hit london Posts

One of the things I don't get about the press treatment of the Follieri/Galante scandal is their attitude toward actress Anne Hathaway. Until a few weeks ago she was the dapper Italian's girlfriend and they were constantly photographed together. But they broke up the week before the scandal hit the tabloids, and all we've gotten are these silly human interest stories. We hear speculation she must be heartbroken, we hear how she's moving on with her life, we even hear details about getting her dog back from her old apartment with Follieri. She's lost a lot of weight of her latest movie promo tour and mysteriously showed up at a Cape May bar singing Journey songs this weekend with a photographer conveniently in tow.

Hello? She was on the board of directors of the Follieri Group's charities. The New York penthouse they shared was paid for by conned money as were their lavish trips and high flying lifestyle. Boyfriend drama is the last thing she needs to be worried about right now. I sure hope the FBI is carefully going through her checkbook and date book right now. She both solicited and received stolen money. No wonder she's lost a lot of weight.

And what's up with her getting off the plane from London and driving a couple of hours to the southern tip of the New Jersey? The Cape May County house Follieri bought from the bishop was reportedly just sold again. Could Anne Hathaway be on the deed or authorized to sign for  Follieri? Idle speculation of course but I do wish her publicists weren't making fools of the popular press like this.

Rove posing as a patriot

There's evidence that one of President Bush's key aids was involved with the leak that revealed a CIA agent's identity. Republican political hack Karl Rove is being named as someone who told Time Magazine that a whistleblower against the Bush's weapons of mass destructions lies was a CIA agent. More background of the story from two years ago, White House treasonable dirty tricks against whistleblower's wife.

The first question: are we surprised? Of course the smear campaign was orchestrated out of the White House. The whole war has everything to do with politics. Facts were inconveniences when it came to building a case against iraq. We now know that the decade of sanctions against Saddam Hussein worked. His military was a shambles and he had no money to engage in researching or building weapons of mass destruction. The war was a political ploy by the White House. It propped up the President and kept terrorism in the spotlight. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the London bombings were carried out by iraqi insurgents, people who might not be terrorists if we hadn't gone and invaded iraq (yes, there were terrorist before but every act of violence inspires acts of counter-violence).

Karl Rove's job has been to get George W. Bush elected and then re-elected. The role of political consultants is supposed to stop there. The job of governance and statemanship should be left to the President himself. This Administration is more overtly political than any in recent history. Why was Karl Rove selling the war against iraq?

Two of the blasts that hit London today were near Friends House, the home of Britain Yearly Meeting, which is acting as a relief center. From TimesOnline

Ministers and priests went on to the streets to work alongside the emergency services, helping to comfort traumatised commuters. At Friends House, opposite Euston Station, Quakers set up an emergency unit for the hundreds of people blocked in the middle of the explosions at Kings Cross, Woburn Place and Russell Square.

The Quakers offered free tea, coffee and telephone calls to all the people affected by the blasts as well as emotional support. Many of the hundreds of people stuck in Euston were witness to the explosions, with one young woman describing how she saw the bus explode and thought it was another 9/11.

She has become partially deaf and is resting in the Quaker First Aid room.

The hundreds of people who are in Friends House remain stuck there for the foreseeable future and many are unsure how they will return home tonight.

Friends House also gets a mention in this Guardian piece

Responses from the Quaker Blogosphere:

Rob of Consider the Lillies is okay and is posting reactions. The Contemplative Activist reminds us to live in that virtue of that life and power that takes away the occasion of all wars'. Peterson Toscano wonders if the bombings really are senseless in light of our cultural attitudes--"You push me; I push you harder; you push me back, and it goes on and on and on." Beppe turns to a recent passage from his scripture study to gage just what Jesus might have done. I will try to continue updating these responses as they come in.

Our prayers are with all those in London today: the dead, the injured, the scared. And with those whose fear turns to anger and will inevitably lead to calls for retribution. Our Friends Peace Testimony helps us keep our groundedness in times of horror and I am grateful to hear that Friends are there, ready to tend to the wounded of body and soul.

