ehBeth wrote:...the French Kiss-Off
...Ican made me think of this.
How did I
make you do that?
I think these chronologies are pertinent.
It generally takes a long time for a country to
begin to get a new democracy right--it took us 21 years. So far, it's taken Iraq 14 years (counting from 1991, or 2 years counting from 2003). It is also analogous in what the American colonies did and what Iraq is now doing to end tyranny.
USA--18th Century
1770--Boston Masacre
1775--Patrick Henry's declaration
1776--Declaration of Independence
1778--Valley Forge
1779--Articles of Confderation signed by all states except Maryland (Maryland refused to sign).
1781--Defeat of British at Yorktown
with help of French troops and ships.
1783--Peace Treaty with British signed in Paris.
1787--Constitutional Convention
1789--Constitution ratified and Constitutional Government instituted
1790--13th State ratifies Constitution
1791--Bill of Rights (i.e., 1st 10 Amendments) adopted
IRAQ--20th and 21st century
1991--Saddam Hussein's forces driven out of Kuwait
with US help
1992--Saddam Hussein begins corruption of UN Oil-for-Food Program
2001--al Qaeda again encamped in northern Iraq
2003--Saddam Hussein's government ended
with US help
2003--Saddam Hussein's corruption of UN Oil-for-Food Program ended
with US help
2003--al Qaeda no longer encamped in northern Iraq
with US help
2003--Iraqi Provisional Government established
with US help
2005--Election by the Iraqi people of Iraqi representatives to Iraqi Constitutional Convention
Will the American People ever catch on?
)(****************************)(
May 22, 2005
It's All Newsweek's Fault
By FRANK RICH
IN the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Fareed Zakaria wrote a 6,791-word cover story for Newsweek titled "Why Do They Hate Us?" Think how much effort he could have saved if he'd waited a few years. As we learned last week, the question of why they hate us can now be answered in just one word: Newsweek.
"Our United States military personnel go out of their way to make sure that the Holy Koran is treated with care," said the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, as he eagerly made the magazine the scapegoat for lethal anti-American riots in Afghanistan. Indeed, Mr. McClellan was so fixated on destroying Newsweek - and on mouthing his own phony P.C. pieties about the Koran - that by omission he whitewashed the rioters themselves, Islamic extremists who routinely misuse that holy book as a pretext for murder.
That's how absurdly over-the-top the assault on Newsweek has been. The administration has been so successful at bullying the news media in order to cover up its own fictions and failings in Iraq that it now believes it can get away with pinning some 17 deaths on an errant single sentence in a 10-sentence Periscope item that few noticed until days after its publication. Coming just as the latest CNN/Gallup/USA Today poll finds that only 41 percent of Americans think the war in Iraq is "worth fighting" and only 42 percent think it's going well, this smells like desperation. In its war on the press, this hubristic administration may finally have crossed a bridge too far.
Let's stipulate flatly that Newsweek made a serious error. For the sake of argument, let's even posit that the many other similar accounts of Koran desecration (with and without toilets) by American interrogators over the past two years are fantasy - even though they've been given credence by the International Committee of the Red Cross and have turned up repeatedly in legal depositions by torture victims and in newspapers as various as The Denver Post and The Financial Times. Let's also ignore the May 1 New York Times report that a former American interrogator at Guantánamo has corroborated a detainee's account of guards tossing Korans into a pile and stepping on them, thereby prompting a hunger strike. Why don't we just go all the way and erase those photographs of female guards sexually humiliating Muslims (among other heinous crimes) at Abu Ghraib?
Even with all that evidence off the table, there is still an overwhelming record, much of it in government documents, that American interrogators have abused Muslim detainees with methods specifically chosen to hit their religious hot buttons. A Defense Department memo of October 2002 (published in full in Mark Danner's book "Torture and Truth") authorized such Muslim-baiting practices as depriving prisoners of "published religious items or materials" and forcing the removal of beards and clothing. A cable signed by Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez called for interrogators to "exploit Arab fear of dogs." (Muslims view them as unclean.) Even a weak-kneed government investigation of prison abuses (and deaths) in Iraq and Afghanistan issued in March by Vice Adm. Albert T. Church III of the Navy authenticated two cases in which female interrogators "touched and spoke to detainees in a sexually suggestive manner in order to incur stress based on the detainees' religious beliefs."
