And so long as George is angry and Condi appalled, Newsweek knows what to do: swiftly grab its corporate ankles and ask the White House for mercy.
But there was no mercy. Donald Rumsfeld pointed the finger at Newsweek and said, “People lost their lives. People are dead.” Maybe Rumsfeld was upset that Newsweek was taking away his job. After all, it’s hard to beat Rummy when it comes to making people dead.
Greg Palast, GregPalast.com (read more. . .)
The Downing Street memo is remarkable only for the frankness with which it acknowledges the illegality of the planned war and Bush’s policy of “fixing” the intelligence around the policy. That the decision was made first, and various pretexts advanced for it in the aftermath, is now clear to the public.
Why has there not been more outrage in the United States at these revelations? Many Americans may have chosen to overlook the lies and deceptions the Bush administration used to justify the war because they still believe the Iraq war might have made them at least somewhat safer. When they realize that this hope, too, is unfounded, and that in fact the war has greatly increased the threat of another terrorist attack on U.S. soil, their wrath may be visited on the president and the political party that has brought America the biggest foreign-policy disaster since Vietnam.
Juan Cole, Salon (read more. . .)
Since the Afghan invasion, public supporters of “exceptional” interrogation methods have argued that in the special, unusual case of the war on terrorism, we may have to suspend our fussy legality, ignore our high ideals and resort to some unpleasant tactics that our military had never used. Opponents of these methods, among them some of the military’s own interrogation experts, have argued, on the contrary, that “special methods” are not only ineffective but counterproductive: They might actually inspire Muslim terrorists instead of helping to defeat them. They might also make it easier, say, for fanatics in Jalalabad to use two lines of a magazine article to incite riots.
Blaming the messenger, even for a bungled message, doesn’t get the administration off the hook. Yes, to paraphrase Rumsfeld, people need to be very careful, not only about what they say but about what they do. And, yes, people whose military and diplomatic priorities include the defeat of Islamic fanaticism and the spread of democratic values in the Muslim world need to be very, very careful, not only about what they say but about what they do to the Muslims they hold in captivity.
Anne Applebaum, washingtonpost (read more. . .)
But let’s face it; we are now beyond the debate about how many bombs are required to maintain deterrence. We can deter any nuclear nation with a fraction of the nuclear weapons that we possess today.
It’s simply bureaucratic momentum and lack of leadership that allows us to keep our huge nuclear arsenal deployed based on a logic that lost its currency more than a decade ago.
And we are paying the price economically. This gets to the heart of why we should act today to shed our oversized nuclear weapons arsenal.
We face a record budget deficit, with no end in sight, as our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq drag on. Meanwhile, our public schools are literally crumbling, tens of million of us, including millions of kids, don’t have health insurance.
We’re not covering the basics. Yet, according to Lawrence Korb, an assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan, we could save $10 billion by reducing our arsenal to a maximum of 1,000 warheads.
It’s outrageous that we don’t take action immediately to get this done.
George McGovern, Miami Herald (read more. . .)
There was no golden era of PBS. The crown jewel of the network’s news programming — with the most viewership and influence — has long been the nightly “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.” As with many other subjects, the program’s coverage of war has relied heavily on official U.S. sources and perspectives in sync with them. The media watch group FAIR (where I’m an associate) has documented that during one war after another — such as the Gulf War in 1991, the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 and the invasion of Iraq two years ago — the NewsHour’s failure to provide independent coverage has been empirical and deplorable. Such failures are routine and longstanding for the show, as FAIR’s research makes clear.
To accept such a baseline of journalistic standards — or, worse yet, to tout it as an admirable legacy for public broadcasting — is to swallow too much and demand too little. A military-industrial-media complex has grown huge while sitting on the windpipe of the First Amendment. And a media siege is normalizing the murderous functions of the warfare state. We are encouraged to see it as normality, not madness.
Norman Solomon, CommonDreams (read more. . .)
Hamad, a Shia man from Basra enters the discussion and states, “I have seen them destroy three farms in Diyala! Why can’t they stay on their bases like the British do in the south? If they would just stay on their bases things would be so much better for us.”
“With my own eyes I’ve seen the Americans, when their patrol was hit by a roadside bomb open fire on all the civilian cars around them,” exclaims Mohammed.
At this everyone begins talking at once, the anger raising their voices.
Over the din Rathman, a driver from Fallujah demands, “If Bush is a real man, he should walk down the street alone!”
“Insh’Allah [God willing] Iraq will be the graveyard of the Americans,” adds Ahmed, “Qaim is three small villages and with all their planes and tanks they still fail to control it. If they were brave they should attack one or two villages without planes and helicopters and tanks and fight man to man!”
A Shia driver from Hilla, a small city south of Baghdad, sternly says that the US is “the mother company of terrorism.”
Dahr Jamail, Iraq Dispatches (read more. . .)
Next year, reports Jane’s Defense Industry, the United States will spend as much on defense as the rest of the world combined. Yet the Pentagon now admits that our military is having severe trouble attracting recruits, and would have difficulty dealing with potential foes - those that, unlike Saddam’s Iraq, might pose a real threat.
In other words, the people who got us into Iraq have done exactly what they falsely accused Bill Clinton of doing: they have stripped America of its capacity to respond to real threats.
So what’s the plan?
The people who sold us this war continue to insist that success is just around the corner, and that things would be fine if the media would just stop reporting bad news. But the administration has declared victory in Iraq at least four times. January’s election, it seems, was yet another turning point that wasn’t.
Paul Krugman, NYTimes (read more. . .)
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For the love of one's country
is a terrible thing.
It banishes fear
with the speed of a flame,
And it makes us all part
of the patriot game.
— Dominic Behan
It was eye for an eye
in the land of the blind
When desert storm blew back
Across the shining seas
and spacious skies
Brought down the purple towers
Cut short the amber waves
Forever fouled the fruited plains
When desert storm blew home
We stopped
One broken hearted people
We huddled in the howling silence
Trembled in that awful still
Until, too soon,
The star-spangled
jingo dance began
The bully speech
and the heavy hand
The schoolyard line
drawn in the sand
And the call to arms, to arms,
and patriot storms
In the land of the blind,
it was eye for an eye
It was tooth for a tooth
and the torture of truth
When the old gray men
again called the tune
Ours is the one true creed,
they said
Ours are the noblest of the dead
Only our suffering counts as real
Only their suffering will heal
this unfair
and so unwanted wound
And oh, we stopped
One nation, terror torn in two
Minds heavy with
the growing madness
Wary of Orwell's
whispered warnings
Of war without end,
the ministry of spin
Destroy the village now
to save it
Imprison love
for freedom's sake
Until all talk of peace is treason
Peace is treason,
As we torture the truth
With tooth for a tooth
Now it's cry for a cry
and tear for a tear
And sword for a sword
and fear for a fear
We'll do it to them
because they did to us
We'll do it again
and again if we must
We must, if we can,
vain foolish men
It goes round and comes round
and goes round again
History falls
through the cracks in our walls
Reason fails
and love . . . love pales
Until we stop
One sorry hopeful sorry planet
Soul-sick of it all
So weary of the same old
blame scold
And no, pampered prince,
this is no new war
Not new the cratered cities
Not new the blackened dawn
Not new the wailing lovers
Not new the friendly-fired spawn
Not new the burning cross
Not new the blood-soaked
cemetery lawn
The wasted and forsaken youth
The tooth for a tooth,
The torture of truth
The eye for an eye
In the land of the blind
Unless, until,
Oh will we stop.
Michael Sky
October, 2001