It is possible to delete all this slip?

yes

Sixty Days from the Night of Sacrifice


'Evil is wrought by want of thought..' Surah 30, Verse 41

A few days ago, one who is dear to me asked an intriguing, almost surreal question. She said : 'Did they really hang him, or was it all a dream?'

No dream, for every cardboard Caesar requires a slain Vercingetorix to show as part of his triumph. No dream, for while Heads of State may go to the gallows, CEOs and banksters do not. The occupier presides precariously over a disintegrating Iraq at the cost of massive repression - 600,000 slain Iraqis is the commonly accepted figure - while the one who was lynched held Iraq together with much less force.

While, in an ideal world, no repression at all would be the preferred option, which of the two will go down in history as the bloodthirsty tyrant? The Arab world will not easily forget or forgive the sight of the bacon-rind banner flying near acres of charred rubble and shattered golden domes.

The cliché had it that he murdered his own people ; does no-one realise that the government of the USA did exactly that at Waco and elsewhere? Not to mention Britain's deployment of state-sanctioned assassination squads in Northern Ireland. Nor does this include the victims of economic sabotage, accounting to some 80,000 excess deaths under Thatcher*. Huh, people shredded without any non-existent people shredder!

The town of Baquba in Iraq now boasts a university in ruins : surely as good a sign as any of a society that's been wrecked for profit and PNAC. Bodies of civilians killed in 'crossfire' litter the streets. That's 'crossfire' à la Jenin, Nablus and Gaza, of course. You all know what I mean.

But, hey, it's OK as we're bringing democr-acy to these people. But is so great about 'democracy' anyway, even when it doesn't involve mass murder?

Invariably, the word is most often to be heard upon the lips of deceivers. Art Garfunkel neatly summed up this American democracy, 162 years after someone else came to exactly the same verdict:

'We still have only one value system here : 100 dollars is twice as good as 50. In America, that's what our life is all about. The money god has been such a blight on American culture.'

In Eastern Europe, as in Iraq, democracy is hardly as advertised. Would that it were a simple matter of freedom and apple pie. Instead democracy is usually shorthand for the enthronement of the money god, bringing in its wake drugs, unemployment, sky-high property prices, porn, organised crime and other delights.

I recently passed up the opportunity to buy an authoritative guide to post-1945 sculpture for hardly more than pennies. The reason? Apart from Vuchetich's Treptow memorial, all the sculpture depicted in the book resembled low-grade trash. On deeper reflection, surely the sign of a society that has lost its moorings, its grounding in reality. An analogy with the alleged Anglo-American democracy also suggests itself, for we are asked to 'buy' into a system which is superficially glossy, but is also trashy and worthless.

Those who have more than pennies buy up the whole process, including the worthless trash that floats uppermost in it. What does it now cost to buy up the American Presidency? $150 million? $200 million?

In Britain they call it New Labour, maybe as some sort of private jest. Decaying late capitalism I call it, rancid with corruption and crookedness. It flushes billions away turning Iraq and Afghanistan into even greater hell-holes, while hospitals at home crumble, patients contracting diseases unseen for over a hundred years. In most cases this is due to sheer filthiness and neglect. Mist and desolation; inner cities the haunt of drug gangs; cannon fodder recruits on their way to Helmand; the sour smell of fear due to financial squeeze and semi-dismantled economy; churches padlocked, demolished or turned into carpet warehouses; a population controlled by debt and the peer pressure of neurotic consumerism.

I am by no means an expert in all the complexities of Iraqi politics, but I like think that I can submit a situation to rational analysis. The Iraqi resistance would never have got into the position of having 'broken' - Colin Powell's expressive term - the most powerful military force on earth had it not observed certain simple and basic rules.

These rules are simple and have been handed down from predecessor organisations. The French resistance, for instance, tried to include every viewpoint, from monarchist to communist. Additionally, any guerilla group must never antagonise the people it relies on for shelter, succour and support.

Therefore, we can understand attacks on the occupiers and those who collaborate with them. But how can one explain all those bizarre, motiveless bombings of footballers or market women? How could any resistance outfit gain from that?

Is it not a truly sinister, malevolent pantomine that is played out in 'the hell that is Iraq'?

We should study real history, not the history that's approved by authority. Then we'd find out that one participant in the Iraqi tragedy has a prior record of such clandestine operations, both in Central America and Vietnam.