About the Newsweek matter Donald Rumsfeld had a moral to bequeath the land. "People need to be careful what they say," he said, channeling Ari Fleischer, and added, "just as people need to be careful what they do." How true. If one of his right-hand men, Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, hadn't been barnstorming American churches making internationally publicized pronouncements that his own Christian God is "a real god" and Islam's god is "an idol," maybe anti-American sentiment in the Middle East, at record highs even before the Newsweek incident, would have been a shade less lethal. If higher-ups had been called to account for the abuses of Abu Ghraib, maybe Newsweek might have had as little traction in the Arab world as The Onion.
Then again, even the administration's touchy-feely proactive outreach to Muslims in the Middle East is baloney: Karen Hughes, appointed with great fanfare by the president in March as our latest under secretary of state for public diplomacy (the third since 9/11), runs a shop with no Muslims at the top - or would, if she were there. As The Washington Post reported, she doesn't intend to assume her duties until the fall and the paperwork for her confirmation has yet to be sent to the Senate. Why rush? It's not as if there's a war on.
Given this context, the administration's attempt to pass the entire buck to Newsweek for our ill odor among Muslims, including those Muslims who abhor jihadists committing murder, is laughable. Yet there's something weirdly self-incriminating about the language it uses to do it. Richard Boucher, the State Department spokesman whose previous boss, Colin Powell, delivered a fictional recitation of Saddam Hussein's weapon capabilities before the United Nations Security Council, said it's "shocking" that Newsweek used "facts that have not been substantiated." Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, attacked Newsweek for hiding "behind anonymous sources," yet it was an anonymous source, an Iraqi defector known as Curveball, who fed the fictions that Mr. Powell spouted to gin up America for war. Psychological displacement of this magnitude might give even Freud pause.
The only thing more ridiculous is the spectacle of the White House's various knee-jerk flacks on cable news shoutfests and in the blogosphere characterizing Newsweek as representative of a supposedly anti-American, military-hating "mainstream media." It wasn't long ago that the magazine and the co-author of the Periscope item, Michael Isikoff, were being cheered by the same crowd for their pursuit of Monica Lewinsky and Kathleen Willey.
As for the supposed antimilitary agenda of the so-called mainstream media, the right should look first at itself. In its eagerness to parrot the administration line, it's as ready to sell out the military as any clichéd leftist. For starters, it thought nothing of dismissing the judgment of Gen. Carl Eichenberry, our top commander in Afghanistan, who, according to Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said the riots were "not at all tied to the article in the magazine."
The right's rage at Newsweek is all too reminiscent of the contempt it heaped on Specialist Thomas Wilson, the soldier who dared to ask Mr. Rumsfeld at a town hall meeting in Kuwait in December about the shortage of armored vehicles. Mr. Wilson was guilty of "near-insubordination," said Rush Limbaugh; the embedded reporter who helped him frame his question was reviled by bloggers as a traitor. Yet Mr. Wilson's question was legitimate, and Mr. Rumsfeld's answer (that the shortage was only "a matter of production and capability") was a lie. As USA Today reported in March, the Pentagon has known for nearly two years that it didn't have enough armored Humvees but let the problem fester until that insubordinate questioner gave the defense secretary no choice but to act.
It's also because of incompetent Pentagon planning that other troops may now be victims of weapons looted from Saddam's munitions depots after the fall of Baghdad. Yet when The New York Times reported one such looting incident, in Al Qaqaa, before the election, the administration and many in the blogosphere reflexively branded the story fraudulent. But the story was true. It was later corroborated not only by United States Army reservists and national guardsmen who spoke to The Los Angeles Times but also by Iraq's own deputy minister of industry, who told The New York Times two months ago that Al Qaqaa was only one of many such weapon caches hijacked on America's undermanned post-invasion watch.
IT is terrible that Newsweek was wrong, though it's worth noting, as John Donvan of ABC News did, that the Defense Department's claim that its story was "demonstrably" false is also an overreach. Almost nothing that happens in the sealed prison at Guantánamo is as demonstrable as, say, Saddam's underwear. But if something good can come out of something bad, the administration's overkill of Newsweek may focus greater public attention on just how much it is using press-bashing to deflect attention from the fictions spun by its own propaganda machine.
Just since the election, we've witnessed the unmasking of Armstrong Williams and Jeff Gannon. We've learned - thanks to Newsweek's parent publication, The Washington Post - that the Pentagon went so far as to deliberately hide the circumstances of Pat Tillman's friendly-fire death from his own family for weeks, lest the truth mar the P.R. advantages to be reaped from his memorial service. Even as Scott McClellan instructs Newsweek on just what stories it should write to atone for its sins, a professional propagandist sits as chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting: Kenneth Tomlinson, who also runs the board supervising Voice of America and other government-run media outlets. He's been hard at work meddling in the journalism on NPR and PBS.
