Maggie, bless her, asked why C.I. didn't cover KPFA's The Morning Show because "they talked about Iraq today." Well, (a) there's not time for everything and (b) no, they really didn't.
Peter Hart was one of two guests and he did try to talk about Iraq. But for some reason they teamed him with Paul Waldman who was on to talk about the lack of balance in the guests for morning's shows. For some reason, this turned into a discussion of Al Gore. Peter Hart was pretty much left out of the discussion. (Though, it should be noted, FAIR has long charted the lack of balance on the Sunday chat and chews.) Paul Waldman didn't say anything wrong and I enjoyed much that he spoke of (I think all, but I may be forgetting something). But it wasn't an Iraq discussion. Hart was supposed to talk about the lead up to the illegal war and how the press sold it. He really wasn't given the time to do so. It was a lively segment but it wasn't about Iraq (and, again, Hart was basically ignored). I have no idea why it was billed as being about Iraq. If Hart had been given the time, my guess is his point would be that voices calling for an end to the war are shut out from the Sunday chat & chews. Instead, with Waldman, it was all about Dems shut out. That's not surprising because Media Matters is an admitted partisan group. And there's a place for that. Good for them. There are more than enough groups that are doing that for the Republicans from the right. But FAIR's supposed to be non-partisan. FAIR has, in the past, raised the issue of why is it all Beltway guests, so I would assume Hart would have spoken of how insular the whole thing is -- a point that whether it's an elected Dem or elected Repube doesn't address. But he didn't get to talk.
Paul Waldman was a good guest and I hope they'll bring him back on. But that wasn't an Iraq segment. I didn't discuss the segment with C.I. but I'm sure our opinion is the same on that. Abu Ghraib Maggie didn't ask about. Democracy Now! did a segment on that. It was okay, I guess. But the fact was Naomi Klein was announced on air yesterday as a guest today. Naomi Klein is huge favorite of the community. When Klein wasn't on, you could forget about Democracy Now! getting a mention. It would have just enraged members and C.I. wasn't about to do that. I was glad that C.I. said, "I'm not issuing a retraction." Nor should one be needed. It was announced on air. Jess told me there were a ton of e-mails complaing that they had turned on the show (viewers get it before those of us who listen to it on radio do) and C.I. held the 2nd entry this morning until the show started to see if Klein was mentioned in the opening. She wasn't. Like C.I. wrote, "Take it up with the program." (Actually, C.I. wrote "Apologies to members. Visitors, take it up with the program.") I wouldn't have offered that. It was announced. Jess said the only ones griping at C.I. (as opposed to griping to C.I.) were visitors. But to mention it in the snapshot today would have been a huge mistake because visitors and members were upset about it. I don't think people get how much Klein's work has held up. While she's worked on her book, I think people have gone back and read her old stuff on Iraq and see how it holds up. (You can't say that about everyone.) So when it was announced that she was going to be on and the topic would obviously be Iraq, this was a big deal. When it didn't come to be, people were angry.
Someone e-mailed me (Jess passed it on) saying Alfandery couldn't announce it four times. Yes, she did. Three during The Morning Show, once in the news break that preceeds the first broadcast of DN! on KPFA. I was really angry when I wrote and if that's not clear, I'll take the fall. But it was announced four times by her.
Frances Fox Piven, Sumner pointed out, not Francis Fox Piven. So let me note that. I don't go back and change. I had an e-mail a few months back about one of the reviews I did where I thought I was typing "gum" but had instead typed "gun." I'm at the airport and checking my purse to be sure I packed my "gun." I think that's funny. I don't have a gun. But I still think it's funny. I think me, standing in the airport, about to board a plane, with a "gun" is actually funny. Or as I always say, "It is what it is."
Am I still pissed at KPFA? I was asked that in e-mails and in person. Yeah. More disappointed today as no one wants to tackle MoveOn. That includes Leigh Ann Caldwell who notes that Lynn Woolsey isn't backing down to them but fails to note that MoveOn's being called out everywhere. I'm also disappointed that neither John Stauber or Sheldon Rampton have been booked to discuss their recent piece (pieces for Stauber) about MoveOn.
KPFA needs to serve the KPFA audience. And anytime they act scared (which is how I'm seeing it) of calling out an organization that the audience already knows it a joke, they betray the audience. When it's an issue of war and peace, it's all the more important that they call it considering their history. But they won't do it.
I also love how I'm hearing Al Gore jaw bone in the Congress right now (I'm listening to the evening news). I don't believe Jimmy Carter had a speech broadcast when he was addressing the Middle East. No, he didn't speak to Congress, he spoke elsewhere. I'm not sure why everything that happens in Congress is suddenly news? Maybe Nancy Sinatra can testify about how much she loves the Hell's Angels, to Congress, and KPFA can cover that?
I thought Gore's film was static -- he didn't direct it. I think he's a populizer of ideas, I don't think he's a leader (I'm referring to the environment) and I'm getting really tired of hearing how wonderful he is on the environment. That wasn't true from 1992-2000. Now they're covering testimony that took place on Monday -- read"THIS JUST IN! THE NEW EXCUSE!" and "It's not 'lying,' it's 'alining'"-- Wally and Cedric's joint-post from Monday about this testimony. We get far shorter soundbytes than when Gore was speaking, but this is the more important story.
I don't dislike Al Gore. But I don't worship him. Reality "curbs my enthusiasm." And I really did think that, as a film, that documentary didn't cut it. I was bored. I was yawning. I was wishing they'd offer something up. The documentary on Ralph Nader was the better film -- it had movement and was an actual film where the Gore thing played like a taped lecture.
I'm at C.I.'s and have to praise the red raspberries and blueberries I'm eating right now. These are really wonderful. I haven't had raspberries in years. I'd forgotten how much I loved them.
I taped Bonnie Faulkner today but haven't listened yet. I had to shoot some photos so I put in a tape as I was headed out the door and then headed for C.I.'s after I finished taking pictures. I promise I'll write about it tomorrow (mainly because I intend to listen as soon as I get home).
Here's C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"
Wednesday, March 21, 2007. Chaos and violence continue; Kristin M. Hall covers the latest on "one of the worst atrocities in the Iraq war" and she and co-workers at AP are some of the few who can hold their heads high because most everyone took a pass; but the key thing about today is that it's the day after March 20th and we're seeing what Rebecca long ago termed the "Baby cried the day the circus came to town" coverage: It settles, then it picks ups and leaves.
We'll open by noting something worthy. Pacifica Radio deserves praise for a program, which originated at WBAI, noting the 4th anniversary with a two hour special program American War in Iraq: The Fraud, the Folly, the Failure featuring speeches, interviews and discussions. Daniel Ellsberg spoke of the opposition during the Vietnam era and the importance of the opposition. "They say it will take a lot more courage than we've seen," Ellsberg said, "to end this war." Bernard White hosted the two-hour program with David Occhiuto. Howard Zinn shared, "It's just about four years since the United States invaded and attacked Iraq with an enormous arsenel of weaponry . . . what was called 'shock and awe'. And so we've had four years to evaluate what we have accomplished. Have we brought democracy or freedom to Iraq in these four years? Have we brought peace or security to Iraq? I think it's quite clear -- we've brought the opposite. We've brought choas and death and misery to Iraq." He also noted the US Congress' comedy of ineptitude as they debate "timetables for withdrawal" when each day brings more of our soldiers will be dead, more amputees, more Iraqi children dead, more Iraqi families forced from their homes, more of those shameful scenes that we've seen of US soldiers breaking down the doors of an Iraq family. There's something absurd about a timetable for withdrawal given what we are doing. If someone broke into your home, smashed everything, terrorized your children, would you give them a timetable to leave? No. . . . They say, and this to me has always been ridiculous, if we withdrawal we will create chaos and violence. Well what do we have there now?"
We'll note a few more of the voices featured.
Elizabeth de la Vega: "I think it's critical that we address the legal and political terrain that led up to the war because it's never really been addressed. . . . What we know, based on public information, now is that various members of the Bush administration. including the president. set about -- at least starting openly in September 2002 -- to persuade Congress by doing this marketing campaign aimed at both Congress and the public. Which, of course, if they had been truthful (in stating their grounds for war and so forth), there would be no fraud but there is really overwhelming evidence that the administration was deceitful in almost every regard about whether that had in fact decided to go to war, what their reasons were in a more general sense, but also the details they offered in support of their arguments for example that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted nuclear weapons, and that he had chemical weapons and so forth. Virutally every area of the marketing campaign involved both general deceits and very specific deceits that were made over and over again.
Dahlia S. Wasfi: "In the spirit that all human lives carries equal, immeasurable worth, we need to stop our practice of seperate bodycounts. There are at least 4,000 American dead. The Pentagon's tally counts only those service men and women who die in the sands of Iraq. There are at least 4,000 American dead. But this was the death toll of Iraq after the first few hours of our campaigns to shock and awe them. I'm quite sure that a report estimating 655,000 Americans dead due to our bloody occupation would mandate an end to the slaughter. Why do we value Iraqi blood less? And with all do respect, it is a discriminatory practice to identify dead Americans as husbands, wives, sisters, brothers, sons and daughters, and not do the same for Iraqis. They are all human beings. The difference is that the Americans followed illegal orders and are guilty of the Nuremberg crime against peace. Iraqis, 7,000 miles away, are guilty of being born Iraqi. The death toll we need to mark is the human toll, 659,000 and counting. The civilians at the other end of our weapons don't have a choice but American soldiers have choices. And we know the truth, our soldiers don't sacrifice for duty, honor, country, they sacrifice for Kellogg Brown and Root. Our soldiers, they don't fight for America, they fight for their lives and their buddies beside them because they are in a war zone. They're not defending our freedoms. They're laying the foundation for fourteen permanent military bases to defend the freedoms of Exxon Mobile and British Petroleum. They're not establishing democracy. They're establishing the basis for an economic occupation to continue after the military occupation has ended. I recently received this message from a friend in Baghdad who found my Congressional testimony on the internet. "Dear Dahlia, I have tried to write you back but I have been so busy with moving my mother and two brothers out of Baghdad. They are now living with my relatives in another city I am still in Baghdad as I can't leave my job. My father was kidnapped on December 16th of 2006 couple of blocks away from my family's house. He was taken by men who were using Glock pistols. The same pistols used by the new police force we are training" so don't talk to me about civil war "We have paid the ransom money but it has been over a month and there has been no word. As dangerous as it is I still have to go to the Baghdad morgue every week searching for the man who I owe him all my life. Just imagine the kind of mentality you have when you go there and expect to see your father on the widescreen they have displaying the bodies I am too afraid to go to the house where I was raised. The house has probably been taken by gang or militia the usual thing in Baghdad today. We are moving towards a dead end. There is no way out, no fire escape, no exit. We Iraqis are all registered on the very long list of death and nobody is exempted. Do not let your courageous voice stop." We must dare to speak out in support of the Iraqi people who resist and endure the horrific existance we brought upon them through our blood thirsty imperial crusade. We must dare to speak out in support of those American soldiers the real heroes who uphold their oath to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, including those inside the Beltway. As Lt. Watada said, and you've heard it before, To stop an illegal and unjust war the soldiers can choose to stop fighting it. The organization Iraq Veterans Against the War is comprised of young men and women with a wisdom, courage and conviction of those well beyond their years. It is these veterans, like Vietnam veterans against the war before them who know the ground truth and they are demanding that Congress support the troops by cutting the funding. That is they are demanding that Congress support the troops by cutting the funding to mandate their immediate, unconditional withdrawal. I close with a quote from Frederick Douglas: "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will." Everyone of us must keep demanding, keep fighting, keep speaking, keep struggling until justice is served.
No justice, no peace.
White and Occhiuto had a discussion with Iraq Veterans Against the War's Michael Harmon, Demond Mullins and Jason LeMieux and here's a sample of some of the discussion:
Jason: In my experience, it's largely counter-productive. At best, it's completely worthless because in the process of doing the sweeps, you supposedly cordon off an area and the troops form just one long line, however big the area is that's going to be sweeped, and they go through and search every home. Now generally speaking in the process of cordoning off the area they give whoever is in there plenty of time to either hide whatever evidence they have of resistance activity or to get out, to just exiltrate out just put down your weapons, just walk away. In my three tours we hardly ever found anything, hardly ever found any weapons, and those that we did, when we did find them, would usually be much less than we were expecting in the area and at the same time when the troops are going through and they're searching, they're usually acting in a very oppresive manner to the civilians because I mean you're in a -- you're searching peoples' homes. You know? People don't understand that. When we talk about fighting the insurgency and fighting the enemy this is in people's homes, it's in their neighorhoods it's actually people who live there that we're fighting. So troops go through and they talk directly to women, sometimes they'll actually physically touch them and push them to get them all into a room and this is all just a horribly, horribly dishonest thing to do to these people. And all it's doing is fueling the insugency. It's just creating more anger and resistance for us and making people want to fight us more. So at best it's useless and at worst, it's completely counter-productive.
