June 2003 Archives

Time Magazine quotes President Bush asking each of his aides in turn: "Are you in charge of finding WMD?"
    It is very significant when a bastion of fuddy-duddy journalism like Time can no longer excuse away the absence of weapons of mass destruction in occupied Iraq. This article implies a brewing scandal and rates which Administration officials will get swept up in the accusations and finger-pointing. There's nothing in this article that we haven't been asking here on Nonviolence.Org but it's a sign of the times when the hard questions and scent of scandal jumps from the blogs into the mainstream press.
    The United States is now occupying two Persian Gulf countries by military force. Democracy has is still largely absent and the US military will probably have have to occupy these countries for many years. Both wars are military failures if judged by their stated rationales--the US went into Afghanistan to stop Osama bin Laden, who remains free and plotting. The US went into Iraq to stop a weapons program that we now know didn't exist.
    When a President takes a country to war, he places on himself an awesome responsibility, for we the people are relying both on his integrity and his skills of discernment. There are limits to what the public should know, and it is this fact which makes the integrity of the office of the Presidency so important in the 21st Century. If the US Commander-in-Chief states that there is conclusive proof of weapons, he'd better be damned sure he's right. This President was wrong. This President very likely lied. George W. Bush has degraded the dignity of his office. He has tricked the American people into war.
    The Time Magazine article concludes with the warning of things to come: "But if WMD don't turn up and the Administration wants to act elsewhere, it may find that the enemy massing against it is public opinion at home." That Time could describe public opinion as an "enemy" is proof that it's not a lefty publication. The Good Ol' Boy Front is starting to break ranks. Will it fall apart?

Occupation forces in Iraq have canceled upcoming elections. Instead of democracy, the US is choosing the mayors and provincial leaders, mainly from a pool of former Iraqi military leaders.

"Ten weeks into the occupation, the cities and towns outside of Baghdad are largely administered by former Iraqi military and police officers and people who had close ties to the Baath Party. Iraqi generals and police colonels, for example, are now mayors of a dozen cities, including Samarra, Najaf, Tikrit, Balad and Baqubah."

    There are shadows of Vietnam here, where the US prevented elections in the South knowing that their chosen candidates would loose. Our real reasons for being in Iraq will become clear in how we administer the occupation. If the US government installs Iraqi generals to run the country then that makes clear that "regime change" was just a slogan and that "democracy" just a pretty word to the Bush Administration.

An interesting article on George Orwell and the future we've become. What would Orwell have thought about the big brother of national security and the never-ending war on terror. And what would he have thought of the internet and blogs? Here's a snippet:

"In the age of the leak and the blog, of evidence extraction and link discovery, truths will either out or be outed, later if not sooner. This is something I would bring to the attention of every diplomat, politician and corporate leader: the future, eventually, will find you out.

International Atomic energy Agency says the recently-discovered and hyped equipment dates to before the 1991 Gulf War. But as I wrote a few days ago, I'm sure there are millions of Americans who will not see this retraction and think that weapons were found. Shame on CNN & MS-NBC for over-hyping these finds. The question of the day: Will Byron York apologize now?

In the news today is the latest U.S. claim of evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Read past the headlines to the middle of the reports--but make sure you're sitting down. Drumroll, please: Saddam Hussein was stockpiling beans. The evil bastard! I couldn't make this stuff up but it's true: U.S. troops have found 300 sacks of beans and have announced it as the latest weapons of mass destruction find.
    Apparently one can make a biological weapon out of castor beans. Scientists have studied this thoroughly and determined that the symptoms are stomach aches and diarrhea. It turns out that beans have an ingredient that can make you fart. Concentrate it enough and you can get diarrhea and die. The phrase "weapons of mass destruction (WMD)" has always been wonderfully vague but at long last we now know it includes sacks of beans.
    As I write this, I'm aware I might be underestimating all this. Perhaps castor beans really are the weapon we should all fear. Perhaps every American should start stockpiling Beano. But perhaps the Bush Administration has finally gotten so desparate they'll lay claim even to a hill of beans.
    PS: Yes there was also a claim that parts were found for a uranium-enrichment centrifuge. But as blogger John erhardt ("The Skeptic") notes: All this is evidence of is that Iraq can pass a gas or liquid in a vacuum sealed length of pipe. More from Josh Marshall, who says the age of the parts are proof that the the 1990s UN sanctions & inspections in Iraq worked

