Monthly Archive for June, 2005
Russell Brown offers up some timely comments on National’s loathsome political strategy in the lead up to New Zealand’s coming general election. It’s quite simple I think, if you want a divided New Zealand, one where you are made to feel resentful about other New Zealanders every time you open a paper, then vote National because that’s the New Zealand they’d like to foster; it’s the only kind of New Zealand in which they believe they can grab power.
Mike Whitney, writing for Information Clearing House, reports on the current U.S. media cover up over the use of firebombs (a.k.a. napalm) in Iraq:
Two weeks ago the UK Independent ran an article which confirmed that the US had “lied to Britain over the use of napalm in Iraq.†(06-17-05) Since then, not one American newspaper or TV station has picked up the story even though the Pentagon has verified the claims.
A firebomb, according to the Federation of American Scientists, is a thin skinned container of fuel gel designed for use against dug-in troops, supply installations, wooden structures, and land convoys. The MK 77 500-pound fire bomb is the only fire bomb now in service. Fire bombs rupture on impact and spread burning fuel gel on surrounding objects.
It just so happens that those “objects†are often people. Those sorry weasels in the Pentagon tried to brush aside reports in 2003 that it was using firebombs in Iraq, by denying the use of “napalm.†When is napalm not napalm? Apparently when you switch gasoline for jet fuel and use some other name like Mark 77 firebomb.
As per usual U.S. military personel are a little more forthcoming than their civilian spin masters: “We napalmed both those [bridge] approaches,†said Colonel James Alles, commander of Marine Air Group 11. “Unfortunately there were people there … you could see them in the [cockpit] video. They were Iraqi soldiers. It’s no great way to die. The generals love napalm. It has a big psychological effect.â€
Use of such bombs against civilians was banned in the 1980 United Nations Convention on Inhumane Weapons. Not surprisingly the U.S. refused to sign this agreement.
In case you missed it:
- ‘Dead bodies are everywhere’ (22 March 2003)
- Napalm by another name (22 March 2003)
- Officials confirm dropping firebombs on Iraqi troops (5 August, 2003)
- US rejects German napalm bombing report (8 August, 2003)
- US admits it used napalm bombs in Iraq (10 August, 2003)
- US Troops Reportedly Gassing Fallujah (10 November 2004)
- Exchange With the BBC’s Director of News (on the BBC’s failure to report effectively on alleged U.S. atrocities) (30 March, 2005)
- US lied to Britain over use of napalm in Iraq war (17 June, 2005)
Meanwhile, Gary Younge, writing for The Guardian, argues that the American public may have reached the tipping point with regard to the occupation of Iraq.
At just around the time when Hush Puppies were believed to have been relegated to the footwear of choice for old geezers and ageing hippies, they suddenly enjoyed a comeback. Hip people started scouting around in unfashionable shops to buy them and then hip stores in Greenwich Village started to sell them. A Hush Puppy executive, Geoffrey Lewis, was taken completely by surprise. “We were told that Isaac Mizrahi was wearing the shoes himself,†he said. “I think it’s fair to say that at the time we had no idea who Isaac Mizrahi was.â€
In Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point, he describes the conditions that are necessary to transform Hush Puppies from the old school to new cool. “The world of the tipping point is a place where the unexpected becomes expected, where radical change is more than a possibility,†he argues. “It is—contrary to all our expectations—a certainty.â€
American public opinion appears to be approaching just such a point in relation to the war in Iraq.
And this week’s Harper’s Weekly includes:
It was revealed that North Korea had approached the United States in 2002, offering to “resolve the nuclear issue†if North Korea’s sovereignty was acknowledged; the Bush Administration rejected the offer.
“The reality,†said Senator Chuck Hagel (R., Nebraska), “is that we are losing in Iraq.†“Insurgencies,†said Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, “tend to go on five, six, eight, ten, twelve years.†“I think about Iraq,†said President George W. Bush.
In Spartanburg, South Carolina, a man was caught molesting a dog. “He had his pants down,†said the owner of the dog, “and he was doing sexual activity with the dog like a man would do to a woman.†The dog, Princess, later died of related injuries.
No Right Turn paints a picture of hypocrisy NZ First style.
David Slack does it again; first it was the Treaty quiz some of you might remember me emailing to you, now its the automatic tax-cutter. Just enter your income and your desired rate of tax, and it will tell you both how much extra you will get in the hand every week, and how much it will cost the country (NZ i.e.). It’ll then give you a series of options asking you what government spending should be cut to pay for your tax cut. Good luck Luke.
