Better Red Than Dead?

But the unhappy fact is that almost everything this Administration tries to sell to Americans is snake oil, and the mere act of reporting it without comment implicates the media in the fundamental dishonesty that is this President’s modus operandi. When he says “freedom,” he means the freedom of the United States and its allies to jail and torture anyone they choose. When he says “liberty,” he means the liberty of other governments to profess to share the alleged aims of US foreign policy and then–like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Egypt–jail and silence all critics without inconvenient criticism from the United States. (If you play the game right, you can even provide weapons to anti-American terrorists and fund anti-American and anti-Semitic propaganda on behalf of the terrorists, all the while remaining a close friend of Bush & Co.)

This is apparently what NBC’s Andrea Mitchell had in mind when she spoke of the Administration’s “democracy agenda that Condi Rice is going to be bringing to Europe and the Middle East.” Or perhaps she meant an American invasion of Iran; or the destruction of Social Security. It’s hard to know in a post-truth society what anything means anymore, except more nonsense and lies, dutifully reported.

Eric Alterman, The Nation ( more. . .)

February 13th, 2005 || PermaLink

Torture, American Style

Maher Arar is a 34-year-old native of Syria who emigrated to Canada as a teenager. On Sept. 26, 2002, as he was returning from a family vacation in Tunisia, he was seized by American authorities at Kennedy Airport in New York, where he was in the process of changing planes.

Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen, was not charged with a crime. But, as Jane Mayer tells us in a compelling and deeply disturbing article in the current issue of The New Yorker, he “was placed in handcuffs and leg irons by plainclothes officials and transferred to an executive jet.”

In an instant, Mr. Arar was swept into an increasingly common nightmare, courtesy of the United States of America. The plane that took off with him from Kennedy “flew to Washington, continued to Portland, Maine, stopped in Rome, Italy, then landed in Amman, Jordan.”

Any rights Mr. Arar might have thought he had, either as a Canadian citizen or a human being, had been left behind. At times during the trip, Mr. Arar heard the pilots and crew identify themselves in radio communications as members of “the Special Removal Unit.” He was being taken, on the orders of the U.S. government, to Syria, where he would be tortured.

………

Our henchmen in places like Syria, Egypt, Morocco, Uzbekistan and Jordan are torturing terror suspects at the behest of a nation - the United States - that just went through a national election in which the issue of moral values was supposed to have been decisive. How in the world did we become a country in which gays’ getting married is considered an abomination, but torture is O.K.?

………

Any government that commits, condones, promotes or fosters torture is a malignant force in the world. And those who refuse to raise their voices against something as clearly evil as torture are enablers, if not collaborators.

Bob Herbert, New York Times ( more. . .)

February 12th, 2005 || PermaLink

Mideast: No Peace Without Justice

So, the Palestinians will end their occupation of Israel. No more will Palestinian tanks smash their way into Haifa and Tel Aviv. No more will Palestinian F-18s bomb Israeli population centers. No more will Palestinian Apache helicopters carry out “targeted killings” — i.e., murders — of Israeli military leaders.

The Palestinians have promised to end all “acts of violence” against Israelis while Israel has promised to end all “military activity” against Palestinians. So that’s it, then. Peace in our time.

A Martian — even a well-educated Martian — would have gathered that this was the message, supposing he dropped in on the fantasy world of Sharm el-Sheikh this week. Palestinians had been committing “violence,” the Israelis carrying out “innocent” operations. Palestinian “violence” or “terror and violence” — the latter a more popular phrase since it carried the stigma of 9/11 — was now at an end.

Robert Fisk, Seattle PI ( more. . .)

February 12th, 2005 || PermaLink

“Compassionate Conservatism,” R.I.P.

Speaking last week at the Detroit Economic Club — in a city whose economic devastation he has done nothing to relieve — the president offered all the usual, useless Bush bromides. His speech lauded a local “VIP” businessman who “mentors” the children of incarcerated parents, without mentioning that his budget will deprive many of those same kids of child care, food stamps and better schools. (God bless the child who’s got to survive on the charity of Bush’s friends.) He went on to reassure the well-heeled audience that they will keep their tax cuts and get even more, while promising to enforce “real budget discipline” and “difficult choices” in federal spending.

They applauded, of course.

Yet even Bush’s cruelest cuts will achieve no meaningful reduction in the half-trillion-dollar federal deficits created by his tax cuts and his elective war. Cutting “domestic discretionary programs” will inflict considerable suffering on poor people, but won’t improve the fiscal deficit at all. Although the proposed reductions are large enough to hurt those who depend on the programs he wants to reduce or eliminate, they still represent a tiny proportion of federal spending.