Is the war over? asked "Nowhere Man" on the Nonviolence Board a week, citing over three dozen articles on continued fighting in Iraq and sparking quite a discussion. Now the Guardian is reporting that forces in Iraq are facing mounting attacks.
    The Financial Times has an interesting if flawed article on the occupation of Iraq. It reports that the Pentagon is starting a major review of its Iraq occupation amid growing criticism (an example from the BBC) that the US failed to prepare adequately for occupation. Fair enough, but the article mixes this report with quotes from a financial security group that declares that there's a even chance that open revolt will soon break out in Iraq, without explicitly reminding readers taht private security firms make their living off of warnings like this.

There has been a lot of speculation of the "highly unusual" role of New York Times reporter Judith Miller in Iraq War II. She was particularly cozy with Iraqi dissident leader Ahmed Chalabi, which was the source of many of her often-wrong news reports. She filed a lot of reports about weapons of mass destruction that were later found to be wrong and according to this Washington Post article she even participated in a improper interrogation of a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein. She threatened U.S. generals with hostile articles in the Times if the unit she was attached to was pulled out of a good reporting vantage point (the decision to redeploy was rescinded, presumably due to Miller's pressure).
    Since when do U.S. army units base their deployments on reporter's whims and threats? And why are improper interrogations being held for the benefit of a celebrity journalist from a powerful paper? It seems like the Times needs to do some more soul-searching and that it's recent scandals might not be over.

At the New York Times, Op-ed Columnist Paul Krugman comes right out and says it:

There is no longer any serious doubt that Bush administration officials deceived us into war. The key question now is why so many influential people are in denial, unwilling to admit the obvious.
--and--In particular, there was never any evidence linking Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda; yet administration officials repeatedly suggested the existence of a link. Supposed evidence of an active Iraqi nuclear program was thoroughly debunked by the administration's own experts; yet administration officials continued to cite that evidence and warn of Iraq's nuclear threat.

It's good to see someone at the Times taking some responsibility for helping "bamboozle" the country to war. But how relevant really is the Times: Will that Bamboozled Bloc of Americans even notice a little op-ed like this?

Slate's Timothy Noah asks "Can Bush Be Both Ignorant and a Liar?" and concludes that its "impossible to tell--and, ultimately, of little interest--whether Bush lacks the necessary mental equipment, or whether he's simply incurious." He asks why the president is so often left off the hook for his inaccurate statements and has this great piece from The Nation's David Corn:

"He mischaracterizes situations to fit his pattern of thinking. Does he believe he's lying? I don't know. [But] he still should be held accountable, whether he made a mistake of this nature in good faith or in bad faith."