Demond Mullins: Your whole life you have your parents teaching you what is right and what is wrong. What is the right way to treat people and what is the wrong way to treat people and then you're put into a situation where you have to behave violently towards people, you have to be oppressive towards people. And it's totally a mob mentality, you know? You get into character. I completely . . . I can say there were times when I was in Iraq and I was in tough situations where I completely lost myself and who I was as a person and who my parents raised me to be. And those are the moments that I look back now on, those are the moments that in retrospect I am the most embarrassed about because it was as if I was a different person and it was as if it was a whole lifetime ago that I behaved in that manner. And to be honest with myself I can't forgive myself for the way that I behaved towards people
when I was in Iraq and that's partially the reason why I'm doing the work that I'm doing.
Michael Harmon: I signed up as a "health care specialist," as the Army calls it, which turns out to be a combat medic. So I didn't sign up to really rush people's homes, I signed up to help the injured and the sick. But Geneva Conventions says they're not allowed to use medical vehicles and medical personnel for those type of activities but that was out the window over there. I used my M113 which is, our medical vehicle, it's a slightly, lightly armored, maybe like a tank, like a PC, and we smashed down gates with it. When infranty couldn't kick it in, if there was locks behind the gate, one of those bolt locks. And I was used also, like Jason was saying, to sweep areas. And it was . . . It wasn't what I signed up . . . I saw the fear on people's faces. The Americans get upset when tele-marketers call them at dinner time. Imagine if we kicked in your door and cornored you off in a little corner and rummaged through your stuff. I mean, this is not -- we're violating the rights of people. George says 'Oh, yeah, we want to give them their freedom and democracy' but yet we're not showing them that. We're showing them Nazi-ism really, that's what it comes down to.
Veronica Jarret Mackey: For me my personal experiences, I was there when the war originally broke out and also I was there in 2005 but from my personal experience, especially the first time there, my mission was to transport fuel from one military installation to another installation that was the only thing we did. We didn't enforce anything, we didn't build anything. We were just picking up fuel from one military base to another base and that was my whole mission the whole time I was there. And is it worth it? No. Is it worth just taking up something to bring it to somewhere else? No. There was no growth, no anything. So that was my personal experience. . . . When I did my mission, I had this thought in my head, "Oh my goodness I might be going out today and not coming back. I might never see my family again, I might never see my husband again, I might never see my buddy that's riding in the truck with me." We were targeted. We were hit with IEDs, small arms fire, RPGs, name it, we were hit with it on our convoys, so of course anxiety, everything mixed up together, going out not, knowing if we were going to come back."
There were other guests, other conversations. If you missed the special, you can listen to it at the WBAI archives -- Monday, 9:00 p.m., filed under "Home Fries" (the program it aired in place of) or you can listen to it at the Pacifica Radio main page.
On the special, Howard Zinn noted, "Soldiers like Ehren Watada are refusing to fight in Iraq and when more and more do that, well, maybe the war will come to an end." Elaine Pasquini (WRMEA) notes that the speaking out and opposition to the war includes the war resisters and notes how Darrell Anderson, Kyle Snyder and others have taken the issue to the people.
Watada, Anderson and Snyder are part of a movement of resistance within the military that also includes Dean Walcott, Joshua Key, Agustin Aguayo, Mark Wilkerson, Camilo Mejia, Patrick Hart, Ivan Brobeck, Ricky Clousing, Aidan Delgado, Pablo Paredes, Carl Webb, Jeremy Hinzman, Stephen Funk, David Sanders, Dan Felushko, Brandon Hughey, Corey Glass, Clifford Cornell, Joshua Despain, Katherine Jashinski, Chris Teske, Matt Lowell, Jimmy Massey, Tim Richard, Hart Viges, Michael Blake and Kevin Benderman. In total, thirty-eight US war resisters in Canada have applied for asylum.Information on war resistance within the military can be found at Center on Conscience & War, The Objector, The G.I. Rights Hotline, and the War Resisters Support Campaign. Courage to Resist offers information on all public war resisters.
In Iraq today, two events compete for attention. One is a desire for a dialogue. In an exclusive interview with the BBC, Iraq's Sunni vice president, Tareq al-Hashemi stated that talks needed to begin with all Iraqis including so-called 'insurgents' because they are "just part of the Iraqi communities." The other? First some of today's violence.
Bombings?
CNN reports that a roadside bomb in Baghdad killed a police officer and left three more wounded and another roadside bomb in Baghdad that killed two people and also injured three police officers. Reuters notes that a bombing aimed "at the headquaters of a Kurdish party" in Mosul left five dead and 40 wounded. CBS and AP note a mortar attack in Madain that claimed three lives and left ten wounded. AFP notes that the number dead from the mortar attack in al-Madain is 8 with 18 injured. Reuters notes that an attempt by Iraqi police to dispose of "a huge truck bomb near the Finance Ministry in Baghdad" resulted in 12 people being injured and "collapsed part of the main highway linking the north and south of the capital." Sinan Salaheddin (AP) reports that at least one person died in the Iraqi police's attempt to dispose of the truck bomb. AFP notes a bombing in Mosul that killed three people and one in Kirkuk that killed one person.
Shootings?
Reuters reports that "a former army brigadier and a friend" were shot dead in Falluja.
Corpses?
CBS and AP report the corpses of two police officer were discovered in Diwaniyah. Reuters notes three corpses discovered in Kut ("Shi'ite Mehdi Army militia members"). AFP reports: "On Wednesday, officials reported . . . another 33 corpses found shot and dumped in the capital."
Staying on the topic of violence, Kristin M. Hall (AP) reports on the latest regarding "one of the worst atrocities in the Iraq war" -- and she can use that language, anyone at AP can because they actually covered the story -- then and now. Yes, we're talking Abeer -- gang raped by US soldiers while her parents and five-year-old sister were murdered and then she was murdered as well. Paul Cortez and James P. Barker have already confessed in court (and been sentenced) to the part in the war crimes. Hall was reporting on Bryan Howard's trial which started today. He is thought to have been a "look out" who knew what was planned. After Howard, the next military trial will be Jesse Spielman's "scheduled for April 2." Steven D. Green, whom Cortez and Barker have portrayed as the ringleader, will be tried in a civilian court due to the fact that he had been discharged back when the story was still that 'insurgents' had attacked Abeer's home. In an update, Hall reports that Bryan Howard "pleaded guilty Wednesday to being an accessory to the rape and murder of an Iraqi girl and the slaying of her family" and "also pleaded guilty to conspiracy to obstruct justice by lying to his superior officers". We'll again note the words of Captain Alex Pickands in the August Article 32 hearing into the death of Abeer and her family: "Murder, not war. Rape, not war. That's what we're here talking about today. Not all that business about cold food, checkpoints, personnel assignments. Cold food didn't kill that family. Personnel assignments didn't rape and murder that 14-year-old little girl."
The news of another guilty plea comes at a time when Lucinda Marshall (CounterPunch) rightly notes that "issues such as the violence against women that occur as a result of militarism become all but invisble at events such as the March on the Pentagon." Marshall recommends that everyone read "Statement of Conscience: A Feminist Vision for Peace" by the Feminist Peace Network.
With all the press al-Sadr has received recently, one big topic may be why al-Maliki -- supposedly standing up to al-Sadr (yeah, right) -- did him a solid? CNN notes Moqtada al-Sadr's "top aide" -- Ahmed Shibani -- was released from jail after two years behind bars on the orders of Nouri al-Maliki. Mariam Karouny (Reuters) reports, "Shibani's release is likely to boost the standing of Maliki, a Shi'ite Islamist who relies on Sadr for political support, with the Sadrist movement which holds a quarter of the parliamentary seats in the ruling Shi'ite Alliance."
Turning to Australia, John Howard, who, try as he may, never managed to nudge ahead of Tony Blair, still remains a Bully Boy poodle. Patrick Walters (The Australian) reports that Howard, desperate to be re-elected, bellowed and blustered with statements about "The staes are extraordinarily high" and "I believe strongly that to signal our departure now would be against Australia's national interest." He's referring to Iraq. It's in Australia's national interest to be in Iraq? Well that must mean that they have 100,000 troops there. No? 50,000? No? 25,000? No? About 1,400. If it was truly important to the security of Australia, shouldn't that figure be higher? Well, he's trying hard to hold on to his office as prime minister and behind in the polls. Rod McGuirk (AP) reports that Howard "conceded Wednesday that keeping Australian troops in Iraq could cost him re-election" As Australia's ABC notes, Kevin Rudd and the Labor party support a withdrawal of Australian troops from Iraq. And AP notes that a recent poll found that 68% found Howard "arrogant" (29% found Rudd "arrogant").
Turning to the US, House Rep and 2008 presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich has stated, "This week, we have the power to cut off the funding for the war and bring our troops home. If we continue to fund the war, our troops will continue to remain in harm's way. . . . How much more time are we going to give this misguided quagmire of a war? More than 3,200 of our brave men and women have perished in a needless, selfless war that does not have an end in sight. I have a real plan in place, HR 1234, that actually has the power to bring the troops home while transitioning to an international security and peacekeeping force. The people of the United States are way ahead of Congress in wanting to get out of Iraq. We need to listen to the mandate given to us by the American people on November 7, and act now to use the money that is in the pipeline to bring the troops home." The office of US House Rep Lynn Woolsey notes, "While the Congress debates a $120 billion supplemental that would continue the occupation of Iraq through 2008, Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey (CA) today laid out her plan for a 6-month withdrawal from Iraq before the House Foreign Affairs Committee." That's HR 508 which provides for a six-month withdrawal, cancels Bully Boy's War Powers Act (that he's used to abuse the Constitution and the world ever since), say "NO" to US bases in Iraq, "return all oil licenses back to the Iraqi people . . . and establish a commission to investigate the run-up to the war."
As the Pelosi measure attracts a lot of people and organizations who never accomplished anything (there's a personal "ouch" in there for someone), Kevin Zeese (Democracy Rising) notes that Gallup has polled and -- guess what -- Congress's numbers are falling -- approval numbers -- "and the pollster speculates that the Democrats failure to 'do anything substantive' on Iraq is the likely reason why." WalkOn has supported the measure and Democracy Rising features Howard Zinn's reply: "I'm disappointed in MoveOn. We are not politicians, we are citizens. Let the politicians advocate half-way measures if they choose, but only after they have felt the full force of citizens who speak for what is right, not what is winnable in a shameful timorous Congress." And David Lindorff (This Can't Be Happening)notes: "If Democrats wanted to end the war, they could do so immediately by refusing to pass a supplemental funding measure to support it, but they don't want to do this. It's not that they fear being called unpatriotic -- hell, with 70 percent of the public wanting the war to end immediately, nobody would fault Congress for pulling the plug. . . . But ending the war would leave the Democrats without their best issue going into the 2008 national election: Bush's war. So instead of ending the war, they vote to oppose it, but then continue to fund it."
And finally, Tom Hayden takes a look back to yesterday to find meaning for today. Writing at The Huffington Post, Hayden notes: "Yes, history repeats and these days, increasingly so. For those fighting over Iraq funding today, I believe history offers useful lessons in the role of patient political organizing."
iraqehren watada
iraq veterans against the war
tom hayden
wbai
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
KPFA, I'm pissed!
Okay, I'm pissed. Sandra Lupien, on the news tonight, finally mentions John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton's article (it's in the snapshot). Now this was the first time she covered it so the "finally" refers to all day long having to hear about "the liberal group" from Alfandary and others. As Lupien noted, other than candle light vigils, MoveOn refused to post announcements about vigils. So why, on Monday, did everyone keep saying to check on MoveOn for information about local events? Alfandary said it four damn times during the two hour Morning Show. She also kept going on about "85%" voting for it and MoveOn claims three million plus members but only a little over 100,000 bothered to vote in the damn poll. So it should have been presented as, "Of the less than 10% of alleged members who bothered to vote, 85% of them supported the House leadership's proposal."
I'm also not real thrilled with Mark right now who gave a report on the evening news that was WRONG. The bill the House Leadership is pushing (and that MoveOn is backing) does not mean troops will come home on the date that's in the bill. Read the damn bill! Bully Boy can cite "national security" and ignore anything in the bill on those grounds which includes the date for withdrawal.
Mark needs to study the bill before he speaks again and I don't need to hear the words "MoveOn" on the news again. All day long, starting with Alfandary, I had to hear about "the liberal" group MoveOn supporting the Pelosi bill and then, at the very end, that Barbara Lee and Lynn Woolsey didn't support it. As though they were out of step.
It's bad enough that KPFA sold out listeners on Monday (and they did SELL OUT listeners) by sending them to that crappy website, but to continue to push that ass-wipe group is just not cutting it.