In the good old days - when America was respected, and not the most hated country on the globe - there was a American healer and thinker called William Bates. Mark his words well, for had more heeded these words, the myth of 9/11 would have been universally exposed, and tragedy prevented both in Iraq and Afghanistan :

'The fact is that, except in rare cases, man is not a reasoning being. He is dominated by authority, and when facts are not in accord with the view imposed by authority, so much the worse for the facts. They may, and must, win in the long run; but in the meantime he gropes needlessly in darkness and endures much suffering that might have been avoided.'

* For those unfamiliar with recent British history, Thatcher was the less effeminate version of Blair, run by many of the same wealthy businessmen as her equally demented successor.

"He shall mark our goings, question whence we came,

Set his guards about us, as in Freedom's name.

He shall peep and mutter;

and the night shall bring Watchers 'neath our window, lest we mock the King"

- Rudyard Kipling

Dianne Feinstein resigns committee post amid scandal; accused of war profiteering

Source: www.metroactive.com/metro/03.21.07/dianne-feinstein-resigns-0712.html

Posted by Joshua Holland at 12:52 PM on March 30, 2007.

SEN. Dianne Feinstein has resigned from the Military Construction Appropriations subcommittee. As previously and extensively reviewed in these pages, Feinstein was chairperson and ranking member of MILCON for six years, during which time she had a conflict of interest due to her husband Richard C. Blum's ownership of two major defense contractors, who were awarded billions of dollars for military construction projects approved by Feinstein.

    As MILCON leader, Feinstein relished the details of military construction, even micromanaging one project at the level of its sewer design. She regularly took junkets to military bases around the world to inspect construction projects, some of which were contracted to her husband's companies, Perini Corp. and URS Corp.

    Perhaps she resigned from MILCON because she could not take the heat generated by Metro's expose of her ethics (which was partially funded by the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute). Or was her work on the subcommittee finished because Blum divested ownership of his military construction and advanced weapons manufacturing firms in late 2005?

    The MILCON subcommittee is not only in charge of supervising military construction, it also oversees "quality of life" issues for veterans, which includes building housing for military families and operating hospitals and clinics for wounded soldiers. Perhaps Feinstein is trying to disassociate herself from MILCON's incredible failure to provide decent medical care for wounded soldiers.

    Two years ago, before the Washington Post became belatedly involved, the online magazine Salon.com exposed the horrors of deficient medical care for Iraq war veterans. While leading MILCON, Feinstein had ample warning of the medical-care meltdown. But she was not proactive on veteran's affairs.

    Feinstein abandoned MILCON as her ethical problems were surfacing in the media, and as it was becoming clear that her subcommittee left grievously wounded veterans to rot while her family was profiting from the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

I don't have much to add. For background, check out Joshua Frank giving it to the Senator with both barrels, here.

I'll just say this. Even if you think this criticism of Feinstein is unfair -- as I know some do -- you have to acknowledge that this kind of stuff sends the message that all of Washington is the same. It allows Republicans to hold onto the delusion that their brand of corruption over the past decade was run-of-the-mill -- just Standard Operating Procedure for the party in power -- and it just demoralizes progressives.

Two Items on Iran, a satire by Monty Python and a knockout "must read and spread" by Ed Herman:
 
 
Call that humiliation?

No hoods. No electric shocks. No beatings. These Iranians clearly are a very uncivilised bunch
 
Terry Jones
Saturday March 31, 2007
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2046991,00.html
 
I share the outrage expressed in the British press over the treatment of our naval personnel accused by Iran of illegally entering their waters. It is a disgrace. We would never dream of treating captives like this - allowing them to smoke cigarettes, for example, even though it has been proven that smoking kills. And as for compelling poor servicewoman Faye Turney to wear a black headscarf, and then allowing the picture to be posted around the world - have the Iranians no concept of civilised behaviour? For God's sake, what's wrong with putting a bag over her head? That's what we do with the Muslims we capture: we put bags over their heads, so it's hard to breathe. Then it's perfectly acceptable to take photographs of them and circulate them to the press because the captives can't be recognised and humiliated in the way these unfortunate British service people are.
It is also unacceptable that these British captives should be made to talk on television and say things that they may regret later. If the Iranians put duct tape over their mouths, like we do to our captives, they wouldn't be able to talk at all. Of course they'd probably find it even harder to breathe - especially with a bag over their head - but at least they wouldn't be humiliated.
 