This steady drip of subterfuge and news manipulation increasingly tells a more compelling story than the old news that Newsweek so egregiously botched.
* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
Quote:Weekend Edition
May 21 / 22, 2005
Black Helicopters?
The GOP's Police State
By DAVE LINDORFF
It's always been an article of faith on the "loony" right that the black helicopters of the Jewish-United Nations fascist government would arrive to take over America and turn it into a hellish police state through the machinations of the liberal Democrats. Who would have thought that it would be the conservative Republicans who would be waving the landing lights to guide the troop planes in?
But there it is.
In four short years, following the 9/11 attacks, we have moved a long way down a very dark and dead-end alley.
First we had the Patriot Act, the handiwork of John Ashcroft (now out to pasture nursing his wet dreams of a restoration of slavery and the Confederacy) and his able assistant Michael Chertoff, now Sith overlord of the Department of Homeland Security. This obscene 362-page pile of totalitarian legislation has dangerously undermined the First and Fourth Amendments of the Bill of Rights.
Then we had the assertion of a Justice Department and Presidential right to revoke one's citizenship (as witness the cases of Mssrs. Hamdi and Padilla, the latter of whom, a native-born American citizen, remains in jail in a military lock-up now for two years, with no access to family or even an attorney, with no charge against him and no right to challenge his arrest).
Couple that with the Bush/Cheney-sanctioned policies of rendition, where people are kidnapped by government agents and whisked away on unmarked planes to other nations like Syria and Egypt where torture and extra-judicial killings are routine, and torture (see Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, etc.), and you have the very real threat of American citizens being disappeared, just they way they did it for years (under American instruction and direction) in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Argentina and Chile).
In communities across this land where believers in Islam dwell, both immigrants and native-born citizens, there is these days a permanent state of terror, as FBI, ATF, Secret Service and other nefarious federal agents slink around grabbing people from their homes, interrogating others, hauling off computers and files, leveling trumped-up charges, and threatening people into becoming unwilling informants on their neighbors-- all in the name of fighting "terror".
Thousands of decent, hard-working immigrants have been snatched from their families (many of whom are American citizens, and often young children) and shipped off to home countries to face arrest and torture and, in some documented cases, death, with no access to hearings. We never learn about most of them. The government doesn't have to tell us they've been taken. Even their own families are often left in the dark.
Citizens who try to exercise their First Amendment right to protest the actions of this president and vice president are herded into fenced in "free-speech zone" holding pens, or arrested and jailed, often after first being beaten or maced, on orders of the Secret Service. Others have been blacklisted and barred from events because they had the temerity to wear an anti-Bush T-shirt or to paste an anti-war bumper sticker on their car.
Now the Republican leadership in Congress has quietly pushed through a law establishing a national identity card which Wired magazine says will be enable the government to set up a computerized data bank on every citizen, telling authorities where we've been, where we are, who we've meet, what we buy, what our political affiliations are, and a whole lot of other stuff.
And they're pushing ahead, at urging from the White House, with a new and improved Patriot Act that continues to define terror as anything that threatens the state (including a simple act of protest), and that in the name of fighting that loosely defined evil, will essentially eliminate the Fourth Amendment protection against illegal search and seizure, giving the administration the power to spy and obtain records on virtually anyone without even going to a judge for a "probable cause" warrant.
Not content with that, the right is also stuffing the courts with judges who don't give a damn about any of those old rights and freedoms-who think state power is just dandy. That's what this fight over the filibuster is all about-getting rid of judges who take the Bill of Rights and the rest of the Constitution with its hoary concerns about separation of powers seriously-and of course paving the way for "Justice" Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas to assume the post of Chief Justice.
Sadly, while they are leading the parade, the Republicans are not alone in this march to fascism and a 21st Century police-state tyranny. They've been doing it with the willing connivance of a number of conservative Democrats, including the likes of Joe Lieberman, Hillary Clinton and Diane Feinstein (this is hardly a complete list). And the way was paved, of course, by anti-Democratic police-state measures introduced earlier by the Clinton administration. They've also had the help of a somnolent corporate media and a blissfully ignorant public caught up in "American Idol" and the Jackson trial or whatever the latest entertainment diversion might be.
I used to think that right-wing warnings about jackbooted agents of the federal government landing in black Cobra gunships and storming our homes in dead of night were the fevered ravings of lunatics, but no more.
