Last Straw

Appar­ently banned by the Nor­we­gian gov­ern­ment this catchy tune by Gatas Par­la­ment begins with a news clip stat­ing that the Kill Him Now cam­paign, “a non-religious move­ment col­lect­ing money for a bounty on Bush’s head,” has raised enough money to hire a hit man. It spills out from there into a scath­ing polemic of U.S. imper­i­al­ism, mov­ing on to chal­lenge listen­ers to get up and dance the Anti-American Dance, burn the U.S. flag, and burn down the U.S. embassy in hon­our of St. Hans. Well… got my head nod­ding. You can watch an eng­lish sub­titled ver­sion over at spike.com.

Paul Robin­son, of The Spec­tator, ana­lyses the latest bogey­man of the power-elite, ter­ror­ism, and con­cludes, “Far from being more dan­ger­ous, the world is safer now than ever before; and far from being an ever-growing prob­lem, ter­ror­ism has been in sharp decline for over a decade.”

The Amer­ican Civil Liber­ties Union (ACLU) is char­ging that U.S. Army doc­u­ments obtained under the U.S. Free­dom of Inform­a­tion Act show that the mis­treat­ment of detain­ees in Iraq was much more wide­spread than the gov­ern­ment has admit­ted, includ­ing sworn state­ments that sol­diers were told in August 2003 to “take the detainee(s) out back and beat the fuck out of them.” Sur­prise sur­prise. Matt Welch, of Reason magazine, explains why we’ll never see the second round of Abu Ghraib photos.

Robin Cook explains why why Amer­ican neo­cons are out for Kofi Annan’s blood, and Khaled Amayreh writes from Ramal­lah about the bur­geon­ing rate of pogrom-like attacks by mes­si­anic Israeli ter­ror­ists on defense­less Palestinian vil­la­gers through­out the West Bank.