And what's all this about allowing the captives to write letters home saying they are all right? It's time the Iranians fell into line with the rest of the civilised world: they should allow their captives the privacy of solitary confinement. That's one of the many privileges the US grants to its captives in Guantánamo Bay.
The true mark of a civilised country is that it doesn't rush into charging people whom it has arbitrarily arrested in places it's just invaded. The inmates of Guantánamo, for example, have been enjoying all the privacy they want for almost five years, and the first inmate has only just been charged. What a contrast to the disgraceful Iranian rush to parade their captives before the cameras!
 
What's more, it is clear that the Iranians are not giving their British prisoners any decent physical exercise. The US military make sure that their Iraqi captives enjoy PT. This takes the form of exciting "stress positions", which the captives are expected to hold for hours on end so as to improve their stomach and calf muscles. A common exercise is where they are made to stand on the balls of their feet and then squat so that their thighs are parallel to the ground. This creates intense pain and, finally, muscle failure. It's all good healthy fun and has the bonus that the captives will confess to anything to get out of it.
 
And this brings me to my final point. It is clear from her TV appearance that servicewoman Turney has been put under pressure. The newspapers have persuaded behavioural psychologists to examine the footage and they all conclude that she is "unhappy and stressed".
What is so appalling is the underhand way in which the Iranians have got her "unhappy and stressed". She shows no signs of electrocution or burn marks and there are no signs of beating on her face. This is unacceptable. If captives are to be put under duress, such as by forcing them into compromising sexual positions, or having electric shocks to their genitals, they should be photographed, as they were in Abu Ghraib. The photographs should then be circulated around the civilised world so that everyone can see exactly what has been going on.
 
As Stephen Glover pointed out in the Daily Mail, perhaps it would not be right to bomb Iran in retaliation for the humiliation of our servicemen, but clearly the Iranian people must be made to suffer - whether by beefing up sanctions, as the Mail suggests, or simply by getting President Bush to hurry up and invade, as he intends to anyway, and bring democracy and western values to the country, as he has in Iraq.
 
· Terry Jones is a film director, actor and Python
www.terry-jones.net
_________________________________________
 
ZNet | Foreign Policy
 
Beyond Munich: The UN Security Council Helps Disarm a Prospective Further Victim of U.S. Aggression [*]
by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson; March 31, 2007
 
    Imagine that when Hitler was threatening to invade Poland, after having swallowed Czechoslovakia—with the help of the Western European powers' appeasement of Hitler at Munich in September 1938—the League of Nations imposed an arms embargo on Poland, making it more difficult for the imminent victim to defend itself, and at the same time suggested that Poland was the villainous party. That didn’t happen back in 1939, but in a regression from that notorious era of appeasement something quite analogous is happening now.
    Here is the United States, still fighting a brutal war of conquest in Iraq, which it is now doing with UN Security Council approval, with open plans and threats to attack Iran and engage in “regime change,” gathering aircraft carriers off the coast of Iran, already engaging in subversive and probing attacks on the prospective target, and the UN Security Council, instead of warning and threatening the aggressor warns, threatens and imposes sanctions on the prospective victim!
   The way it works is that the United States stirs up a big fuss, proclaiming a serious threat to its own national security, and expressing its deep concern over another state's flaunting of Security Council resolutions or dragging its feet on some point of order such as weapons inspections—we know how devoted the United States and its Israeli client are to the rule of law!
 In the Iraq case, this noise was echoed and amplified in the media, often splashed across headlines and drummed up in editorial commentary. In turn, elite opinion in the United States and Britain coalesced around the beliefs (a) that a WMD-related crisis really existed in Baghdad and (b) that it required the Security Council's special attention. Straight through March 19-20 2003, Iraq, the prospective target of a full-scale attack, decried the absurdity of this U.S.-U.K. noise, and filed regular communiqués with the Security Council and Secretary-General documenting the U.S.-U.K. aerial strikes on its territory,[1] including the "spikes of activity" period from September 2002 onward.[2] The vast majority of the world's states and peoples also rejected the war propaganda—including the largely voiceless U.S. public, where in the weeks before the war, two-thirds of non-elite opinion stood firmly behind multilateral approaches to defuse the crisis, foremost of which was permitting the UN weapons inspections to take their course.[3] But then, as now, pretty much the entire world recognized the U.S.-U.K. hijacking of the Security Council, and its strategic misdirection away from a defense of the actual target of the threats (Iraq) onto the execution of the policy of the states making those threats while playing the role of Iraq's potential victims (the U.S. and U.K.).
 So the aggression planning proceeded then and does now with the cooperation of the UN and international community. In the Iraq case, the Security Council allowed itself to be bamboozled into restarting the weapons-inspection process, accepting this as the urgent matter, rather than the war-mobilization and threat of aggression by the United States and its British ally. Although the Security Council did not vote approval of the U.S.-British attack, it helped set it up by inflating the Iraq threat and failing to confront the real threat posed by the United States and Britain. Then, within two months after “shock and awe,” the Security Council voted to give the aggressor the right to stay in Iraq and manage its affairs, thereby approving a gross violation of the UN Charter after the fact.
  Now, four years later, the Security Council has outdone itself. Not only has it failed to condemn the U.S. and Israeli threat to attack Iran—the threat itself a violation of the UN Charter,[4] and one made ever-more real by the U.S. invasions of neighboring Afghanistan and Iraq during this decade alone, now followed by a huge U.S. naval buildup near Iran's coast to levels not seen since the U.S. launched its war on Iraq four years ago in what the New York Times just called a "calculated show of force."[5] But even worse, the Council has aided and abetted these potential aggressors by adopting three resolutions in the past eight months under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, each of which affirms that Iran's nuclear program is a threat to international peace and security, and reserves for the Council the right to take "further appropriate measures" should Iran fail to comply—that is, should Iran not cave-in to U.S. demands on exactly the terms demanded.[6]
 