So Alfandary needs to do what Sandra Lupien was always comfortable doing when she did the newsbreaks on The Morning Show. She needs to say tomorrow, "A correction to Monday's news breaks, MoveOn didn't have the local events posted." And then she needs to explain why. And never again does KPFA need to promote MoveOn as a resource for anything other than the crappy candle light vigils they do at night. How many listeners to KPFA missed out on events during the day Monday because they went to MoveOn and didn't see anything listed?
KPFA needs to either post the events on their website or send you to an organization that carries the events.
I love KPFA but that's just bullshit. I love Kris Welch but she's another one who has to toss out MoveOn (or Daily Kos) constantly. I'm not sure, with Welch, if it's because they're "buzz words" or something else. But KPFA doesn't need to be promoting MoveOn. MoveOn is not about peace. It's a political party organization. For anti-war rallies, you send the listeners where they can get information, not to that damn MoveOn that's just going to tell them that there's a candle light vigil.
On the subject of KPFA, visitors continue to ask (in the public e-mail account at The Common Ills), why doesn't C.I. link to it? C.I. does link to it and to the archive page. C.I. does not link to any MySpace pages. That's even true of Carl Webb's page -- whom we all support. But MySpace is owned by Rupert Murdoch. KPFA has it's own page, it's linked to at The Common Ills. You will not find a MySpace page linked to at The Common Ills (or anywhere else). We don't support MySpace, we' don't exist to drive traffic that puts dollars in the pockets of Rupert Murdoch.
There's also the fact that MySpace is an embarrassment. I wasn't aware of that. I will apologize for the half-assed nature of pretty much everything I post here at my site. And I will mean it. But MySpace is nothing but a bulletin board at your local grocers. Those aren't blogs. It's "Oh, you're sexy" and all this other nonsense. Maggie's niece has a page and she was all excited that she'd gotten 120 to link to her (or whatever they call it there). I asked her to show me her page which she did. There was nothing to it. She's got two paragraphs that have been up there for six months, two paragraphs that she wrote. And then you've got all these little kids (or adults pretending) leaving "messages" that wouldn't even pass for a greeting in a high school hall.
Since I'm just making this a personal post (AlterPunk can get over it), I'll talk goings on in my building. Remember my friend who broke up with the little hustler who not only used him but also cheated on him? Well he's got new problems. He came over for a cup of tea after he got off work today and asked me how much everyone hates his new boyfriend? Completely. They hate him completely.
Why? Well, I think most aren't shocked or worried by the smell of pot, this is the Bay Area. But he's such a priss about smokers. We have two in the building. Now he can have the whole hall, upstairs and downstairs reeking of pot and doesn't give a damn. But he gets these fits where he runs up and down the halls spraying this thing he mixed himself (that makes everyone's eyes burn and their throats hurt) and cussing about "smokers." (Repeat, he smokes pot. I'm not really sure where he gets off complaining about other smokers.) Yesterday, he was in the hall every forty minutes from nine a.m. until just after midnight spraying over and over. I was out at a protest but I heard he did the same thing while I was gone.
His nickname by some is "Street Trash." (He has an even worse nickname that I won't type here.) But he has his hissy fit as he goes around spraying over and over, where he is cursing about everyone in the building in a loud voice so they can hear him. Street Trash, which I didn't call him until yesterday when I heard him griping about me as he was spraying, doesn't have a job. So why he's out there calling me "lazy ass bitch" I have no idea. I do have a job. My studio is here, I work out of my home. So don't call me a lazy ass when you've only got a roof over your head because you're giving it up every night.
You cannot walk in to the building these days without having your eyes burn from all of his spraying. Now I didn't care about the pot smell so maybe I don't care about cigarette smell. But I don't smoke and I've never been bothered that anyone else in the building did. But he's ticked off everyone because he's going through the hall griping about us -- all of us. While I was protesting yesterday, the oldest guy here made a point of telling him if he didn't like it, maybe he should find somewhere else to live. The little punk (he's probably middle aged, but he's very short) started screaming in the hall and basically acting like he had mental problems.
So my neighbor wanted to know what he should do. I told him unless the sex was wonderful, break it off because it's going to get ugly. Ty came back with me yesterday after the protest to listen to some music and as soon as we walked in the front door he started coughing and rubbing his eyes from the fumes of the crap that punk sprays. Ty hadn't been exposed it to before and that's what happens with anyone any of us have over. We've gotten used to it to a degree. For someone new, it's a nightmare.
I asked my neighbor, "Does any cigarette smoke get in your apartment?" He said no. I said that his boyfriend didn't need to be spraying in the halls, that the halls are for everyone and, since the punk doesn't have a job and won't look for one (he promised my neighbor weeks ago that he would and he never has), he should just be keeping his ass in my neighbor's apartment.
My neighbor said, "I have the worst love life in the world."
I consoled him with my belief that after all the assholes he's had lately, he's due for a winner at some point. As with the last time I wrote about him, he's the one who told me I could write about it.
Here's C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"
March 20, 2007. Chaos and violence continue, protests continued, the state and meaning of the illegal war continues to be debated and Iraqis speak in their own voices, on their own terms.
Today on KPFA's The Morning Show, Andrea Lewis and Philip Maldari spoke with Tom Hayden and Frances Fox Piven about Iraq (Hayden has a book on Ending the Iraq War due out in June and professor Piven authored The War At Home.). Frances Fox Piven noted that it was time to "begin withdrawal immediately and we also should push for an interim authority in the area made up of other national representatives that's either nations in the area or UN authority that tries to surpress violence while we are withdrawing. We should withdraw as fast as we can. The Democrats are as timid as they are not because they don't have the support of the American people for withdrawal but because they have their eye on the 2008 election and they want to avoid any circumstancing which they can be attacked, including attacked for 'exposing the troops' or . . . adding to the 'losing' of the war, or whatever, politicans are always going to be cautious, especially in a two-party system where there is no alternative to the left of the Democratic Party so they can position themselves very moderately and still hope to gain electorally." Hayden noted that Bully Boy "wants to put the issue to the test in the 2008 presidential election as well. He wants to push it on. It's not unusual for presidents, leaders of the state, the establishment, to want to avoid losing at all costs and escalation is always the answer to losing, you just pass it along so you can say that you finished your term without losing any honor blah, blah, blah." Maldari brought up 1968 and Nixon's secret plan for getting out of Vietnam (apparently the secret plan was the threat of his own impeachment).
Piven: Certainly one of the factors leading to the pull out from South Vietnam was the military themselves who were in --
Hayden: In revolt.
Piven: . . . the GI anti-war movement was escalating, really, beginning in 1970, the prospect of losing control of the military, the prospect of this kind of international disaster certainly had a lot to do with the ultimate pull out from Vietnam. It also had a lot to do with the reluctance of the American military to go to war on that scale again. Instead we had a lot of small wars.
Hayden spoke of the importance of setting a deadline and planning for an orderly departure.
and observed, "No one in the media has ever called for the withdrawal of American troops or setting the deadline for withdrawal." Which is a good time to drop back to the start of the month when John R. MacArthur (writing for the Providence Journal) noted that withdrawal of US troops also means planning who gets withdrawn -- as in Vietnam, there are many who've aided US troops and who among them will be allowed (most have already been promised that they will be) to leave with the US military. The issue of the financial costs for the illegal war was addressed and how the losses were more complex than some might realize.
Piven: I think that the official figures bring the costs of the wars in Afgahnistan and Iraq up to around 400 billion at this point and yes they are cutting Medicad and Medicare. And they stopped building low-cost housing. There's a very long list of domestic needs that are going unmet. I think it's a little more complicated than that. All that's true but at the same time I think it's also true that their motives for going into war in the first place had a lot to do with the way war and war time enthusiasm would allow them, at least for a time, to manipulate the American public. They depicted a great menace overseas. They evoked all kind of foreign dragons that nobody could asses in terms of their own experience or their own perceptions, And they created a lot of war like enthusiasm in the United States. And then they used that enthusiasm not only to get themselves elected -- their majority increased in 2002, to get re-elected in 2004 -- but they also used that kind of enthusiasm, and the domination of all branches of government that it gave them, to slash taxes on the very rich and to do that again and again and again. And Tom DeLay said 'nothing is more important in a time of war than cutting taxes'. And they used the war time enthusiasm to push through subsidies for the pharmaceutical companies, for the energy corporations. So . . . the domestic costs to the war are truly profound. They go beyond the simple arithmetic of 'we could have spent the money that went for Iraq on what our children need'. That's true but the war also corrupted democracy to an extent that one can choke on and also allowed them to engage in this very predatory behavior in domestic politics.
Hayden noted the polling of Iraqis and how they want troops out. (A point made in the segment, was also that it's up to the people to educate one another on what withdrawal means as opposed to what it's sometimes portrayed as. He wrote about this last week at The Huffington Post.) As time ran out, one of the most important points was made. Hayden stated, "The Baghdad government is a sectarian police state that's based on militias and death squads and that's the issue for funding should funding tax dollars go continually to that regime? That was a big issue in '73. It's a big issue today."
And that is who is being supported and the support needs to be questioned. Earlier this month, Joseph Forrest (Socialist Appeal) interviewed US war resister Darrell Anderson and asked Anderson if he thought the Democrats would be ending the war anytime soon? "No, no," Darrell Anderson replied. "If anything the Democrats will go into Iran or have a draft of something. I have no belief in Hillary Clinton or any of them, because they're all politicians. They're not going to stop the war." Anderson, who self-checked out after serving in Iraq and receiving the Purple Heart, returned from Canada last year to turn himself in and he discussed with Forrest how that went, "I went to turn myself in at Fort Knox and I found the Generals at Fort Knox, and they had the choice to either Court Marshall me or not, and I told them that they're going to have to put my uniform on me and pin my medals to my chest, put me on Court Martial, and that my whole defense is going to be talking about all the war crimes we committed, all the friends I've seen beating prisoners to death, all the times we killed innocent civilians. They told me I was going to go to jail for one to five years, and when I got to the base they started to break, saying, 'Come in quietly and we'll let you go.' I told them no. I was gonna keep talking, and I got to the base and three days later I was sent away with discharge papers, because the soldiers on the base were really reacting to me being there. They were like, 'What the hell is going on? This guy against the war and he has a purple heart.' So they released me. I guess they felt the longer I was at the base, the more trouble I was going to cause, the more soldiers would have gotten on my side, and they felt it was better for the military to get rid of me basically."
Also speaking out was US war resister Dean Walcott who is attempting to be granted refugee status in Canada. Melanie Patten (The Canadian Press) reports on his participation at the rally in Hallifax where he was received by a "cheering crowd" and declared that, "I'm not a politician I don't know the ins and outs of political theory but I do know that there's got be a better way for a nation to be free whether than us putting a gun in their face and demanding it of them."
Anderson and Walcott are part of a movement of resistance within the military that also includes Ehren Watada, Kyle Snyder, Joshua Key, Agustin Aguayo, Mark Wilkerson, Camilo Mejia, Patrick Hart, Ivan Brobeck, Ricky Clousing, Aidan Delgado, Pablo Paredes, Carl Webb, Jeremy Hinzman, Stephen Funk, David Sanders, Dan Felushko, Brandon Hughey, Corey Glass, Clifford Cornell, Joshua Despain, Katherine Jashinski, Chris Teske, Matt Lowell, Jimmy Massey, Tim Richard, Hart Viges, Michael Blake and Kevin Benderman. In total, thirty-eight US war resisters in Canada have applied for asylum.Information on war resistance within the military can be found at Center on Conscience & War, The Objector, The G.I. Rights Hotline, and the War Resisters Support Campaign. Courage to Resist offers information on all public war resisters.
Protests have been going on since Friday to demonstrate opposition to the illegal war. Yesterday, Karen Miller (Free Speech Radio News) reported on Saturday's march on the Pentagon and noted this from a speech given by Cindy Sheehan: "We're only part of the world. We're only 5% of the population and we use up to 40% of the resources. It's gotta stop. We have to share with our brothers and sisters around the world. We have to start saying, 'We have enough, do you want to have enough too?' We have to stop demonizing other people to allow our leaders to send our young people off to kill them, to send our young people off -- like my son Casey -- to die for nothing, to die for the war machine." Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!) noted Monday's protests at the New York Stock Exchange on Monday where 44 protesters were arrested and quoted Margio Farr stating, "If people sit down and they refuse to move and they create a dent in the effectivity of the market today, hopefully that will send a message to government officials that this war needs to end and that corporations have to stop profiting off of people's lives."
In the Bay Area yesterday, many actions took place. Flashpoints Nora Barrows- Friedman spoke with Antonia Juhasz who was at the San Ramon Chevron headquarters and explained, "I have been locked into two barrels since about seven o'clock this morning. We have been blockading the entrance to Cheveron's world headquaters. We've got about a 150 people and we successfully and significantly not only disrupted their business day but definately gave every employee at Cheveron a conversation piece for the day with a full protest against not only their involvement in the war but their advancement of climate chaos and a very successful action. . . . We had a funeral for the last cube of ice that just finished. We also had a tug of war between the Bush administration and Chevron oil executives and the people . . . and we're just now finishing that up. . . . We're here to talk in particular about Chevron's role in trying to steal Iraq's oil through the war and the passage of a new Iraqi oil law . . "
Brian Edwards-Tiekert reported from the protests for yesterday's The KPFA Evening News.