A poll by the Washington Post and ABC News says most Americans support U.S. military action in Iran to stop development of nuclear arms. After all the mounting evidence that there weren't any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the drumroll to further war is being met with the same unquestioning and misplaced trust in President Bush.
      The ignorance is astounding: one in four of those polled acutally thought Iraq had used chemical or biological weapons in the recent war. This is a real testament to the brilliant P.R. work of the Bush Administration over the last two years. The most important way to influence public opinion is to control the images on the TV news. It doesn't matter that there were no chemical or biological attacks--just the sight of all the "embedded" reporters with their gas masks convinced a quarter of the population. Just like the rising and falling Terror Alerts issued by the Department of Homeland Security, there's a continually-reinforced message to be afraid of the world. Fear has become its own reality. Perhaps this is the central truth to all pre-emptive actions: fear becomes the only justification necessary for an attack against perceived threats. While this might work in a perfect world where we'd have perfect knowledge and assurance of an imminent attack, there is no system of checks and balances to counteract our unrestrained fear. There's a very real paranoia that develops and anyone not sharing the sense of urgency or crisis needs to be jailed, ridiculed or lied to. Politicians can make any unsubstantiated claim they wish--as long as it starts debate on the news programs, it will be real to a startling percentage of Americans.
      The rise of the Bush Administration has coincided with the rise of "Reality Shows" in the United States. Beautiful people (mostly aspiring actors) are put into very unrealistic situations and filmed in different types of humilitating, embarrasing or dangerous stunts. Again, the image becomes the message and incredulity takes a back seat to the show's self-declared claim to represent reality. At the dawn of their unquestioned empire, Americans are donning their pajamas and demanding to hear fairy tales, where their princes and princesses are the heros in a world that can't be trusted past the castle gates.

In Iraq, U.S. soldiers are blaring the soundtract to 'Apocalypse Now' to psych themselves up to war:

"With Wagner's 'Ride of the Valkyries' still ringing in their ears and the clatter of helicopters overhead, soldiers rammed vehicles into metal gates and hundreds of troops raided houses in the western city of Ramadi"

Meanwhile in my hometown of Philadelphia four teenagers listened to the Beatles' 'Helter Skelter' over forty times before attacking and beating to death one of their friends.
   Horrific as both stories are, what strikes me is the choice of music. 'Helter Skelter' and most of the music on 'Apocalpse Now' were written in the late 1960 and early 70s (the movie itself came out in 1979). Why are today's teenagers picking the music of their parents to plan their attacks? Can't you kill to Radiohead or Linkin Park? Couldn't the Philly kids have shown some hometown pride and picked Pink? Why the Oldies Music? Seriously, there have been some topsy-turvy generational surprises in the support and opposition to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Is there some sort of strange fetish for all things 70s going on here?

The New Republic has a long article by John B Judis & Spencer Ackerman detailing the subversion of the intelligence agencies to the political agenda of the pro-war hawks in the Bush Administration. The job of the Central Intelligence Agency is to provide the U.S. with credible information on threats to national security. Subverting it to fit a political agenda is the real threat to national security.

"Had the administration accurately depicted the consensus within the intelligence community in 2002--that Iraq's ties with Al Qaeda were inconsequential; that its nuclear weapons program was minimal at best; and that its chemical and biological weapons programs, which had yielded significant stocks of dangerous weapons in the past, may or may not have been ongoing--it would have had a very difficult time convincing Congress and the American public to support a war to disarm Saddam."

This week former General Wesley Clark told NBC's Meet the Press that the White House called him just hours after the airplanes hit the World Trade Center, pressuring him to declare Iraq was responsible. He refused, citing a lack of evidence. It seems like evidence has never been terribly important to the Bush folks. They came into office wanting a second war with Iraq and have used every political opportunity to push this agenda. It's pretty disgusting that they were using the tragedy of 9/11 to manipulate public opinion while the buildings were still smouldering and the people still dying.
   This link courtesy of thoughts on the eve of the apocalypse, Bill Connoly's blog, which has a lot of great links and smart commentary.

The editor of Slate wonders if the whole question of Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction even matters. "By now, WMD have taken on a mythic role in which fact doesn't play much of a part. The phrase itself--'weapons of mass destruction'--is more like an incantation than a description of anything in particular."
   Here's a nostalgic listing of Bush Administration quotes assuring us WMDs existed. (Thanks to StuffedDog for the link)

By Martin Kelley. How can we use online tools to measure the state of the Peace Movement?

The Washington Post reports that "senior intelligence officials" at the CIA felt pressured Vice President Dick Cheney's multiple visits to CIA headquarters over the past year. These visits created "an environment in which some analysts felt they were being pressured to make their assessments fit with the Bush administration's policy objectives."