Since July 31, the Council has demanded that Iran “suspend all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, including research and development"[7]—despite the fact that Iran's right to engage in these activities is guaranteed under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.[8] Since December 23, it has identified the existence of Iran's nuclear program with so-called "proliferation sensitive nuclear activities"[9]—despite the fact that the International Atomic Energy Agency has never shown Iran's program to be engaged in any kind of activities other than peaceful ones. Indeed, in the December 23 resolution, the Council used the phrase "proliferation sensitive nuclear activities" no fewer than eight different times to describe Iran's nuclear program, the clear—and perfectly false—allegation being that for Iran to do research on and develop its indigenous nuclear fuel capabilities places Iran in violation of its NPT commitments.
  But perhaps most egregious of all, the March 24 resolution prohibits Iran from selling "any arms or related material" to other states or individuals (par. 5), and calls upon all states "to exercise vigilance and restraint" in the sale or transfer of a whole list of weapons systems to Iran, "in order to prevent a destabilizing accumulation of arms…" (par. 6).[10] As the editorial voice of The Hindu immediately recognized, the first term is critical "not so much because the Islamic Republic is a major vendor of weapons even to Hamas or Hizbollah but because it gives the U.S. an excuse to intimidate or interdict all Iranian merchant shipping under the guise of 'enforcement'."[11] Likewise with the second term, which, if history is any guide, Washington will interpret as a strict prohibition on weapons sales to Iran, thus depriving the potential victim, faced with attack by one or more nuclear powers, of the right to obtain even non-nuclear means of self defense. This of course has been a standard U.S. tactic over many years, even against puny victims—Guatemala in 1954 and Nicaragua in the 1980s, among other cases. But now the United States has succeeded in getting the Security Council to help it impede the self-defense of yet another target of aggression. In this truly Kafkaesque case, the state targeted for attack (Iran) has been declared a threat to the peace by the Security Council, at the behest of a serial aggressor openly mobilizing its forces to attack the “threat.”[12]
 It should be recognized that the treatment of Iran’s nuclear program, and the Security Council’s cooperation in this treatment, is the ultimate application of a global double standard, enforced by an aggressive superpower now able to get away with both hypocrisy and murder. Only the United States and its allies may possess nuclear weapons. They alone may threaten to use nukes. They alone may improve their nukes and delivery systems. Only client states such as Israel may remain outside the NPT indefinitely and without penalty. The United States may ignore its NPT obligation to work toward nuclear disarmament. It may even renege on its promise never to use nukes against nuke-free states that joined the NPT. But no matter. By sheer fiat-power, no other state may acquire nukes without U.S. consent. Nor as the case of Iran shows may a state engage in its "inalienable right" to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes unless and until the United States approves.
  We are in the midst of a crisis within the post-war international system, as a serial aggressor is now able to mobilize the Security Council, tasked with the maintenance of international peace and security, to declare the state that it threatens with war a menace to the peace and to help the aggressor disarm its target. This carries us beyond Munich.
 
