The Rake # 14 - IRaq, IRan, IRolll

2003-08-10T17:38:00.000-07:00

Iraq Body Count: Adding Indifference To Injury
10.08.2003 [12:36]

Aug 09, 2003

Extraction of media-reported civilian injuries from the Iraq Body Count database and archive of war reports provides evidence of at least 20,000 civilian injuries on top of the maximum reported 7798 deaths. 8,000 of these injuries were in the Baghdad area alone, suggesting that the full, countrywide picture, as with deaths, is yet to emerge.

The Iraq Body Count Project has never published a running total of injuries suffered in the war because injuries encompass a scale from the grievous and incapacitating to the light and fully recuperable, and in the absence of information about severity it makes no sense to assign the same unit value to each report of injury. But because injuries are not all comparable does not mean that they can or should be excluded from an accounting of the human costs of the war. On the contrary, the need to investigate and assess them is especially urgent, for many of the injured may still be suffering and their condition may be improved if we act promptly.

The protagonists of the war have repeatedly claimed an inability to provide accurate estimates of civilian deaths. Insofar as some casualties may have been burned beyond recognition, pulverised into dust or buried quickly according to Islamic custom and never officially recorded, there is indeed a possibility that not every death can be accounted for. Injuries are another matter. The injured are alive, perhaps receiving treatment, and the cause, nature and extent of their injuries will appear in medical, official, and informal records.

What follows is Iraq Body Count (IBC)'s attempt to provide an overview of the scale of the problem that needs to be tackled more directly by those who have the means to do so. First we analyse what the IBC data-base can tell us about civilian injuries in Iraq, and include various accounts of injuries suffered during the course of the war to illustrate our general conclusions. We then discuss the potential costs of compensation, and argue that the occupying powers have a moral and humanitarian imperative to meet those costs. It is our hope that they do not entirely lack the will to do so--or if they do, that their citizenry will help them to find it.

Data Are Derived From Over 300 Press Reports

IBC archivist Kay Williams has undertaken a content-analysis of over 300 published reports used to establish the 150 entries in the IBC data-base of civilian deaths to July 6 2003. Every mention of injuries in these reports has been extracted and tabulated. In IBC terminology, each line in the on-line data-base is referred to as an incident, even though some entries cover multiple incidents within a locality.

There is evidence that the "precision" or highly-targeted bombing of Baghdad in the early days of the conflict may have injured far more people than were killed. Conversely, deaths in the ground war, particularly when civilian cars were fired on by heavy machine guns or tanks, may have seen the ratios reversed, with few escaping alive from the blazing wrecks. However, taken across all phases and arenas of the war, injuries were probably about 3 times more numerous than deaths.

Press and media reports for 43 IBC incidents do not mention any injuries. It cannot be inferred from this that no injuries occurred, simply that the journalists or reporters concerned either had no access to information about injuries, or were concentrating simply on deaths.

Civilian injuries were mentioned in the press and media reports for 107 incidents. The total maximum reported injuries across all 107 incidents is 19,733. [1] This takes account of known double counting across different incidents using much the same methodology as has been applied to reports of deaths in the IBC database. This total should NOT however be considered comprehensive, and is most likely an under-estimate because:

Our data-base includes only stories which include reports of civilian deaths. Stories reporting injuries but no deaths are not included in our data-base.

The present calculations include only media and NGO reports published up to July 6, and in particular do not include UNICEF's July 17 report [2] of more than 1,000 children injured since the end of the war by unexploded ordnance;

The injured may, and likely will, have been under-reported during the war, for reasons including their more rapid removal (for treatment) from the scene of incidents.
These limitations should be borne in mind and the present study considered a "first count", not a final or complete accounting, of the war's civilian wounded.

3 Times As Many Injuries As Deaths Have Been Reported

An informative statistic for analysing and evaluating injuries is the RATIO of injuries to deaths for a given incident. This ratio can be calculated by dividing the maximum estimate of injuries by the maximum estimate of deaths. If there are equal numbers of injuries to deaths, then this ratio is 1.0. If there are twice as many injuries as deaths, this ratio is 2.0. If there are twice as many deaths as injuries, this ratio is 0.5.

18 of the 107 incidents had a injury-to-death ratio of less than 1.0, and 7 incidents had a ratio of exactly 1.0. The remaining 82 incidents had an injury-to-death ratio of greater than 1, with a maximum ratio of 69. This maximum ratio was provided by 207 reported injuries and 3 reported deaths during massive aerial bombardment of Baghdad on the night of 21-22 March (IBC incident x009). Although the reports of injuries were provided by Iraqi government sources, independent estimates from the Red Cross confirmed at least 100 injuries, which still represents a massive injury-death ratio of 33. This lends some support to the claims that parts of the air-war (particularly in and around Baghdad) were conducted using precision-guided munitions, where there were few deaths but many injuries from falling and flying masonry, shrapnel etc. Most of the larger ratios were indeed the result of aerial bombardment, relatively early in the campaign. The smaller ratios typically come from the later ground war and "post-war" conflict.