("It felt like a carnival at the gates to Chevron's world headquarters") and spoke with Antonia Juhasz who explained the proposed Iraqi oil legislation, "The law changes Iraq from an oil system closed to US oil companies into an oil system in which . . . American oil companies including Chevron could own and control at least two-thirds of Iraq's oil for a generation or more."
The KPFA Evening News yesterday noted actions by the Declaration of Peace at Senator Dianne Feinstein's office in San Francisco that then became a street action with at least 57 people being arrested as well as actions at Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco offices by CODEPINK and others including Sean O'Neill:
O'Neill (president of the Berkeley chapter Iraq Veterans Against the War): "I speak for the men in my platoon who do not have the opportunity to because they were killed in this pointless military adventure that we call 'Operation Iraqi Freedom.' There's the courage of those like Ehren Watada who stand on a principled, moral ground and with decency say that they will not participate in this mockery of the military and American values. But there are others who, like myself were not quite the same moral fabric, were not as strong as they are, and we went knowing that this was wrong, knowing that this was completely ineffective. We are trying to provide our experiences to you the public so that you know you are right because you are. This war is a travesty."
David Montgomery (Washington Post) reports on DC actions by Iraq Veterans Against the War where thirteen members dressed in "desert camo" as they marched "from Union Station to Arlingotn National Cementary" and "carried imaginary assault rifles, barked commands, roughly 'detained' suspected hostiles with flex cuffs and hoods -- and generally shocked frightened and delighted tourists and office workers." Operation First Casualty was the name of the action and it "aims to bring the story of the war to the American people."
Garrett Reppenhagen: "We are calling Monday's action Operation First Casualty because we believe that truth was the first casualty of this war. Our aim is to show the American public the truth of the US occupation in Iraq. It is time for the American people to know the truth so they will act to bring the troops home now."
As these and other actions take place (remember Darrell Anderson's quote), the leadership in the US House of Representatives promotes a weak measure. As Robert Knight noted in his Knight Report on KPFA's Flashpoints yesterday, the Democratic leadership "angling to extend the Republican launched war until the eve of the 2008 presidential election while running out the clock with do nothing resolutions in the House and Senate that impose no budgetary restraints or mandatory withdrawals."
Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber (Center for Media and Democracy) walk everyone through how MoveOn's recent 'polling' (of 'members'), how the 'poll' severly limited options and how the organization's leaders refuse to support US House Reps Barbara Lee, Lynn Woolsey and Maxine Waters' bill (HR 508). Rampton and Stauber write: "Politically, the Lee amendment cannot pass; fewer than 100 members of Congress are expected to vote for it. However, the same thing is true of weaker legislation that MoveOn is currently supporting, in league with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, John Murtha and David Obey. The Pelosi bill merely establishes 'benchmarks' of progress in Iraq, so that all Bush has to do is certify that he is making progress on those goals to keep funding flowing for the war. Instead of withdrawing troops this year, the Pelosi bill talks about beginning to withdraw them in March 2008. Even so, it faces united Republican opposition and is not expected to pass the U.S. Senate, even if it is approved by the House of Representatives. And even if it does pass, Bash has already said he will veto it. So why was the Democratic Party leadership so determined to prevent the Lee amendment from even coming to the floor -- and why has MoveOn.org avoided even mentioning the Lee proposal to its members?" Another question is why MoveOn is called a "liberal" organization? The organization began 'reformist' (at best), or "appeasement" (at worst and that's the label many in the Clinton White House tagged it with). The story of MoveOn is told in it's beginnings. It was an organization that came about when there was talk of impeaching then US president Bill Clinton. There were impeachment petitions gathering signatures. The people never supported impeachment and a truly liberal organization might have started a petition entitled "Nobody's Damn Business! Back The Hell Off!" Instead, MoveOn took what the Republicans were pushing for (which had a minority of public support) and said, "Censure! Don't Impeach! And Move On!" If there was a time to fight, that was it. Instead of fighting, MoveOn appeased Republican leadership and provided cover for impeachment by allowing right-wingers to claim that even 'liberals' supported some action by pointing to MoveOn's call for censure. If you found the impeachment circus ridiculous, and many Americans did, remember that the efforts were aided by some 'liberal' groups. It's worth remembering that as we find another situation where the American people (the majority) want real action on Iraq, want a timeline, want troops home. Again, MoveOn is appeasing elected leaders and MovingOn away from their supposed membership.
Military Families Speak Out, Iraq Veterans Against the War and Veterans For Peace are among the groups who have come out against the measure backed by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. And this is a good place to note Robert Parry's (Consortium News) observation, "George W. Bush and Dick Cheney may deserve the most blame for the Iraq war, but a core reality shouldn't be missed: the four-year-old conflict resulted from a systemic failure in Washingtonn -- from the White House, to congressional Republicans and Democrats, to an insular national news media, to Inside-the-Beltway think tanks."
Ron Jacobs (CounterPunch) raises another issue for the peace movment to consider, debate and discuss: whether a new umbrella organization is needed "that would emcompass the two current supposedly umbrella antiwar organizations: UFPJ and ANSWER"? It's a conversation worth having whatever your position. (The community's position is reflected in this roundtable for The Third Estate Sunday Review. United for Peace and Justice, A.N.S.W.E.R.have done wonderful work and deserve praise. New groups emerging are not a threat, they further the message and promote even more action. As for a larger umbrellas group, it's something to consider and hopefully Jacobs will return to that topic in the future.)
Providing Iraqis the chance to speak for themselves, Hilba Dawood (Free Speech Radio News) got the views of two Iraqis yesterday. A 44-year-old "businessman" in Baghdad offered that: "Americans have turned Iraq into a guinnea pig. They have tried everything in hand until they have turned Iraq into chaos. They created this chaos waiting to see who was the strongest to be in power. This is not going to work without a good plan." A 35-year-old teacher in Karbala shared, "No one is optimistic. Our people are scared. Though the bombs are a bit less frequent now. The people of Iraq are tired of the situation -- which was a lot better during Saddam's times. No one wants him back but we need security. We don't want the Americans to stay. No single side in Iraq wants them to stay."
Meanwhile the BBC reports that Iraqi police chief Abdul Hussein Al Saffe ("head of policing in Dhi Qhar province") has stated "that many of his officers were disloyal. They could not be sacked because they had political protection" and "Brigadier General Ghalib al Jaza'aere, said he had been forced to hire 300-4000 officers who were completely illiterate." This comes as Karin Brulliard (Washington Post) reports on events in Duluiyah yesterday ("45 miles north of Baghdad") where people with machine guns surrounded the police station and were told "Repent or die" -- at which point they quit the police force on the spot after which the police station was blown up.
Bombings?
CBS and AP note 5 deaths and 18 wounded in a car bombing at a bus station in Baghdad,
Reuters notes a mortar attack in southern Baghdad that claimed at least 7 lives and left 20 injured. The BBC notes that the wounded included "women and children." CNN reports, "second car bomb ripped through a commercial district in the capital's Karrada neighborhood, killing two people and wounding at least seven others. Karrada is a predominatly Shiite area in central Baghdad." Reuters notes a bombing "near a mosque" that took one life and left three wounded, while a bombing near a police station left five dead and 17 wounded.
Shootings?
Reuters notes a police officer was shot dead just outside of Kirkuk and that 39 people were killed (suspected of . . . something) by "[p]olice and tribal fighters" in Amiriya.
Corpses?
Reuters notes that a corpse was discovered in Kirkuk, one corpse was discovered in Falluja,
Today the US military announced: "Two MND-B Soldiers died when an improvised explosive device struck the unit's vehicle during a combat security patrol in a souther section of the Iraqi capital, wounding another."
This as Atef Hassan (Reuters) reports, "British troops in Iraq's southern Basra oil port pulled out of their heavily attacked base in the heart of the city on Tuesday, the first to be handed to Iraqi forces who are slowly taking control of security." Today, PTI reports that a new poll of British sentiment found that only 29% of respondents felt the illegal war was "justified" and that "nearly 60 per cent" felt it wasn't.
Yesterday, at Inside Iraq, Laith blogged: "Now and while I'm writing these words, the American troops are attacking a part of my neighborhood west Baghdad. At the same time, I got a call from my nephew that some insurgents are attacking her neighborhood south west Baghdad. I'm sure the American army knows about the insurgents but I'm sure they ignore them or let me say they allow them to do everything they want. . . . A question just jumped in my mind, Shouldn't the American go to the place where the insurgents are attacking the civilians? Shouldn't they do their duty as they say to protect Iraqis and fight terror? It looks that the American government and Mr. President Bush don't care about anything except for his own capital friends' interest. The strategy the US army follows in Iraq is not more than another lie to cheat us both Iraqis and Americans and we all, Iraqis and Americans pay the price. . . . I just hope that someone reads these words and tell the poor Americans that your soldiers are not fighting Al Qaida or the terrorists in Iraq as the military commanders claim. They are here to do their role of killing the innocents and to complete the play the politicians started since the American administration decided to get [rid] of its crazy fool agent Saddam Hussein."
Heads up -- Tomorrow on Democracy Now!, Jeremy Scahill and Naomi Klein are scheduled guests. (Scahill was on today's show as well.)
iraqehren watadadean walcottcodepinkthe kpfa evening news
kpfaantonia juhasz
flashpointsnora barrows friedman
tom haydeniraq veterans against the warfrances fox piventhe morning showthe washington postdavid montgomery
john staubersheldon ramptondemocracy now
amy goodmannaomi kleinharper's magazine
I'm also not real thrilled with Mark right now who gave a report on the evening news that was WRONG. The bill the House Leadership is pushing (and that MoveOn is backing) does not mean troops will come home on the date that's in the bill. Read the damn bill! Bully Boy can cite "national security" and ignore anything in the bill on those grounds which includes the date for withdrawal.
Mark needs to study the bill before he speaks again and I don't need to hear the words "MoveOn" on the news again. All day long, starting with Alfandary, I had to hear about "the liberal" group MoveOn supporting the Pelosi bill and then, at the very end, that Barbara Lee and Lynn Woolsey didn't support it. As though they were out of step.
It's bad enough that KPFA sold out listeners on Monday (and they did SELL OUT listeners) by sending them to that crappy website, but to continue to push that ass-wipe group is just not cutting it.
So Alfandary needs to do what Sandra Lupien was always comfortable doing when she did the newsbreaks on The Morning Show. She needs to say tomorrow, "A correction to Monday's news breaks, MoveOn didn't have the local events posted." And then she needs to explain why. And never again does KPFA need to promote MoveOn as a resource for anything other than the crappy candle light vigils they do at night. How many listeners to KPFA missed out on events during the day Monday because they went to MoveOn and didn't see anything listed?
KPFA needs to either post the events on their website or send you to an organization that carries the events.
I love KPFA but that's just bullshit. I love Kris Welch but she's another one who has to toss out MoveOn (or Daily Kos) constantly. I'm not sure, with Welch, if it's because they're "buzz words" or something else. But KPFA doesn't need to be promoting MoveOn. MoveOn is not about peace. It's a political party organization. For anti-war rallies, you send the listeners where they can get information, not to that damn MoveOn that's just going to tell them that there's a candle light vigil.
On the subject of KPFA, visitors continue to ask (in the public e-mail account at The Common Ills), why doesn't C.I. link to it? C.I. does link to it and to the archive page. C.I. does not link to any MySpace pages. That's even true of Carl Webb's page -- whom we all support. But MySpace is owned by Rupert Murdoch. KPFA has it's own page, it's linked to at The Common Ills. You will not find a MySpace page linked to at The Common Ills (or anywhere else). We don't support MySpace, we' don't exist to drive traffic that puts dollars in the pockets of Rupert Murdoch.
There's also the fact that MySpace is an embarrassment. I wasn't aware of that. I will apologize for the half-assed nature of pretty much everything I post here at my site. And I will mean it. But MySpace is nothing but a bulletin board at your local grocers. Those aren't blogs. It's "Oh, you're sexy" and all this other nonsense. Maggie's niece has a page and she was all excited that she'd gotten 120 to link to her (or whatever they call it there). I asked her to show me her page which she did. There was nothing to it. She's got two paragraphs that have been up there for six months, two paragraphs that she wrote. And then you've got all these little kids (or adults pretending) leaving "messages" that wouldn't even pass for a greeting in a high school hall.
Since I'm just making this a personal post (AlterPunk can get over it), I'll talk goings on in my building. Remember my friend who broke up with the little hustler who not only used him but also cheated on him? Well he's got new problems. He came over for a cup of tea after he got off work today and asked me how much everyone hates his new boyfriend? Completely. They hate him completely.