Elsewhere

Apparently Wikipedia is now covering news and is one of the better sources of information on the London bombings.

Quakers Uniting in Publications, better known as "QUIP", is a collection of 50 Quaker publishers, booksellers and authors committed to the "ministry of the written word." I often think of QUIP as a support group of sorts for those of us who really believe that publishing can make a difference. It's also one of those places where different branches of Friends come together to work and tell stories. QUIP sessions strike a nice balance between work and unstructured time, it's has its own nice culture of friendliness and cooperation that are the real reason many of us go every year.

From the Mordechai Vanunu site:

"PEACE HERO" MORDECHAI VANUNU, LEAVING PRISON IN HOURS, WILL BE GREETED BY WHITE DOVES, FLOWERS... AND YET MORE PUNISHMENT

In less than twelve hours, Israel's captive Mordechai Vanunu is to walk out of Shikma Prison, where his home was a cell for the last 18 years. Over 100 international anti-nuclear, peace and human rights activists, and at least as many Israeli supporters of the nuclear whistleblower will assemble outside the prison gate at 8:00 am Wednesday morning

Then the leash stiffens, and the collar tightens. Although his full sentence has been served and all his secrets have been told, Mordechai Vanunu's next punishment is to shun all contact with foreigners and most modern communications while confined to the city of Jaffa for one year. He is denied his passport and is forbidden to enter embassies or approach borders and airports. He may not talk to Israelis about his work at the nuclear weapons factory in Dimona, nor even recite his published revelations from the pages of the London Sunday Times in October, 1986.

Nuclear whistleblower Mordachai Vanunu will be released from Israeli prisons in a month's time, so I'll repost this entry from last August:

The recent U.S. war in iraq was justified in large part by fear that iraq was researching and perhaps building weapons of mass destruction. President Bush and Prime Minister Blair could stand resolutely before the T.V. cameras and pronounce that this was unacceptable and that weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) are wrong.

Of course, WMDs are possessed by many countries in the world, in the form of nuclear weapons. Now is as good a time as any to review the case of Mordechai Vanunu , an Israeli technician who worked on his country's nuclear weapons program. Troubled by his work, he left the nuclear research center and eventually made his way to England, where he told the London Sunday Times of his work with the program. Before the newspaper articles hit the streets, Israeli agents lured him to Italy, kidnapped him there and smuggled his drugged body back to Israeli. There they charged him with treason in a secret trial. Every year activists have marked the date of his imprisonment with vigils. This September 30th will be the seventeenth anniversary. Fortunately it might be the last one, as Vanunu's prison term is expected to end next April.

The issue of weapons of mass destruction is a very real concern, no matter who's finger is "on the button." We now pretty much know for certain that iraq had no program through the 1990s. But a dozen countries are known or suspected of having nuclear weapons and we must be as concerned with their stockpiles as we were with the mirages of the iraq desert.

The U.S. war against iraq just gets stranger every day. One of the key people behind the war told a London audience that week that "international law ... would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone," explaining that "I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing." Perle is one of the key players behind the scenes at the Pentagon. Although he's recently resigned from an important advisory, group, he was one of a handful of military analysists who spent the Clinton Administration arguing for a second war in iraq. So what's up? Perle isn't an official White House spokesperson and doesn't represent official Bush Administration policy. Is he just talking on his own behalf, perhaps to get headlines? Or does he represent a position well represented inside the White House, that the President of the United States should intervene when international law is inefficient? This follows a New York Times report that the military doesn't _really_ think there are many "outside institgators in iraq":http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/19/international/middleeast/19iraq.html and that the bombings really are homegrown resistance to the U.S. invasion. Check out "Daily Kos's":http://www.dailykos.com/story/2003/11/20/65113/597 post on all this, with it's extensive reader commentary. "Thoughts on the eve of the Apocalypse":http://b-c.blogspot.com/2003_11_01_b-c_archive.html#106937251455211736 blog also gives some good context.