Ars Technica touches on some of the moves being made toward a police state in the U.S. and points to a Supreme Court decision with the following commentary:
As of today’s Supreme Court decision, if some local official—a completely upright and unbribable one, of course—decides that the city needs to bulldoze your house, seize your property, and sell it Home Depot to build a new store, then they can now do that. You’ve got to take whatever money that the government gives you, and move. On the bright side, that money goes into your bank account, which nobody can access but you…
Update: A number of folks have expressed surprise that it was the conservative justices who put up a united front in opposition to this governmental land grab, while the liberal justices were the ones who wrote the majority opinion. For those of us who remember what conservatism stood for before the GWOT—individual liberty, strong property rights, small government, a government of laws and not men, etc.—this isn’t surprising at all. It’s a blast from the past, maybe, but it’s not surprising.
(Actually, all the stuff that I just said that “conservatism” stood for was called “liberalism” at the time of the founding fathers. The “conservatives” of the Enlightenment West were pro-monarchy—the “big government” of the day—and in favor of a strong, monolithic, state-sponsored Church. It wasn’t until after the rise of Marxism that the left began its obsession with technocratic, totalitarian, collectivist utopias. It’s funny how labels can flip, and then flip again.)
And it’s always worth checking out Russell Brown’s friday round up.
Enjoy your weekend, that’s what they’re doing in Glastonbury:
If you haven’t yet got your head around the Downing Street Memos Justin Raimondo, a libertarian (i.e. a right winger who occasionally talks a bit of sense), gives a pretty good rundown, and explains why the most important thing is not the lies they uncover, but the liars they uncover.
Robert Steinback, a columnist for The Miami Herald, had this to say about the slighting of John Conyers after Conyers had carried a letter to the White House, signed by more than 120 House members, asking for answers to questions provoked by the Downing Street Memos:
White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, in a press briefing that day, dismissed Conyers as “an individual who voted against the war in the first place and is simply trying to rehash old debates that have already been addressed.”
Did you catch the irony? Conyers has no credibility to challenge the president’s actions toward Iraq, the White House argues, because Conyers has opposed the war from the beginning. Yet just a few months ago, the Bush people ridiculed Sen. John Kerry because Kerry allegedly supported the war before being against it — remember all the giddy supporters chanting ‘Flip-flop! Flip-flop!’
Steinback goes on to write:
I never hear anymore from the conservative readers who once admonished me for not trusting that Bush had secret intelligence about weapons of mass destruction. Or who said the British wouldn’t have joined us if the case for war wasn’t solid. Or who insulted the French and Germans for not going along with the madness.
I do miss those spirited exchanges. But if it means that at long last, a reckoning is under way, I’ll manage.
Iraq’s Justice Minister accuses the U.S. of trying to hinder the investigation into Saddam by limiting his access to interrogators and says “it seems there are lots of secrets they want to hide.” Yup.
Reuters reports on some of the looting that took place in Iraq:
The United States handed out nearly $20 billion of Iraq’s funds, with a rush to spend billions in the final days before ‘transferring power’ to the Iraqis nearly a year ago, a report said on Tuesday. A report by Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman of California, said in the week before the hand-over on June 28, 2004, the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority ordered the urgent delivery of more than $4 billion in Iraqi funds from the U.S. Federal Reserve in New York. One single shipment amounted to $2.4 billion — the largest movement of cash in the bank’s history, said Waxman. Cash was loaded onto giant pallets for shipment by plane to Iraq, and paid out to contractors who carried it away in duffel bags.
Robert Fisk, in an interview worth watching on ABC Australia, explains some of the framework behind Middle Eastern political culture.
Tony Benn outlines the foundations being laid for a police state in Britain.
OneGoodMove has posted another blinder from The Daily Show’s Jon Stuart. This guy’s good.
And this weeks Harper’s Weekly includes:
An autopsy showed that Terri Schiavo had never been abused, was blind at the time of her death, and had a brain half the normal size. When asked about his earlier statements on Schiavo, Senator Bill Frist, who on March 17 said from the floor of the Senate that he had reviewed videotapes of Schiavo and that the “footage, to me, portrays something very different than persistent vegetative state,” said, “I never, never, on the floor of the Senate made a diagnosis.”
A nun in Romania, undergoing exorcism, died after she was tied to a cross, gagged, and left alone for three days in a cold room. “I don’t understand why journalists are making such a fuss about this,” said the priest who organized the exorcism.
Philip Cooney, the chief of staff at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, who achieved notoriety when he revised government reports on global warming to cover up the link between greenhouse gas emissions and rising temperatures, quit his job to become a lobbyist for ExxonMobil. “Perhaps he won’t even notice he has changed jobs,” said the director of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
And in New Zealand we have some of our own ostrich types. Don Brash is officially a global warming skeptic while HB Today editor (and family friend) Louis Pierard argues that global warming is self-evident but is quick to point out that we shouldn’t just blame humans and, uh hell, what’s the point we probably can’t do anything about it anyways: apparently the Kyoto Protocol, ratified by 141 countries, is “pious, feel-good ideology.” Surely, he asks, “there are more efficient and cost-effective ways of cutting reliance on fossil fuels.” How long he thinks we should ponder this question he doesn’t say.