Why? Well, I think most aren't shocked or worried by the smell of pot, this is the Bay Area. But he's such a priss about smokers. We have two in the building. Now he can have the whole hall, upstairs and downstairs reeking of pot and doesn't give a damn. But he gets these fits where he runs up and down the halls spraying this thing he mixed himself (that makes everyone's eyes burn and their throats hurt) and cussing about "smokers." (Repeat, he smokes pot. I'm not really sure where he gets off complaining about other smokers.) Yesterday, he was in the hall every forty minutes from nine a.m. until just after midnight spraying over and over. I was out at a protest but I heard he did the same thing while I was gone.
His nickname by some is "Street Trash." (He has an even worse nickname that I won't type here.) But he has his hissy fit as he goes around spraying over and over, where he is cursing about everyone in the building in a loud voice so they can hear him. Street Trash, which I didn't call him until yesterday when I heard him griping about me as he was spraying, doesn't have a job. So why he's out there calling me "lazy ass bitch" I have no idea. I do have a job. My studio is here, I work out of my home. So don't call me a lazy ass when you've only got a roof over your head because you're giving it up every night.
You cannot walk in to the building these days without having your eyes burn from all of his spraying. Now I didn't care about the pot smell so maybe I don't care about cigarette smell. But I don't smoke and I've never been bothered that anyone else in the building did. But he's ticked off everyone because he's going through the hall griping about us -- all of us. While I was protesting yesterday, the oldest guy here made a point of telling him if he didn't like it, maybe he should find somewhere else to live. The little punk (he's probably middle aged, but he's very short) started screaming in the hall and basically acting like he had mental problems.
So my neighbor wanted to know what he should do. I told him unless the sex was wonderful, break it off because it's going to get ugly. Ty came back with me yesterday after the protest to listen to some music and as soon as we walked in the front door he started coughing and rubbing his eyes from the fumes of the crap that punk sprays. Ty hadn't been exposed it to before and that's what happens with anyone any of us have over. We've gotten used to it to a degree. For someone new, it's a nightmare.
I asked my neighbor, "Does any cigarette smoke get in your apartment?" He said no. I said that his boyfriend didn't need to be spraying in the halls, that the halls are for everyone and, since the punk doesn't have a job and won't look for one (he promised my neighbor weeks ago that he would and he never has), he should just be keeping his ass in my neighbor's apartment.
My neighbor said, "I have the worst love life in the world."
I consoled him with my belief that after all the assholes he's had lately, he's due for a winner at some point. As with the last time I wrote about him, he's the one who told me I could write about it.
Here's C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"
March 20, 2007. Chaos and violence continue, protests continued, the state and meaning of the illegal war continues to be debated and Iraqis speak in their own voices, on their own terms.
Today on KPFA's The Morning Show, Andrea Lewis and Philip Maldari spoke with Tom Hayden and Frances Fox Piven about Iraq (Hayden has a book on Ending the Iraq War due out in June and professor Piven authored The War At Home.). Frances Fox Piven noted that it was time to "begin withdrawal immediately and we also should push for an interim authority in the area made up of other national representatives that's either nations in the area or UN authority that tries to surpress violence while we are withdrawing. We should withdraw as fast as we can. The Democrats are as timid as they are not because they don't have the support of the American people for withdrawal but because they have their eye on the 2008 election and they want to avoid any circumstancing which they can be attacked, including attacked for 'exposing the troops' or . . . adding to the 'losing' of the war, or whatever, politicans are always going to be cautious, especially in a two-party system where there is no alternative to the left of the Democratic Party so they can position themselves very moderately and still hope to gain electorally." Hayden noted that Bully Boy "wants to put the issue to the test in the 2008 presidential election as well. He wants to push it on. It's not unusual for presidents, leaders of the state, the establishment, to want to avoid losing at all costs and escalation is always the answer to losing, you just pass it along so you can say that you finished your term without losing any honor blah, blah, blah." Maldari brought up 1968 and Nixon's secret plan for getting out of Vietnam (apparently the secret plan was the threat of his own impeachment).
Piven: Certainly one of the factors leading to the pull out from South Vietnam was the military themselves who were in --
Hayden: In revolt.
Piven: . . . the GI anti-war movement was escalating, really, beginning in 1970, the prospect of losing control of the military, the prospect of this kind of international disaster certainly had a lot to do with the ultimate pull out from Vietnam. It also had a lot to do with the reluctance of the American military to go to war on that scale again. Instead we had a lot of small wars.
Hayden spoke of the importance of setting a deadline and planning for an orderly departure.
and observed, "No one in the media has ever called for the withdrawal of American troops or setting the deadline for withdrawal." Which is a good time to drop back to the start of the month when John R. MacArthur (writing for the Providence Journal) noted that withdrawal of US troops also means planning who gets withdrawn -- as in Vietnam, there are many who've aided US troops and who among them will be allowed (most have already been promised that they will be) to leave with the US military. The issue of the financial costs for the illegal war was addressed and how the losses were more complex than some might realize.
Piven: I think that the official figures bring the costs of the wars in Afgahnistan and Iraq up to around 400 billion at this point and yes they are cutting Medicad and Medicare. And they stopped building low-cost housing. There's a very long list of domestic needs that are going unmet. I think it's a little more complicated than that. All that's true but at the same time I think it's also true that their motives for going into war in the first place had a lot to do with the way war and war time enthusiasm would allow them, at least for a time, to manipulate the American public. They depicted a great menace overseas. They evoked all kind of foreign dragons that nobody could asses in terms of their own experience or their own perceptions, And they created a lot of war like enthusiasm in the United States. And then they used that enthusiasm not only to get themselves elected -- their majority increased in 2002, to get re-elected in 2004 -- but they also used that kind of enthusiasm, and the domination of all branches of government that it gave them, to slash taxes on the very rich and to do that again and again and again. And Tom DeLay said 'nothing is more important in a time of war than cutting taxes'. And they used the war time enthusiasm to push through subsidies for the pharmaceutical companies, for the energy corporations. So . . . the domestic costs to the war are truly profound. They go beyond the simple arithmetic of 'we could have spent the money that went for Iraq on what our children need'. That's true but the war also corrupted democracy to an extent that one can choke on and also allowed them to engage in this very predatory behavior in domestic politics.
Hayden noted the polling of Iraqis and how they want troops out. (A point made in the segment, was also that it's up to the people to educate one another on what withdrawal means as opposed to what it's sometimes portrayed as. He wrote about this last week at The Huffington Post.) As time ran out, one of the most important points was made. Hayden stated, "The Baghdad government is a sectarian police state that's based on militias and death squads and that's the issue for funding should funding tax dollars go continually to that regime? That was a big issue in '73. It's a big issue today."
And that is who is being supported and the support needs to be questioned. Earlier this month, Joseph Forrest (Socialist Appeal) interviewed US war resister Darrell Anderson and asked Anderson if he thought the Democrats would be ending the war anytime soon? "No, no," Darrell Anderson replied. "If anything the Democrats will go into Iran or have a draft of something. I have no belief in Hillary Clinton or any of them, because they're all politicians. They're not going to stop the war." Anderson, who self-checked out after serving in Iraq and receiving the Purple Heart, returned from Canada last year to turn himself in and he discussed with Forrest how that went, "I went to turn myself in at Fort Knox and I found the Generals at Fort Knox, and they had the choice to either Court Marshall me or not, and I told them that they're going to have to put my uniform on me and pin my medals to my chest, put me on Court Martial, and that my whole defense is going to be talking about all the war crimes we committed, all the friends I've seen beating prisoners to death, all the times we killed innocent civilians. They told me I was going to go to jail for one to five years, and when I got to the base they started to break, saying, 'Come in quietly and we'll let you go.' I told them no. I was gonna keep talking, and I got to the base and three days later I was sent away with discharge papers, because the soldiers on the base were really reacting to me being there. They were like, 'What the hell is going on? This guy against the war and he has a purple heart.' So they released me. I guess they felt the longer I was at the base, the more trouble I was going to cause, the more soldiers would have gotten on my side, and they felt it was better for the military to get rid of me basically."
Also speaking out was US war resister Dean Walcott who is attempting to be granted refugee status in Canada. Melanie Patten (The Canadian Press) reports on his participation at the rally in Hallifax where he was received by a "cheering crowd" and declared that, "I'm not a politician I don't know the ins and outs of political theory but I do know that there's got be a better way for a nation to be free whether than us putting a gun in their face and demanding it of them."
Anderson and Walcott are part of a movement of resistance within the military that also includes Ehren Watada, Kyle Snyder, Joshua Key, Agustin Aguayo, Mark Wilkerson, Camilo Mejia, Patrick Hart, Ivan Brobeck, Ricky Clousing, Aidan Delgado, Pablo Paredes, Carl Webb, Jeremy Hinzman, Stephen Funk, David Sanders, Dan Felushko, Brandon Hughey, Corey Glass, Clifford Cornell, Joshua Despain, Katherine Jashinski, Chris Teske, Matt Lowell, Jimmy Massey, Tim Richard, Hart Viges, Michael Blake and Kevin Benderman. In total, thirty-eight US war resisters in Canada have applied for asylum.Information on war resistance within the military can be found at Center on Conscience & War, The Objector, The G.I. Rights Hotline, and the War Resisters Support Campaign. Courage to Resist offers information on all public war resisters.
Protests have been going on since Friday to demonstrate opposition to the illegal war. Yesterday, Karen Miller (Free Speech Radio News) reported on Saturday's march on the Pentagon and noted this from a speech given by Cindy Sheehan: "We're only part of the world. We're only 5% of the population and we use up to 40% of the resources. It's gotta stop. We have to share with our brothers and sisters around the world. We have to start saying, 'We have enough, do you want to have enough too?' We have to stop demonizing other people to allow our leaders to send our young people off to kill them, to send our young people off -- like my son Casey -- to die for nothing, to die for the war machine." Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!) noted Monday's protests at the New York Stock Exchange on Monday where 44 protesters were arrested and quoted Margio Farr stating, "If people sit down and they refuse to move and they create a dent in the effectivity of the market today, hopefully that will send a message to government officials that this war needs to end and that corporations have to stop profiting off of people's lives."
In the Bay Area yesterday, many actions took place. Flashpoints Nora Barrows- Friedman spoke with Antonia Juhasz who was at the San Ramon Chevron headquarters and explained, "I have been locked into two barrels since about seven o'clock this morning. We have been blockading the entrance to Cheveron's world headquaters. We've got about a 150 people and we successfully and significantly not only disrupted their business day but definately gave every employee at Cheveron a conversation piece for the day with a full protest against not only their involvement in the war but their advancement of climate chaos and a very successful action. . . . We had a funeral for the last cube of ice that just finished. We also had a tug of war between the Bush administration and Chevron oil executives and the people . . . and we're just now finishing that up. . . . We're here to talk in particular about Chevron's role in trying to steal Iraq's oil through the war and the passage of a new Iraqi oil law . . "
Brian Edwards-Tiekert reported from the protests for yesterday's The KPFA Evening News.
("It felt like a carnival at the gates to Chevron's world headquarters") and spoke with Antonia Juhasz who explained the proposed Iraqi oil legislation, "The law changes Iraq from an oil system closed to US oil companies into an oil system in which . . . American oil companies including Chevron could own and control at least two-thirds of Iraq's oil for a generation or more."
The KPFA Evening News yesterday noted actions by the Declaration of Peace at Senator Dianne Feinstein's office in San Francisco that then became a street action with at least 57 people being arrested as well as actions at Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco offices by CODEPINK and others including Sean O'Neill:
O'Neill (president of the Berkeley chapter Iraq Veterans Against the War): "I speak for the men in my platoon who do not have the opportunity to because they were killed in this pointless military adventure that we call 'Operation Iraqi Freedom.' There's the courage of those like Ehren Watada who stand on a principled, moral ground and with decency say that they will not participate in this mockery of the military and American values. But there are others who, like myself were not quite the same moral fabric, were not as strong as they are, and we went knowing that this was wrong, knowing that this was completely ineffective. We are trying to provide our experiences to you the public so that you know you are right because you are. This war is a travesty."
David Montgomery (Washington Post) reports on DC actions by Iraq Veterans Against the War where thirteen members dressed in "desert camo" as they marched "from Union Station to Arlingotn National Cementary" and "carried imaginary assault rifles, barked commands, roughly 'detained' suspected hostiles with flex cuffs and hoods -- and generally shocked frightened and delighted tourists and office workers." Operation First Casualty was the name of the action and it "aims to bring the story of the war to the American people."
Garrett Reppenhagen: "We are calling Monday's action Operation First Casualty because we believe that truth was the first casualty of this war. Our aim is to show the American public the truth of the US occupation in Iraq. It is time for the American people to know the truth so they will act to bring the troops home now."
As these and other actions take place (remember Darrell Anderson's quote), the leadership in the US House of Representatives promotes a weak measure. As Robert Knight noted in his Knight Report on KPFA's Flashpoints yesterday, the Democratic leadership "angling to extend the Republican launched war until the eve of the 2008 presidential election while running out the clock with do nothing resolutions in the House and Senate that impose no budgetary restraints or mandatory withdrawals."
Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber (Center for Media and Democracy) walk everyone through how MoveOn's recent 'polling' (of 'members'), how the 'poll' severly limited options and how the organization's leaders refuse to support US House Reps Barbara Lee, Lynn Woolsey and Maxine Waters' bill (HR 508). Rampton and Stauber write: "Politically, the Lee amendment cannot pass; fewer than 100 members of Congress are expected to vote for it. However, the same thing is true of weaker legislation that MoveOn is currently supporting, in league with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, John Murtha and David Obey. The Pelosi bill merely establishes 'benchmarks' of progress in Iraq, so that all Bush has to do is certify that he is making progress on those goals to keep funding flowing for the war. Instead of withdrawing troops this year, the Pelosi bill talks about beginning to withdraw them in March 2008. Even so, it faces united Republican opposition and is not expected to pass the U.S. Senate, even if it is approved by the House of Representatives. And even if it does pass, Bash has already said he will veto it. So why was the Democratic Party leadership so determined to prevent the Lee amendment from even coming to the floor -- and why has MoveOn.org avoided even mentioning the Lee proposal to its members?" Another question is why MoveOn is called a "liberal" organization? The organization began 'reformist' (at best), or "appeasement" (at worst and that's the label many in the Clinton White House tagged it with). The story of MoveOn is told in it's beginnings. It was an organization that came about when there was talk of impeaching then US president Bill Clinton. There were impeachment petitions gathering signatures. The people never supported impeachment and a truly liberal organization might have started a petition entitled "Nobody's Damn Business! Back The Hell Off!" Instead, MoveOn took what the Republicans were pushing for (which had a minority of public support) and said, "Censure! Don't Impeach! And Move On!" If there was a time to fight, that was it. Instead of fighting, MoveOn appeased Republican leadership and provided cover for impeachment by allowing right-wingers to claim that even 'liberals' supported some action by pointing to MoveOn's call for censure. If you found the impeachment circus ridiculous, and many Americans did, remember that the efforts were aided by some 'liberal' groups. It's worth remembering that as we find another situation where the American people (the majority) want real action on Iraq, want a timeline, want troops home. Again, MoveOn is appeasing elected leaders and MovingOn away from their supposed membership.
Military Families Speak Out, Iraq Veterans Against the War and Veterans For Peace are among the groups who have come out against the measure backed by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. And this is a good place to note Robert Parry's (Consortium News) observation, "George W. Bush and Dick Cheney may deserve the most blame for the Iraq war, but a core reality shouldn't be missed: the four-year-old conflict resulted from a systemic failure in Washingtonn -- from the White House, to congressional Republicans and Democrats, to an insular national news media, to Inside-the-Beltway think tanks."
Ron Jacobs (CounterPunch) raises another issue for the peace movment to consider, debate and discuss: whether a new umbrella organization is needed "that would emcompass the two current supposedly umbrella antiwar organizations: UFPJ and ANSWER"? It's a conversation worth having whatever your position. (The community's position is reflected in this roundtable for The Third Estate Sunday Review. United for Peace and Justice, A.N.S.W.E.R.have done wonderful work and deserve praise. New groups emerging are not a threat, they further the message and promote even more action. As for a larger umbrellas group, it's something to consider and hopefully Jacobs will return to that topic in the future.)
Providing Iraqis the chance to speak for themselves, Hilba Dawood (Free Speech Radio News) got the views of two Iraqis yesterday. A 44-year-old "businessman" in Baghdad offered that: "Americans have turned Iraq into a guinnea pig. They have tried everything in hand until they have turned Iraq into chaos. They created this chaos waiting to see who was the strongest to be in power. This is not going to work without a good plan." A 35-year-old teacher in Karbala shared, "No one is optimistic. Our people are scared. Though the bombs are a bit less frequent now. The people of Iraq are tired of the situation -- which was a lot better during Saddam's times. No one wants him back but we need security. We don't want the Americans to stay. No single side in Iraq wants them to stay."
Meanwhile the BBC reports that Iraqi police chief Abdul Hussein Al Saffe ("head of policing in Dhi Qhar province") has stated "that many of his officers were disloyal. They could not be sacked because they had political protection" and "Brigadier General Ghalib al Jaza'aere, said he had been forced to hire 300-4000 officers who were completely illiterate." This comes as Karin Brulliard (Washington Post) reports on events in Duluiyah yesterday ("45 miles north of Baghdad") where people with machine guns surrounded the police station and were told "Repent or die" -- at which point they quit the police force on the spot after which the police station was blown up.
Bombings?
CBS and AP note 5 deaths and 18 wounded in a car bombing at a bus station in Baghdad,
Reuters notes a mortar attack in southern Baghdad that claimed at least 7 lives and left 20 injured. The BBC notes that the wounded included "women and children." CNN reports, "second car bomb ripped through a commercial district in the capital's Karrada neighborhood, killing two people and wounding at least seven others. Karrada is a predominatly Shiite area in central Baghdad." Reuters notes a bombing "near a mosque" that took one life and left three wounded, while a bombing near a police station left five dead and 17 wounded.
Shootings?
Reuters notes a police officer was shot dead just outside of Kirkuk and that 39 people were killed (suspected of . . . something) by "[p]olice and tribal fighters" in Amiriya.
Corpses?
Reuters notes that a corpse was discovered in Kirkuk, one corpse was discovered in Falluja,
Today the US military announced: "Two MND-B Soldiers died when an improvised explosive device struck the unit's vehicle during a combat security patrol in a souther section of the Iraqi capital, wounding another."
This as Atef Hassan (Reuters) reports, "British troops in Iraq's southern Basra oil port pulled out of their heavily attacked base in the heart of the city on Tuesday, the first to be handed to Iraqi forces who are slowly taking control of security." Today, PTI reports that a new poll of British sentiment found that only 29% of respondents felt the illegal war was "justified" and that "nearly 60 per cent" felt it wasn't.
Yesterday, at Inside Iraq, Laith blogged: "Now and while I'm writing these words, the American troops are attacking a part of my neighborhood west Baghdad. At the same time, I got a call from my nephew that some insurgents are attacking her neighborhood south west Baghdad. I'm sure the American army knows about the insurgents but I'm sure they ignore them or let me say they allow them to do everything they want. . . . A question just jumped in my mind, Shouldn't the American go to the place where the insurgents are attacking the civilians? Shouldn't they do their duty as they say to protect Iraqis and fight terror? It looks that the American government and Mr. President Bush don't care about anything except for his own capital friends' interest. The strategy the US army follows in Iraq is not more than another lie to cheat us both Iraqis and Americans and we all, Iraqis and Americans pay the price. . . . I just hope that someone reads these words and tell the poor Americans that your soldiers are not fighting Al Qaida or the terrorists in Iraq as the military commanders claim. They are here to do their role of killing the innocents and to complete the play the politicians started since the American administration decided to get [rid] of its crazy fool agent Saddam Hussein."
Heads up -- Tomorrow on Democracy Now!, Jeremy Scahill and Naomi Klein are scheduled guests. (Scahill was on today's show as well.)
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john staubersheldon ramptondemocracy now
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Monday, March 19, 2007
Tom Hayden on KPFA's The Morning Show Tues.
Heads up, tomorrow on KPFA's The Morning Show, Tom Hayden and Francis Fox Piven will be among the guests. Now C.I. passed me this item that Polly had noted in an e-mail. This is from Gethin Chamberlain's "Court 'can envisage' Blair prosecution By Gethin Chamberlain" (Sunday Telegraph of London):
Tony Blair faces the prospect of an International Criminal Court investigation for alleged coalition war crimes in Iraq.
The court's chief prosecutor told The Sunday Telegraph that he would be willing to launch an inquiry and could envisage a scenario in which the Prime Minister and American President George W Bush could one day face charges at The Hague. Luis Moreno-Ocampo urged Arab countries, particularly Iraq, to sign up to the court to enable allegations against the West to be pursued. Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations said that his country was actively considering signing up.
Wouldn't that be wonderful? To see both Tony Blair and Bully Boy prosecuted for war crimes at The Hague? It would be fitting. As C.I.'s noted, once Bully Boy's out of office, he better love his ranchette in Crawford because he's going to find traveling as difficult as Henry Kissinger who can only go to countries that won't extradite him elsewhere to face charges for his own war crimes.
What I find amazing about that, especially, is that it could happen. (It should.) It could happen and yet the Democrats in Congress refuse to pursue impeachment. Imagine if, in 2011, Bully Boy's standing for war crimes and he was never impeached by our Congress? That's saying we're all guilty because when Dems had the power, they elected to look the other way.
He needs to be impeached. I'd argue that enough has come out to show that we're not dealing with one thing (illegal war that the nation was lied into, warrantless spying on American citizens, outing Valerie Plame, etc.) but on many things and the m.o. has always been the same, lie to the people, lie to Congress. He needs to be impeached and if he's not, get ready, because the sky's the limit for the next Bully we get as president. (That could be Hillary Clinton, to be clear, a bully can be a woman.)
On the fourth anniversary of the illegal war, the news that Bully Boy could stand trial for war crimes is a reminder (if nothing else) that there are judgements still to come and even if a lazy, timid Congress refuses to their job, history will do its job.
Here's C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"
Monday, March 19, 2007. Chaos and violence continue in Iraq.
Four years after the start of the illegal war, the illegal war continues. Raymond Whitaker (Independent of London) notes that the number of US troops is about to climb to 160,000 which is 10,000 more than was required to invade Iraq. John Simpson (BBC) observes, of Baghdad, "The most common sight, apart from police and army roadblocks, are the black banners on walls and fences announcing people's deaths. And the most common feeling you come across is a kind of slow-burning, gloom." Tariq Ali (New Left Review) notes that "the Occupation is still -- after three years and an outlay of over $200 billion -- unable to assure regular supplies of water and electricity to the people it has subjegated. Factories remain idle. Hospitals and schools barely function. Oil revenues have been looted wholesale by America's loyal minions, not to speak of a horde of US contractors on the take. Wretched as living conditions were for the majority of the population under UN sanctions, under the Americans they have deteriorated yet further, a sectarian killings multiply and minimal security disappears." And the continued violence means people are uprooted as Anthony Arnove (writing at TomGram) reminds, "Nowhere on Earth is there a worse refugee crisis than in Iraq today. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, some two million Iraqis have fled their country and are now scattered from Jordan, Syria, Turkey, and Iran to London and Paris. (Almost none have made it to the United States, which has done nothing to address the refugee crisis it created.) Another 1.9 million are estimated to be internally displaced persons, driven from their homes and neighborhoods by the U.S. occupation and the vicious civil war it has sparked. Add those figures up -- and they're getting worse by the day -- and you have close to 16% of the Iraqi population uprooted. Add the dead to the displaced, and that figure rises to nearly one in five Iraqis." Damein Cave (New York Times) reports today on the "endless loop of inquiry and disappointment" that is the search for family members who have disappeared and may or may not be dead -- Intisar Rashid searches for her husband who disappeared two months ago, searching computer databases of prisoners, searching the morgues, the hospitals in Baghdad . . . Is her husband alive or dead? Will she ever get an answer? Many of the Iraqi dead are never identified. Returning to Arnove's article, he also notes the (PDF format) Lancet's study published in October which found that over 655,000 Iraqis had died during the illegal war. Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!) noted that Dr. Gideon Polya has just released a study which find that there have been "an estimate of one million post-invasion excess deaths in Iraq." Dr. Polya writes (at The Canadian National Newspaper) that: "The 1 million post-invasion Iraqi excess deaths constitutes an Iraqi Holocaust largely due to U.S.-led 'Coalition' violation of the Geneva Conventions that demand that Occupiers keep their conquered subjects ALIVE. Three quarters of the people are women and children. The Bush regime 'War on Terror' is in harsh reality, a 'War on innocent Women and Children,' and more specifically a 'War on Asian/Middle Eastern Women and Children'." A point underscored in MADRE's "Promising Democracy, Imposing Theocracy: Gender-Based Violence and the US War on Iraq" (which can be read in full in PDF format or, by sections, in HTML) which charted the decline/destruction of women's rights and women's safety in Iraq as the US government elected to throw in its lot with those that they expected to be most likely to push the US administration's goals -- goals that did not include full participation in society for all. Women found themselves terrorized, professional women found themselves targeted, rapes, honor killings, and more ran rampant but the US military did nothing to maintain order or to offer protection -- quite the contrary, they actively looked the other way. In The Deserter's Tale, US war resister Joshua Key tells of a young Iraqi girl attempting to return to her country at the border, being the target of the Iraqi police (that the US military was training) who thought she was a "slut" and made it clear (through verbal language and body language) that they would be gang raping her while the US military looked the other way. MADRE's report makes clear that these weren't accidents or surprises (warnings were made before the illegal war began about what would happen to Iraqi women and girls) but the 'trade offs' the US administration was willing to tolerate to put a compliant government in order. And in their desire to create chaos, to take it to "zear zero" as Naomi Klein outlined in "Baghdad Year Zero" (Harper's magazine, 2004). The chaos was thought to throw everyone off guard and allow the US to control (and "shape") the region (hegemony, control of the resources), as professor Elaine C. Hagopian pointed out (noting neocon Michael Ledeen's control theories) in a discussion moderated by Philip Maldari on KPFA's The Morning Show today. Also participating in the discussion was professor Raul Mahajan and while that discussion featured one male guest and one female guest, the reality is that too often women are left out of the discussion and debate. You can see that with Rolling Stone's overly praised text version of a CNN panel on Iraq: "Here's an ex-general, here's a . . . but no women allowed." RadioNation with Laura Flanders' Laura Flanders (writing at The Huffington Post) opens with: "Call me crazy but it still gets my goat that the entire Iraq debate takes place without the input of the female majority." Flanders isn't crazy and if women's voices hadn't been shut out (in the majority of the US media) from the beginning, the nation might have turned against the illegal war much sooner. As Eleanor Smeal, president of Feminist Majority Foundation, noted on KPFA's The Morning Show (March 8, 2007), in the US, women have led on the war, they have been opposed to it in larger numbers and they have been, as she noted, "opinion makers" on this issue. Eleanor's points are backed in up poll after poll but you can check out Celinda Lake's "The Ms. Poll" (Ms. magazine, Summer 2006) and Eleanor's "Women Voted for Change" in the Winter 2007 issue (available only in print but there's an excerpt of it here). In other polling news, AFP notes the new media poll that found (among other things): "About 78 percent [of Iraqis] opposed the presence of foreign forces and 69 percent said their presence made the security situation worse." And thing will only continue to get worse. For instance, Andy Rowell (Oil Change International) notes that puppet of the occupation, Nouri al-Maliki, has been told that "continued White House support depended on positive action on the oil law by the close of this parliamentary session June 30." Rowell also notes a meeting in Amman, Jordan among "Iraqi oil industry officials, expert and lawmakers" with many participants expressing their dismay at the selling/stealing of Iraqi assets. AFP reports that Iraqi parliamentarian Ali Mashhadani stated: "Our oil wealth is black gold that must be kept underground until security conditions are appropriate to take advantage of it. It has been entrusted to our safekeeping by the people we represents . . . Iraq has sold 125 billion dollars worth of oil since the start of the US-led occupation" but Iraqis "are eating garbage" and that the 125 billion should have resulted in a subsidy bump for the average Iraqi. And mini-big picture, that's where things stand on the 4th anniversary of the start of the illegal war.