      ---- Endnotes ----
      * A shorter, standard op-ed length version of this commentary was drafted and submitted very widely across the major U.S. print media—and found to be 100 percent unpublishable.
      1. For an extensive list of documents filed at the United Nations by the Iraqi Government over the period August 29, 2001, through March 26, 2003, see David Peterson, "No Memo Required," ZNet, July 1, 2005.
      2. See David Peterson, "'Spikes of Activity'," ZNet, July 5, 2005; and David Peterson, "British Records on the Prewar Bombing of Iraq," ZNet, July 6, 2005.
      3. See Steven Kull et al., Americans on Iraq and the UN Inspections, Program on International Policy Attitudes, January 21-26, 2003.
      4. See, e.g., Chapter I, Article 2: "All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nat ions" (par. 4).
      5. "USS John C. Stennis Now Operating in Persian Gulf," Navy Newsstand, March 27, 2007; "Russian intelligence sees U.S. military buildup on Iran border," RIA Novosti, March 27, 2007; and Michael R. Gordon, "U.S. Opens Naval Exercise in Persian Gulf," New York Times, March 28, 2007.
      6. See Chapter VII. —We believe it essential to understand that for the Security Council to adopt a resolution under Chapter VII of the UN Charter means above all that either a threat t o the peace, a breach of the peace, or an act of outright aggression has occurred. Otherwise, there is no point to the Council's resort to its Chapter VII functions and powers. Regardless of what the Council's other members may believe about the import of the Iran resolutions, their assent to these resolutions grants an enormously powerful and dangerous tool of coercion to the United States.
      7. Resolution 1696, July 31, 2006, par. 2.
      8. See the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, the Preamble, and Articles I, II, and IV.
      9. Resolution 1737, December 23, 2006, par. 2.
      10. Resolution 1747, March 24, 2007, par. 5, par. 6.
      11. "Stepping towards the precipice," Editorial, The Hindu, March 27, 2007.
      12. See Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, "Hegemony and Appeasement: Setting Up the Next U.S.-Israeli Target (Iran) For Another 'Supreme International Crime'," ZNet, January 27, 2007.
 
    [Edward S. Herman is an economist and media analyst, co-author with Noam Chomsky of Manufacturing Consent; David Peterson is a Chicago-based researcher and journalist.]

May 7. Raymond Chandler said you know you're washed up as a writer when you start reading your own old stuff for inspiration. Tony just reminded me about my most under-appreciated essay, Troubleshooting America, which only works if you're sympathetic to the critique of civilization, know some stuff about computer repair, and enjoy metaphors and puns. Also it fits well with the post below.

May 7. The 2008 presidential race is getting interesting! Basically, the framing of the whole discourse gets deeper in bullshit year after year, until all it takes is one candidate who stands up and talks straight, and the internet goes wild and the dominant media have to suppress it. This happened to some extent with Nader in 2000 and Dean in 2004. This year the Democrat to watch is Mike Gravel (pronounced gravEL), who is apparently the only Democrat -- the only Democrat -- to pledge not to start a nuclear war, or in propaganda-talk, "preemptively use nuclear weapons," or in extreme propaganda-talk, "leave all options on the table with Iran."

And the Republican to watch is Ron Paul. You might have seen that ABC news put up a debate poll that listed every candidate except Paul, and when they were swamped with complaints, they added Paul and he blew the other candidates away. He's pretty bad on the issues, but I would probably vote for him over the leading Democrats just because he owes nothing to the ruling powers. In reality, I expect not to vote but to endorse the batshit crazy Rudolph Giuliani over Hillary Clinton, so he can finish Bush's job of destroying the American Empire and making the right look bad.

The same thing is now beginning in France, with the election of Nicolas Sarkozy. The European system is much better than the American system, but both of them are circling around the same whirlpool. Socialism is a temporary compromise between central control and benevolence, which ultimately cannot exist together. The only spiritually sustainable system is one that rises organically from activities that individuals and tribes find intrinsically rewarding. And the easiest (but most painful) way to get there from here is to elect right wingers to run the control system off the rails.

May 7. And a general comment on the below: "Conspiracy theorist" is a propaganda term, a big lie built around a tiny kernel of truth: that a few people are religious about it, and always find a way to believe the most paranoid side of every popular controversy. At the other extreme, you've got people who are equally dogmatic in defending the dominant side on every question of fact. Most of us are in between, and the difference between those of us who accept (not believe) weird things, and those who don't, is not a matter of right and wrong but a matter of how people with different political and intellectual motives deal with reasonable doubt. When I don't have enough information to be sure one way or the other, I always put the burden of proof on the story that backs up the ruling system, and give slack to the story that undermines it; and I always put the burden of proof on the story that provides closure, and give slack to the story that creates openings.