I am shocked and horrified by the decapitation of Nicholas Berg in Iraq, but not for the chest-puffing reasons the folks at Fox News are. U.S. military proxies held Berg without charges for an extended period of time and there are too many questions about when he was released and who he might have been released to. I’m not one for conspiracy theories but there are real questions as to how Berg ended up in front of those anonymous, hooded butchers. Whatever the answers, the U.S. military is involved in his detention, as is the FBI (who made him miss a plane that was supposed to take him out of Iraq last month), as is the U.S. government back home who didn’t cooperate with his family to get him out of there.
My major piece on this is over on the main Nonviolence.org site: “US military proxies held Berg before decaptiation; who were his executioners?”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000340.php
I’m sure to get even more hate mail than usual for this but I’ll also be watching the mainstream media coverage. I only know of many of these details because Berg was local and Channel 10 News gave background to Berg’s detention. Here’s my prediction from past experience: this story will be too hot for the mainstream media to question for a few days and then it will only be to report that there are some nutcases asking questions. Only after a few days of this kind of second-hand question will the national media drop the fascade and start asking the questions themselves. It should be a fun week ahead.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ nonviolence.org
Mostly archives from Nonviolence.org, the groundbreaking peace portal started by Martin in 1995.
Watergate Web-Style
January 29, 2004
In the papers, a story of “extensive Republican spying on Democrats”:www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/01/22/infiltration_of_files_seen_as_extensive made possible by a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password. Information from the memos was passed to conservative columnist Robert Novak, who was the conduit for White House dirty tricks last summer – he was the one who revealed classified information meant to hurt a prominent “WMD scandal whistleblower Joseph Wilson”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000168.php. The plot thickens.
Housekeeping on Nonviolence.org
December 17, 2003
We are making some big behind-the-scene changes at Nonviolence.org over the next few days. There will almost certainly be features of our site that are affected. We apologize in advance for disruptions and hope that the changes will be worthwhile. If you’d like to help us build the new features we have planned, “please consider making a donation today”:www.nonviolence.org/support. Thanks!
Dead Horses
November 12, 2003
I am so tired of phone war tax resistance. I have a fondness for the aging hippies of NWTRCC & WRL but I thought they’d given up this dead horse by now. Well, at least they’re not “resurrecting the ‘Doomsday Clock’.
Update, 12/8/03: Robert Randall, an old friend from NWTRCC, is the first to comment on the Dead Horses post.
Recycling Dead Horses
November 12, 2003
I originally titled this entry “Why the peace movement is doomed,” but maybe that’s too strong a charge. Still, it’s hard to see how the coterie of small mainstream groups (and the older activists in charge) expect to attract new people when they keep recycling old campaigns that are ridiculous and borderline-irrelevant. A small coalition is calling for a new campaign of anti-war phone tax resistance.
A lot of U.S. war tax resisters have loved protesting the “phone war tax” over the years. Some history, from the new site: a tax on phone use was first used to fund the Spanish-American war back in 1898 and special war-related phone taxes came and went for forty years. The only problem is that it was a good funding stream, a tax the U.S. Congress didn’t want to give up. So the phone tax has been authorized and reauthorized the Second World War.
If I’m reading the site’s history right, there’s been a continuous phone tax since 1932(!) and it’s all gone into the general budget. Like all taxes, a good chunk of it has funded military action, but it’s no different percentage than any other tax. Like all taxes, we’ve needed this many taxes because the U.S. is a very militarized country and it has gone up and down in relation to military spending. But even Congress hasn’t bothered to think of it as war-related for many years now.
I’d be embarrased to try to tell some eighteen year old born in 1985 that this tax has some special war significance just because did during the Vietnam War. Back in the sixties, a bunch of radical pacifists jumped on the phone tax resistance and haven’t been able to let go in all this time. So why this clinging to phone taxes as a way of protesting war? I assume everyone likes it is because it’s safe. For those reasons it’s also entirely symbolic and almost completely meaningless.
Can’t we come up with new tactics? When will we be able to leave the Vietnam War to the historians and just move on? Many people think the old-line peace movement is a bunch of aging hippies; with campaigns like this, we kinda prove them right. Let’s brainstorm some new actions!