Reminds me of a piece I wrote for his paper back in 2000 about genetically modifed food, which includes:
We are being told [GE food is safe as houses] by the same people who told us the Titanic could not be sunk, the same people who told us asbestos was fine, the same people who told us global warming does not exist, the same people who now admit that global warming exists but deny that humans have a major part to play, the same people who told us CFCs do not deplete the ozone layer, the same people who told us it was safe to pump pregnant mothers full of Thalidomide, …
Meanwhile, in a piece headed The Wall Street Journal vs. The Scientific Consensus RealClimate (a site run by actual scientists) tears the Wall Street Journal into shreds over the paper’s claims that scientific evidence for climate change “looks weaker all the time.”
No Right Turn has the latest news on Ahmed Zaoui.
Tze Ming Mok ponders why she didn’t make it onto these clown’s ‘hit list’ of “communists, anti-facists, anarchists, homosexuals, and multiculturalists.” Were these guys not breast fed as children or something?
It appears a long-lost Da Vinci masterpiece has been found behind a wall and the Louvre has revamped their already very good website, which is definitely worth a gander.
And, on a final note, apparently the Aussies were claiming Michael Cambell as their own when he won the U.S. open the other day, this from Russell Brown:
PS: Just heard from someone in Melbourne that the radio there was describing Campbell as “an Australasian who lives in Sydney.” No, he’s a New Zealander who lives in Brighton, England, you desperate buggers.
Scott Ritter, former UN Chief Weapons Inspector in Iraq, writing for Aljazeera, argues that the invasion of Iran has already begun, much the same way as the invasion of Iraq begun in the summer of 2002. It’s really worth reading the whole article, but here’s a large excerpt:
Americans, along with the rest of the world, are starting to wake up to the uncomfortable fact that President George Bush not only lied to them about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (the ostensible excuse for the March 2003 invasion and occupation of that country by US forces), but also about the very process that led to war.
On 16 October 2002, President Bush told the American people that “I have not ordered the use of force. I hope that the use of force will not become necessary.”
We know now that this statement was itself a lie, that the president, by late August 2002, had, in fact, signed off on the ‘execute’ orders authorising the US military to begin active military operations inside Iraq, and that these orders were being implemented as early as September 2002, when the US Air Force, assisted by the British Royal Air Force, began expanding its bombardment of targets inside and outside the so-called no-fly zone in Iraq.
President Bush had signed a covert finding in late spring 2002, which authorised the CIA and US Special Operations forces to dispatch clandestine units into Iraq for the purpose of removing Saddam Hussein from power.
The fact is that the Iraq war had begun by the beginning of summer 2002, if not earlier.
As with Iraq, the president has paved the way for the conditioning of the American public and an all-too-compliant media to accept at face value the merits of a regime change policy regarding Iran, linking the regime of the Mullah’s to an “axis of evil” (together with the newly “liberated” Iraq and North Korea), and speaking of the absolute requirement for the spread of “democracy” to the Iranian people.
But Americans, and indeed much of the rest of the world, continue to be lulled into a false sense of complacency by the fact that overt conventional military operations have not yet commenced between the United States and Iran.
As such, many hold out the false hope that an extension of the current insanity in Iraq can be postponed or prevented in the case of Iran. But this is a fool’s dream.
The reality is that the US war with Iran has already begun. As we speak, American over flights of Iranian soil are taking place, using pilotless drones and other, more sophisticated, capabilities.
The violation of a sovereign nation’s airspace is an act of war in and of itself. But the war with Iran has gone far beyond the intelligence-gathering phase.
President Bush has taken advantage of the sweeping powers granted to him in the aftermath of 11 September 2001, to wage a global war against terror and to initiate several covert offensive operations inside Iran.
The most visible of these is the CIA-backed actions recently undertaken by the Mujahadeen el-Khalq, or MEK, an Iranian opposition group, once run by Saddam Hussein’s dreaded intelligence services, but now working exclusively for the CIA’s Directorate of Operations.
It is bitter irony that the CIA is using a group still labelled as a terrorist organisation, a group trained in the art of explosive assassination by the same intelligence units of the former regime of Saddam Hussein, who are slaughtering American soldiers in Iraq today, to carry out remote bombings in Iran of the sort that the Bush administration condemns on a daily basis inside Iraq.
… with everyone’s heads rooted in the events of the past, many are missing out on the crime that is about to be repeated by the Bush administration in Iran - an illegal war of aggression, based on false premise, carried out with little regard to either the people of Iran or the United States.
Most Americans, together with the mainstream American media, are blind to the tell-tale signs of war, waiting, instead, for some formal declaration of hostility, a made-for-TV moment such as was witnessed on 19 March 2003.
We now know that the war had started much earlier. Likewise, history will show that the US-led war with Iran will not have begun once a similar formal statement is offered by the Bush administration, but, rather, had already been under way since June 2005, when the CIA began its programme of MEK-executed terror bombings in Iran.
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