The new poll of Iraqis (which tracks with earlier polls) was comissioned by ARD, USA Today, BBC and ABC (America's ABC). Reuters notes that "86 per cent were concerned about someone in their household being a victim of violence. Iraqis were also disappointed by reconstruction efforts since the invasion, with 67 per cent saying efforts had not been effective." BBC notes that on the question of "how safe do you feel," the results were: "Three years ago, 40 per cent said very safe, now only 26 per cent say they feel that." Of the poll, Christian Berthelsen (Los Angeles Times) observes that "nearly two-thirds of the respondents want to see their nation remain as one, rather than being partitioned along regional and ethnic lines." One of the many concerns about the US-dictated Iraqi oil law is that it will lead to partitioning Iraq into three sections, a position supported by US Senator and 2008 presidential hopeful Joe Biden.
Meanwhile CBS News reports: "After four years of war, Americans are increasingly pessimistic about the prospects for success in Iraq and a majority wants U.S. troops to begin coming home, according to an analysis of data from CBS News and CBS News/New York Times polls. American did not expect the war to last this long, nor did they think it would coast as many lives as it has." Left unstated is where the American people would have gotten that mistaken impression -- from an administration that LIED and a news media that presented stenography as reporting, over and over and over, while shutting out voices with dissenting views. That, more than anything else, explains a March 2003 poll in which 66 % of respondents predicted that the number of US service members who will die in the illegal war would be "less than 1,000." (AP's curren count is 3217 and ICCC's is 3218
for the number of US service members killed in Iraq since the start of the illegal war.)
As Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!) noted today, protests against the war took place "around the world including in Australia, Chile, Turkey, South Korea, Malyasia and Greece." Protests also took place around the US. Among the speeches from last weekend that were broadcast on today's Democracy Now! was former US House Rep Cynthia McKinney who declared: "Well, it seems that George Bush and the Democratic leaders were right: they confidentally told us that only the Democrats would fund the surge, but that the Democrats would not stop action in Iran, too. Now, we are not surprised when the unelected, illegitimate administration of George Bush ignores us. But we are shocked that the Democratic majority in Congress chose war over us, as we say, 'Bring our troops home now.' The answer is clear: our country has been hijacked." Black Agenda Report carries a speech by McKinney that she gave on KPFK at the start of this month: "How can you be against the war if you finance war? And how can you be against George Bush if you won't impeach him? The American people are being fed mandess as sanity. But, this is not Oz, Wonderland, the Twilight Zone, and it's not 1984! With every fiber in our being we must resist. Resist like Mario Savio told us to resist: with our entire bodies against the gears and the wheels and the levers of the machine. We must resist because we claim no partnership in war crimes, genocide, torture, or crimes against humanity. We claim no complicity in crimes against the American people. We will build a broad-based, rainbow movement from justice and peace. And we will win."
In Eugene, Oregon, protesters turned out in large numbers and among those turning out and speaking was Ehren Watada, the first commissioned officer to publicly refuse to deploy to Iraq and the first to be court-martialed for it. Edward Russo (The Register-Guard) notes that Watada declared: "They may imprison or torture or take away our lives, but they can never take away our freedom to choose what is right and just." Watada is among those profiled by Christian Hill (The Olympian) today and Hill notes the transformation for Watada: "He wanted to learn more about Iraq and began reading. This research, he has said, convinced him that the Bush administration manipulated intelligence to sell the war to the American public, bringing suffering to U.S. troops, their families and Iraq citizens." Hill also notes veteran and activist Wally Cuddeford who says of his own transformation following his discharge from the navy, "I go to college and learned about history and how activists, labor activists, environmental activists, etc., had been doing so much work and making so many sacrifices throughout the globe for the cause of justice. And that reminded me there are heroes in this world who are willing to stand up and fight for justice. The moment I heard about that, I dove straight in."
In Canada, war resisters were taking part in actions. Kyle Snyder self-checked out the military and then, in October of 2006, attempted to turn himself in only to have the agreement his attorney and the US military tossed aside after he was in custody -- at which point he checked out again and returned to Canada. Cary Castagana (Edmonton Sun) reports that Kyle Snyder marched with "a couple of hundred protesters . . . along Whyte Avenue". Another US war resister in Canada is Dean Walcott. Jennifer Taplin (Halifax' The Daily News) notes that 25-year-old Walcott served two tours of duty in Iraq, and with "nowhere to turn, Walcott went AWOL and moved to Toronto a few months ago. He applied for refugee status and is now waiting for the paperwork to hopefully go through." Canada's CBC reports that Dean Walcott "spoke to the Halifax crowd" and stated: "I believe individual nations have the right to establish themselves as they see fit, and I believe they can do that without interference from the West. There's got to be a better way for nations to be free rather than us putting a gun in their face and demanding it of them."
Watada, Snyder, Key and Walcott are part of a movement of resistance within the military that also includes Darrell Anderson, Agustin Aguayo, Mark Wilkerson, Camilo Mejia, Patrick Hart, Ivan Brobeck, Ricky Clousing, Aidan Delgado, Pablo Paredes, Carl Webb, Jeremy Hinzman, Stephen Funk, David Sanders, Dan Felushko, Brandon Hughey, Corey Glass, Clifford Cornell, Joshua Despain, Katherine Jashinski, Chris Teske, Matt Lowell, Jimmy Massey, Tim Richard, Hart Viges, Michael Blake and Kevin Benderman. In total, thirty-eight US war resisters in Canada have applied for asylum.Information on war resistance within the military can be found at Center on Conscience & War, The Objector, The G.I. Rights Hotline, and the War Resisters Support Campaign. Courage to Resist offers information on all public war resisters.
In Iraq today?
Bombings?
AFP reports that, in Kirkuk, a car bomb claimed 10 lives and left 8 wounded near two mosques while, in a market, a car bomb took 5 lives and left 26 wounded (4 of the five dead were police officers); while, in Hilla, 3 people were shot dead; and, in Baghdad, a bombing "at the entrance of the Shiite Hussain Abu Ruh mosque" claimed 5 lives and left 25 wounded. CNN notes that the mosque bombing in Baghdad's count rose to 6 dead and 32 wounded. Kim Gamel (AP) notes that the total number dead from bombings in Kirkuk today was 18 and that "more than 50 wounded". Sahar Issa (McClatchy Newspapers) reports five mortar attack in Baghdad which left 11 wounded while a mortar attack in the Diyala province killed 4 and wounded 5.
Shootings?
Reuters notes an attack on a police checkpoint in Samarra that left one police officer dead and three more wounded, a police officer shot dead in Iskandariya. Sahar Issa (McClatchy Newspapers) reports that, in Baiji, a "Facilities and Projects Security guard" was shot dead.
Corpses?
CNN reports that the corpse of Khalaf Ghargan, Dujaila's mayor, was discovered today after he'd been kidnapped hours earlier. Reuters notes the corpse of an Iraqi soldier was discovered in Tikrit and an unidentified corpse was discovered in Mahaweel. Kim Gamel (AP) notes that, in Baghdad, "29 bullet-riddled bodies" were discovered. Sahar Issa (McClatchy Newspapers) reports the number rose to 30 corpses discovered in Baghdad.
And finally, Matt Spetalnick (Reuters) reports that the Bully Boy spoke at the White House today and pleaded for "patience." If that sounds familiar, it's because the same-old, same-old in Iraq requires the same-old, same-old pitch and today's resembles the one he gave in June of last year.
iraqehren watada
dean walcott
kyle snyderjoshua key
anthony arnovephilip maldarikpfathe morning show
naomi klein
harper's magazine
ms. magazineeleanor smeal
laura flandersradionation with laura flanders
the new york timesdamien cave
Tony Blair faces the prospect of an International Criminal Court investigation for alleged coalition war crimes in Iraq.
The court's chief prosecutor told The Sunday Telegraph that he would be willing to launch an inquiry and could envisage a scenario in which the Prime Minister and American President George W Bush could one day face charges at The Hague. Luis Moreno-Ocampo urged Arab countries, particularly Iraq, to sign up to the court to enable allegations against the West to be pursued. Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations said that his country was actively considering signing up.
Wouldn't that be wonderful? To see both Tony Blair and Bully Boy prosecuted for war crimes at The Hague? It would be fitting. As C.I.'s noted, once Bully Boy's out of office, he better love his ranchette in Crawford because he's going to find traveling as difficult as Henry Kissinger who can only go to countries that won't extradite him elsewhere to face charges for his own war crimes.
What I find amazing about that, especially, is that it could happen. (It should.) It could happen and yet the Democrats in Congress refuse to pursue impeachment. Imagine if, in 2011, Bully Boy's standing for war crimes and he was never impeached by our Congress? That's saying we're all guilty because when Dems had the power, they elected to look the other way.
He needs to be impeached. I'd argue that enough has come out to show that we're not dealing with one thing (illegal war that the nation was lied into, warrantless spying on American citizens, outing Valerie Plame, etc.) but on many things and the m.o. has always been the same, lie to the people, lie to Congress. He needs to be impeached and if he's not, get ready, because the sky's the limit for the next Bully we get as president. (That could be Hillary Clinton, to be clear, a bully can be a woman.)
On the fourth anniversary of the illegal war, the news that Bully Boy could stand trial for war crimes is a reminder (if nothing else) that there are judgements still to come and even if a lazy, timid Congress refuses to their job, history will do its job.
Here's C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"
Monday, March 19, 2007. Chaos and violence continue in Iraq.