From an economic perspective, in other words, the Bush budget is practically meaningless, with political symbolism its only real purpose. It permits the president to pose as a zealous budgetary hawk without changing his fiscally ruinous policies. Like his Social Security scheme and his previous budget projections, it is a financial sham.

Joe Conason, Salon ( more. . .)

February 11th, 2005 || PermaLink

Bush Wars: Crooks Get Contracts

The main companies that were awarded billions of dollars worth of contracts in Iraq have paid more than $300 million in fines since 2000, to resolve allegations of fraud, bid rigging, delivery of faulty military equipment, and environmental damage.

For example, according to a review of documents conducted by the Associated Press, American tax payers are paying more than $780 million to one British firm that was convicted of fraud on 3 separate federal construction projects and was banned from US government work as recent as 2002.

A company in Virginia that was convicted of bid rigging on Federally funded projects has also been awarded hundreds of millions of dollars worth of contracts in Iraq, and a 3rd company, found guilty of bid rigging and environmental violations, was approved as a subcontractor to clean up an Iraqi harbor.

Seven other companies with reconstruction contracts have agreed to pay large fines without admitting wrongdoing. All total, these 10 companies have paid fines to resolve 30 violations in the past four years and 6 were fined more than once. Yet these same companies have been awarded reconstruction contracts in Iraq worth more than $7 billion.

Evelyn Pringle, Smirking Chimp ( more. . .)

February 10th, 2005 || PermaLink

Iraq’s Unpredictable Politics

Jonathan Schell, Common Dreams

Introspection is not the purpose of this occasional column, but a moment of it seems appropriate in the wake of the election recently held in Iraq. That election might have been a blood-soaked fiasco, aborted by insurgent forces. It might have been a nonevent, with sparse turnout and sullen voters. It might have been well attended but still inexpressive and mysterious, a merely formal exercise whose meaning was hard to interpret. But none of these eventualities — which pretty much represented the range of my expectations — transpired. Instead, the election was a full-throated, long-suppressed cry by millions of oppressed and abused people against tyranny, torture, terrorism, penury, anarchy and war, and an ardent appeal for freedom, peace, order and ordinary life.

I had not thought that, two years after Saddam Hussein’s fall, such a powerful current of longing could well up. I did not believe that an election with 7,000 candidates, most of whose identities were secret, could inspire such enthusiasm. Above all, I did not believe that so many Iraqis, whose dislike of the American occupation is wide and deep, would seize an opportunity provided in part by that same occupation to express their desires with such clarity and force. On the contrary, I thought that national pride — one of the most powerful forces of modern times — would prevent it.

But express themselves the voters did, with compressed, elemental eloquence. What impressed was not turnout, which remains unknown, especially in Sunni areas; it was the demeanor and comments of those who did vote. A woman in Baghdad explained to the New York Times, “A hundred names on the ballot are better than one, because it means that we are free.” Another woman in Baghdad said to the Washington Post, “We were sad for a long time and this is the first happiness we ever had.” The election was a direct, powerfully expressed and articulated rebuke to car-bombers, kidnappers and beheaders. “Enough fear,” a woman in Baghdad said. “Let us breathe the air of freedom.” A man in Najaf whose father had been killed by Saddam’s regime said, “My father helped bring this election today.” People brought their children. A man accompanied by his son said, “I expect he will be voting many times.” Another man said, “How much those terrorists hate the Iraqis. They were trying to kill us just because we want to do the thing we like to do.” Many voters spoke with deep emotion. A man told the Los Angeles Times, “I kissed the ballot box.” Another said to the New York Times, “People have been thirsting for these elections, as if it was a wedding.” (more…)

February 9th, 2005 || PermaLink

Why We Must Lose This War

Gwynne Dyer isn’t exactly a wimp. Not many guys from Newfoundland are. Born during World War II, he has been fascinated by things military all his life, and has served in three navies — ours, Canada’s and Great Britain’s. He has university degrees from all three countries too, and a Ph.D. in military and Middle Eastern history. During the 1980s, he produced and narrated the best documentary series about the nature of war that I’ve ever seen.

And here’s what he says about what we are doing:

“The United States needs to lose the war in Iraq as soon as possible. Even more urgently, the whole world needs the United States to lose the war in Iraq. What is at stake now is the way we run the world for the next generation or more, and really bad things will happen if we get it wrong.”

Those are the opening lines of his latest and perhaps most important book, Future Tense: The Coming World Order (paperback, McClelland and Stewart, $12.95). If you plan on reading only one book this year, make this the one. In perfectly clear prose, with arguments as well-researched as they are compelling, this military expert explains why what we’re doing is mad.

Jack Lessenberry, Detroit Metro Times ( more. . .)