll has had Kerry ahead for the past four days, unprecedented in these weeks. The Quinnipiac national poll has a dead heat, the Wall Street Journal/NBC poll has Bush’s negatives at an all-time high, etc.
It’s only May.
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/Presidential_Tracking_Poll.htm http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB108380597660303603-IJjeoNmlaN3mpupanmGbquGm4,00.html http://www.dailykos.com/user/Paleo
Advice for Kerry:
(1) Stop targeting the tax cuts for those with incomes of $200,000 and up. Instead, chase the super rich, the top 1/10 of the top 1%.. That’s where the real theft has occurred. http://www.fairnessintaxes.org/pages/howthemegarich.html
(2) Iraq: If you mirror Bush’s ‘stay the course’, then you encourage support for Nader or any other alternative voice that recognizes this policy to be a failure; if you call for less troops, you are a ‘quitter’. So, recall 1952 when Eisenhower promised to end the Korean stalemate- ‘I will go to Korea’.- with incumbent Truman about 10 points below Bush’s level of approval, and opponent Stevenson trapped into merely echoing Truman.
Briefs:
Disney did Michael Moore a favor by refusing to release his new movie. However skillful his Fahrenheit 911 is (cataloguing the links between the Bushes and some notable families in Saudi Arabia, including the bin Ladens), it now has additional buzz.
Pat Tillman: A football player quits to go to Afghanistan and Iraq. Call him noble (not a typical footballer), call him naïve (fodder for the Bush policy based on lies), but don’t make him a hero. As his brother noted at his service, "Pat isn't with God. He's f -- ing dead. He wasn't religious. So thank you for your thoughts, but he's f -- ing dead.'' And, as Charles Pierce (msnbc.com) noted, “iconization can be the worst form of forgetting.”
-R