Four years after the start of the illegal war, the illegal war continues. Raymond Whitaker (Independent of London) notes that the number of US troops is about to climb to 160,000 which is 10,000 more than was required to invade Iraq. John Simpson (BBC) observes, of Baghdad, "The most common sight, apart from police and army roadblocks, are the black banners on walls and fences announcing people's deaths. And the most common feeling you come across is a kind of slow-burning, gloom." Tariq Ali (New Left Review) notes that "the Occupation is still -- after three years and an outlay of over $200 billion -- unable to assure regular supplies of water and electricity to the people it has subjegated. Factories remain idle. Hospitals and schools barely function. Oil revenues have been looted wholesale by America's loyal minions, not to speak of a horde of US contractors on the take. Wretched as living conditions were for the majority of the population under UN sanctions, under the Americans they have deteriorated yet further, a sectarian killings multiply and minimal security disappears." And the continued violence means people are uprooted as Anthony Arnove (writing at TomGram) reminds, "Nowhere on Earth is there a worse refugee crisis than in Iraq today. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, some two million Iraqis have fled their country and are now scattered from Jordan, Syria, Turkey, and Iran to London and Paris. (Almost none have made it to the United States, which has done nothing to address the refugee crisis it created.) Another 1.9 million are estimated to be internally displaced persons, driven from their homes and neighborhoods by the U.S. occupation and the vicious civil war it has sparked. Add those figures up -- and they're getting worse by the day -- and you have close to 16% of the Iraqi population uprooted. Add the dead to the displaced, and that figure rises to nearly one in five Iraqis." Damein Cave (New York Times) reports today on the "endless loop of inquiry and disappointment" that is the search for family members who have disappeared and may or may not be dead -- Intisar Rashid searches for her husband who disappeared two months ago, searching computer databases of prisoners, searching the morgues, the hospitals in Baghdad . . . Is her husband alive or dead? Will she ever get an answer? Many of the Iraqi dead are never identified. Returning to Arnove's article, he also notes the (PDF format) Lancet's study published in October which found that over 655,000 Iraqis had died during the illegal war. Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!) noted that Dr. Gideon Polya has just released a study which find that there have been "an estimate of one million post-invasion excess deaths in Iraq." Dr. Polya writes (at The Canadian National Newspaper) that: "The 1 million post-invasion Iraqi excess deaths constitutes an Iraqi Holocaust largely due to U.S.-led 'Coalition' violation of the Geneva Conventions that demand that Occupiers keep their conquered subjects ALIVE. Three quarters of the people are women and children. The Bush regime 'War on Terror' is in harsh reality, a 'War on innocent Women and Children,' and more specifically a 'War on Asian/Middle Eastern Women and Children'." A point underscored in MADRE's "Promising Democracy, Imposing Theocracy: Gender-Based Violence and the US War on Iraq" (which can be read in full in PDF format or, by sections, in HTML) which charted the decline/destruction of women's rights and women's safety in Iraq as the US government elected to throw in its lot with those that they expected to be most likely to push the US administration's goals -- goals that did not include full participation in society for all. Women found themselves terrorized, professional women found themselves targeted, rapes, honor killings, and more ran rampant but the US military did nothing to maintain order or to offer protection -- quite the contrary, they actively looked the other way. In The Deserter's Tale, US war resister Joshua Key tells of a young Iraqi girl attempting to return to her country at the border, being the target of the Iraqi police (that the US military was training) who thought she was a "slut" and made it clear (through verbal language and body language) that they would be gang raping her while the US military looked the other way. MADRE's report makes clear that these weren't accidents or surprises (warnings were made before the illegal war began about what would happen to Iraqi women and girls) but the 'trade offs' the US administration was willing to tolerate to put a compliant government in order. And in their desire to create chaos, to take it to "zear zero" as Naomi Klein outlined in "Baghdad Year Zero" (Harper's magazine, 2004). The chaos was thought to throw everyone off guard and allow the US to control (and "shape") the region (hegemony, control of the resources), as professor Elaine C. Hagopian pointed out (noting neocon Michael Ledeen's control theories) in a discussion moderated by Philip Maldari on KPFA's The Morning Show today. Also participating in the discussion was professor Raul Mahajan and while that discussion featured one male guest and one female guest, the reality is that too often women are left out of the discussion and debate. You can see that with Rolling Stone's overly praised text version of a CNN panel on Iraq: "Here's an ex-general, here's a . . . but no women allowed." RadioNation with Laura Flanders' Laura Flanders (writing at The Huffington Post) opens with: "Call me crazy but it still gets my goat that the entire Iraq debate takes place without the input of the female majority." Flanders isn't crazy and if women's voices hadn't been shut out (in the majority of the US media) from the beginning, the nation might have turned against the illegal war much sooner. As Eleanor Smeal, president of Feminist Majority Foundation, noted on KPFA's The Morning Show (March 8, 2007), in the US, women have led on the war, they have been opposed to it in larger numbers and they have been, as she noted, "opinion makers" on this issue. Eleanor's points are backed in up poll after poll but you can check out Celinda Lake's "The Ms. Poll" (Ms. magazine, Summer 2006) and Eleanor's "Women Voted for Change" in the Winter 2007 issue (available only in print but there's an excerpt of it here). In other polling news, AFP notes the new media poll that found (among other things): "About 78 percent [of Iraqis] opposed the presence of foreign forces and 69 percent said their presence made the security situation worse." And thing will only continue to get worse. For instance, Andy Rowell (Oil Change International) notes that puppet of the occupation, Nouri al-Maliki, has been told that "continued White House support depended on positive action on the oil law by the close of this parliamentary session June 30." Rowell also notes a meeting in Amman, Jordan among "Iraqi oil industry officials, expert and lawmakers" with many participants expressing their dismay at the selling/stealing of Iraqi assets. AFP reports that Iraqi parliamentarian Ali Mashhadani stated: "Our oil wealth is black gold that must be kept underground until security conditions are appropriate to take advantage of it. It has been entrusted to our safekeeping by the people we represents . . . Iraq has sold 125 billion dollars worth of oil since the start of the US-led occupation" but Iraqis "are eating garbage" and that the 125 billion should have resulted in a subsidy bump for the average Iraqi. And mini-big picture, that's where things stand on the 4th anniversary of the start of the illegal war.
The new poll of Iraqis (which tracks with earlier polls) was comissioned by ARD, USA Today, BBC and ABC (America's ABC). Reuters notes that "86 per cent were concerned about someone in their household being a victim of violence. Iraqis were also disappointed by reconstruction efforts since the invasion, with 67 per cent saying efforts had not been effective." BBC notes that on the question of "how safe do you feel," the results were: "Three years ago, 40 per cent said very safe, now only 26 per cent say they feel that." Of the poll, Christian Berthelsen (Los Angeles Times) observes that "nearly two-thirds of the respondents want to see their nation remain as one, rather than being partitioned along regional and ethnic lines." One of the many concerns about the US-dictated Iraqi oil law is that it will lead to partitioning Iraq into three sections, a position supported by US Senator and 2008 presidential hopeful Joe Biden.
Meanwhile CBS News reports: "After four years of war, Americans are increasingly pessimistic about the prospects for success in Iraq and a majority wants U.S. troops to begin coming home, according to an analysis of data from CBS News and CBS News/New York Times polls. American did not expect the war to last this long, nor did they think it would coast as many lives as it has." Left unstated is where the American people would have gotten that mistaken impression -- from an administration that LIED and a news media that presented stenography as reporting, over and over and over, while shutting out voices with dissenting views. That, more than anything else, explains a March 2003 poll in which 66 % of respondents predicted that the number of US service members who will die in the illegal war would be "less than 1,000." (AP's curren count is 3217 and ICCC's is 3218
for the number of US service members killed in Iraq since the start of the illegal war.)
As Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!) noted today, protests against the war took place "around the world including in Australia, Chile, Turkey, South Korea, Malyasia and Greece." Protests also took place around the US. Among the speeches from last weekend that were broadcast on today's Democracy Now! was former US House Rep Cynthia McKinney who declared: "Well, it seems that George Bush and the Democratic leaders were right: they confidentally told us that only the Democrats would fund the surge, but that the Democrats would not stop action in Iran, too. Now, we are not surprised when the unelected, illegitimate administration of George Bush ignores us. But we are shocked that the Democratic majority in Congress chose war over us, as we say, 'Bring our troops home now.' The answer is clear: our country has been hijacked." Black Agenda Report carries a speech by McKinney that she gave on KPFK at the start of this month: "How can you be against the war if you finance war? And how can you be against George Bush if you won't impeach him? The American people are being fed mandess as sanity. But, this is not Oz, Wonderland, the Twilight Zone, and it's not 1984! With every fiber in our being we must resist. Resist like Mario Savio told us to resist: with our entire bodies against the gears and the wheels and the levers of the machine. We must resist because we claim no partnership in war crimes, genocide, torture, or crimes against humanity. We claim no complicity in crimes against the American people. We will build a broad-based, rainbow movement from justice and peace. And we will win."
In Eugene, Oregon, protesters turned out in large numbers and among those turning out and speaking was Ehren Watada, the first commissioned officer to publicly refuse to deploy to Iraq and the first to be court-martialed for it. Edward Russo (The Register-Guard) notes that Watada declared: "They may imprison or torture or take away our lives, but they can never take away our freedom to choose what is right and just." Watada is among those profiled by Christian Hill (The Olympian) today and Hill notes the transformation for Watada: "He wanted to learn more about Iraq and began reading. This research, he has said, convinced him that the Bush administration manipulated intelligence to sell the war to the American public, bringing suffering to U.S. troops, their families and Iraq citizens." Hill also notes veteran and activist Wally Cuddeford who says of his own transformation following his discharge from the navy, "I go to college and learned about history and how activists, labor activists, environmental activists, etc., had been doing so much work and making so many sacrifices throughout the globe for the cause of justice. And that reminded me there are heroes in this world who are willing to stand up and fight for justice. The moment I heard about that, I dove straight in."
In Canada, war resisters were taking part in actions. Kyle Snyder self-checked out the military and then, in October of 2006, attempted to turn himself in only to have the agreement his attorney and the US military tossed aside after he was in custody -- at which point he checked out again and returned to Canada. Cary Castagana (Edmonton Sun) reports that Kyle Snyder marched with "a couple of hundred protesters . . . along Whyte Avenue". Another US war resister in Canada is Dean Walcott. Jennifer Taplin (Halifax' The Daily News) notes that 25-year-old Walcott served two tours of duty in Iraq, and with "nowhere to turn, Walcott went AWOL and moved to Toronto a few months ago. He applied for refugee status and is now waiting for the paperwork to hopefully go through." Canada's CBC reports that Dean Walcott "spoke to the Halifax crowd" and stated: "I believe individual nations have the right to establish themselves as they see fit, and I believe they can do that without interference from the West. There's got to be a better way for nations to be free rather than us putting a gun in their face and demanding it of them."
Watada, Snyder, Key and Walcott are part of a movement of resistance within the military that also includes Darrell Anderson, Agustin Aguayo, Mark Wilkerson, Camilo Mejia, Patrick Hart, Ivan Brobeck, Ricky Clousing, Aidan Delgado, Pablo Paredes, Carl Webb, Jeremy Hinzman, Stephen Funk, David Sanders, Dan Felushko, Brandon Hughey, Corey Glass, Clifford Cornell, Joshua Despain, Katherine Jashinski, Chris Teske, Matt Lowell, Jimmy Massey, Tim Richard, Hart Viges, Michael Blake and Kevin Benderman. In total, thirty-eight US war resisters in Canada have applied for asylum.Information on war resistance within the military can be found at Center on Conscience & War, The Objector, The G.I. Rights Hotline, and the War Resisters Support Campaign. Courage to Resist offers information on all public war resisters.
In Iraq today?
Bombings?
AFP reports that, in Kirkuk, a car bomb claimed 10 lives and left 8 wounded near two mosques while, in a market, a car bomb took 5 lives and left 26 wounded (4 of the five dead were police officers); while, in Hilla, 3 people were shot dead; and, in Baghdad, a bombing "at the entrance of the Shiite Hussain Abu Ruh mosque" claimed 5 lives and left 25 wounded. CNN notes that the mosque bombing in Baghdad's count rose to 6 dead and 32 wounded. Kim Gamel (AP) notes that the total number dead from bombings in Kirkuk today was 18 and that "more than 50 wounded". Sahar Issa (McClatchy Newspapers) reports five mortar attack in Baghdad which left 11 wounded while a mortar attack in the Diyala province killed 4 and wounded 5.
Shootings?
Reuters notes an attack on a police checkpoint in Samarra that left one police officer dead and three more wounded, a police officer shot dead in Iskandariya. Sahar Issa (McClatchy Newspapers) reports that, in Baiji, a "Facilities and Projects Security guard" was shot dead.
Corpses?
CNN reports that the corpse of Khalaf Ghargan, Dujaila's mayor, was discovered today after he'd been kidnapped hours earlier. Reuters notes the corpse of an Iraqi soldier was discovered in Tikrit and an unidentified corpse was discovered in Mahaweel. Kim Gamel (AP) notes that, in Baghdad, "29 bullet-riddled bodies" were discovered. Sahar Issa (McClatchy Newspapers) reports the number rose to 30 corpses discovered in Baghdad.
And finally, Matt Spetalnick (Reuters) reports that the Bully Boy spoke at the White House today and pleaded for "patience." If that sounds familiar, it's because the same-old, same-old in Iraq requires the same-old, same-old pitch and today's resembles the one he gave in June of last year.
iraqehren watada
dean walcott
kyle snyderjoshua key
anthony arnovephilip maldarikpfathe morning show
naomi klein
harper's magazine
ms. magazineeleanor smeal
laura flandersradionation with laura flanders
the new york timesdamien cave
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