With this push to stack the courts, create a computerized national ID card, equate protest with support for terrorism, and make citizenship a revocable privilege, comes official government promotion of an intolerant, medieval Christian fundamentalism which provides the whole thing with an ideological gloss that makes any outrage not just permissible, but "God's will."
Still, it's surprising to see the right turning off the lights of liberty, after all those years of warnings about liberal Democrats and the "nanny" state.
Do you have your 'new' citizen's identification card?
Also available in 'painless tattoo' form.....
Blatham writes
Notwithstanding that the 'positive proof' is from a private BLOG, doesn't it seem strange that this particular photo of a tank that 'didn't make it past the military censors' would be posted on an offiical DOD Marine website?
But if it fits, use the 'evidence' anyway.
Well gel, that is downright depressing. Mostly because it is what I have been feeling in the back of mind for a few years now.
I also agree that Bill and Hilliary Clinton seem to be made out of the same cloth. This surprised me when I finally came to that conclusion.
CI-good article.
Have you guys been following the Laura Bush tour? It seems she is running into some protest and is brushing it off as though it happens to everybody.
Apart from showing remarkable endurance by having remained in a state of matrimonial alleged bliss with the Shrub for so many years, i genuinely admire Laura Bush for poise and aplomb. One could only wish that her lesser half possessed the tenth part of her intelligence, charm and grace.
Laura Bush is the only one in that entire sorry crew with the least bit of class.
Can you provide a link to the USMC site where the photo appears Walter? I poked around on the site for awhile but didn't find that photo.
Foxfyre - if you look at the properties of the photo when you click on the link - and then remove the tags from the end - section by section - you eventually back your way up to the
http://www.usmc.mil/marinelink/mcn2000.nsf/frontpagenews
That pic is on the official usmc website.
It very well may be ehBeth. I just couldn't find it there when I poked around the site a bit.
You have to go at it back to front, FF.
(I use that method with a lot of photos to see where they're originally from)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
back again
FF - if you've got the patience - go to the photo gallery on the front page of the site - and click through to the photos taken on 050505 - it's in that grouping
.PDF file on awards from CPA Bremer
15 milll for body armour in April 04
7 mill to dredge a harbor
Source for above.
Just about all the site is interesting....
I'll take your word for it ehBeth. (Complete computer klutz here.) But if it is posted on the Marine website, then it apparently did pass the military censors. I frankly find it mildly offensive, but most likely not for the same reason Blatham does.
Here's a faster route to the photo.
On the USMC Official Website mainpage - go to the search option
type in 050505 - then select image archive - it is the first pic on that page
if you click on the small photo - you can get a small description and a further link to an article. the pic originally accompanied the article.
http://www.marines.mil/marinelink/mcn2000.nsf/lookupstoryref/20055187145
http://www.marines.mil/marinelink/image1.nsf/lookup/200551873744?opendocument
PhotoID: 200551873744
Submitted by: 2nd Marine Division
Operation/Exercise/Event:
Operation Iraqi Freedom
Caption:
Haditha Dam, Al Anbar, Iraq - The 'New Testament' a tank with 4th Tank Co., 1st Tank battalion attached to 3/25 prepares to lead the way during a recent mission.
Photo by: Cpl. Ken Melton
Read Story Associated with this photo
Date the Photo was taken:05/05/2005
This Image has been cleared for release.
Well a lot of trouble to double check blatham and walter but it looks it is legit.
Nice to know we are sending our military off to fight Muslims with the words New Testament put on our tanks. Sure way dispell the idea that this a holy war with Christians against the Muslims.
The guys can name their tanks, planes, etc. whatever they wish. Apparently the Marines had no problem with the photo or the name on the tank. I would have preferred the guys pick another name, but I think this is no more than an illustration of tolerance for free speech.
And, in retrospect, those guys are out there putting their lives on the line, and, in case you forget, these guys are doing their damndest to make life better for the Muslims. Within reason our guys should be able to name their tank whatever they want.
It's hardly a holy war of Christians against Muslims and I think no intelligent Muslim who isn't an avowed terrorist would see it that way.
It's unfortunate that there are arm chair critics here who perpetuate that myth.
Foxfyre wrote:It's hardly a holy war of Christians against Muslims and I think no intelligent Muslim who isn't an avowed terrorist would see it that way.
That is just a bit disingenuous.
But it's certainly your right to think that way.
I'm sure it was meant ironically. The intelligent Muslims who are not terrorists, would appreciate the joke.