Blueprint for a Mess, the planning behind the U.S. occupation
November 3, 2003
For those asleep for the past two years, the _New York Times Magazine_ has a long article by David Rieff, “Blueprint for a Mess”:www.nytimes.com/2003/11/02/magazine/02iraq.html, that looks at ongoing problems with the U.S. occupation of iraq:
bq. Historically, it is rare that a warm welcome is extended to an occupying military force for very long, unless, that is, the postwar goes very smoothly. And in iraq, the postwar occupation has not gone smoothly.
The article looks at the ideological roots of the post-war plan of occupation. A number of key decisions were made in the Pentagon’s war room with little input from the State Department. Much of the planning revolved around Ahmad Chalabi, the two-bit, self-proclaimed iraqi opposition party leader during the last decade of Saddam Hussein’s reign. Chalabi spent most of the 90s in London and Washington, where he became the darling of the Republican policy hawks who were also sidelined from political power. Together Chalabi and Washington figures like Donald Rumsfeld spent the 90s hatching up war plans if they ever took power again. Unfortunately Rumsfeld’s plans didn’t have the widespread support of the U.S. diplomatic and military establishment and Chalabi has had virtually no support inside iraq. But the conversations and decisions between the token iraqi opposition and the out-of-power Republican hawks has driven the occupation:
bq. The lack of security and order on the ground in iraq today is in large measure a result of decisions made and not made in Washington before the war started, and of the specific approaches toward coping with postwar iraq undertaken by American civilian officials and military commanders in the immediate aftermath of the war.
Rieff is pessimistic but he backs up his claims. The article is long but it’s a must-read. The postwar occupations of iraq and Afghanistan will almost certainly be the defining foreign policy issue of this generation, and pacifists must look beyond ideology and rhetoric to understand what’s happening in iraq.
Attacks a sign of our success
October 28, 2003
I couldn’t believe it when a friend told me the news. In the wake of four coordinated suicide attacks in iraq that killed 30 and injured 200, President George Bush claimed that the “attacks were merely a mark of how successfully the U.S. Occupation is going”:www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/10/27/sprj.irq.main/index.html :
bq. “There are terrorists in iraq who are willing to kill anybody in order to stop our progress. The more success we have on the ground, the more these killers will react — and our job is to find them and bring them to justice.”
This is really his way of explaining away all opposition to the U.S.: people must be jealous of all we have and all we do. But maybe iraqis continue to be angry that we invaded their country; maybe they’re angry that we’ve only reinstalled many of their generals and many of Saddam’s henchmen. Maybe they’re waiting for a democratically-elected council. I’m sure many iraqi’s condemn yesterday’s bombings. But it’s still way too early to declare victory in the war of iraqi public opinion.
Big Lies & Mass Hysteria
September 11, 2003
It was Adolf Hitler, the world’s most notrious dictator, who told us that The great mass of people … will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.
And it is in the vein that I will pass along the latest poll by MS-NBC, that has found that 70% of American people think Hussein and 9/11 are linked. This is perhaps the biggest lie of my lifetime. I fear for the very soul of my nation, that so many of my fellow Americans would deny all evidence to allow themselves to go along with this myth. There has been no evidence of any connection. Most of the hijackers were Saudi nationals, opposed to the U.S.-backed ruling Saudi family. Al Qaeda is a group of religious fundamentalists trained in part with CIA money who have always been opposed to the secular socialist regime of Saddam Hussein. There’s no mystery who the hijackers were or why they chose the U.S. as their target. Conspiracy theories aren’t needed to explain the events of two years ago.
So why then do we believe Saddam blew up the World Trade Center towers? Maybe there are too many of us who love our lives of convenience, who love our big cars, our big homes, our opulent lifestyles and maybe we know that deep down our lifestyle is based on control of Middle East oil. Or perhaps Saddam Hussein has become the demon we pour all our worldly fears and guilt into, so that we think all the world’s troubles must come from him.
Whatever the reason, the results are a kind of mass hysteria. Seven our of ten Americans believe in a conspiracy theory so divorced from any evidence that history surely prepares to mock us. Every so often I’ll read of the outlandish conspiracy theories running through the Arab world — like the one that the planes were manned by Israelies and that all the Jews who worked in the towers were warned not to come to work — and I’ll wonder how a people could live in such a state of unreality. But then I see American’s myths: just as incredible, just as based on our own demons. We have based a war and a foreign policy on the boogie-men of our subconsciences. We have killed for our fears. What if we were to wake up to reality: could we still justify the war and occupation of Iraq with the imperiousness and surety that we’ve shown so far?