If one wished to answer the question "what is a typical, or average" ratio of injuries to deaths, there are two statistical averaging procedures which might be used. One is the mean ratio (the mean is the sum of all ratios divided by the number of incidents from which ratios could be calculated). The mean injury-death ratio is 5.0 (in other words, 5 injuries per death).

A second averaging procedure is the median ratio. This is found by setting out all 107 ratios in ascending order, and picking the ratio which occurs at the 54th position (i.e. in the middle of the series). The median injury-death ratio is 2.85 (in other words, around three injuries per death).

Often the mean and the median of a set of scores are quite close to one another. The mean tends to differ from the median when the distribution is statistically skewed. The distribution of injury-death ratios in the IBC data base is indeed skewed, with a small number of incidents having very high injury-death ratios, which are not typical of the larger number of incidents. Only 23 of the incidents have an injury-death ratio of greater than 6, with the majority of these being below 10. However the "top" 10 incidents have injury-death ratios, in ascending order, of 10.2, 13.1, 13.9, 16.2 16.6, 17.8, 20, 24, 45, and 69. These few incidents skew the mean upwards.

In our view, the more "typical" estimate is given by the median. This would suggest that, on average, in a typical incident in this war, there were about 3 injuries for every death. Multiplying the 7711 maximum reported deaths (up to July 7th, 2003) by the median of 2.85 provides a figure of 21,976, which might be considered a more accurate estimate of injuries that takes into account the 43 database entries for which injuries were not reported and other data absent from the IBC database, as noted earlier.

Many of the reports of injuries are simply anonymous numbers. But Western journalists were sometimes able to get close to the field of battle and report their encounters with the wounded.

Heartbreaking Details

Some of the most horrific scenes followed coalition air raids in and around Hillah, where, in the first days of April, the Red Cross reported dozens of civilians killed and more than 450 wounded by aerial bombardment, including by suspected cluster bombs. [3]

Robert Fisk was among the Western journalists to visit the local hospital and report on the aftermath:

"Heartbreaking is the only word to describe 10-year-old Maryam Nasr and her five-year-old sister Hoda. Maryam has a patch over her right eye where a piece of bomblet embedded itself. She also had wounds to the stomach and thighs. I didn't realise that Hoda, standing by her sister's bed, was wounded until her mother carefully lifted the little girl's scarf and long hair to show a deep puncture in the right side of her head, just above her ear, congealed blood sticking to her hair but the wound still gently bleeding. Their mother described how she had been inside her home and heard an explosion and found her daughters lying in their own blood near the door. The little girls alternately smiled and hid when I took their pictures. In other wards, the hideously wounded would try to laugh, to show their bravery. It was a humbling experience." [4]

Futher injuries are, of course, being sustained after the cessation of bombing, by unexploded munitions, many fired by US or UK forces:

"Karbala is typical. At al-Hussein hospital, 35 bodies have been brought in since the city fell April 6, many dismembered by a cluster-bomblet blast, according to chief surgeon Ali Iziz Ali. An additional 50 have been treated for fractures and deep, narrow puncture wounds, typical of the weapons. Karbala civil-defense chief Abdul Kareem Mussan says his men are harvesting about 1,000 cluster bombs a day in places Myers said were not targets." [5]

UNICEF has recently reported that more than 1,000 children have been injured by unexploded ordnance since the end of the war, including by cluster bombs (and now unguarded) Iraqi munitions, and emphasized that "the coalition forces have a clear obligation under humanitarian law to remove these dangers from communities." [2]

Despite "major hostilities" having been declared over, Iraqi civilians are still regularly being shot and injured by American and British troops. This incident in Majar-al-Kabir is just one of literally scores of similar incidents all over Iraq, notable only in that this time British troops were involved:

"Most agree that a local man, possibly a former Ba'ath party official, started shooting with a handgun. The British then opened fire. 'It was about 10.15 and the market was very crowded,' said Mr Younis. 'I threw myself on the ground and shouted to everybody to run away or get down. The shooting lasted for about five minutes but there were bullets going everywhere. They were firing on automatic.' .At least 17 people were hit. They included a 13-year-old girl caught by a ricochet in the shoulder and a nine-year-old boy. Several other casualties have spinal injuries and multiple fractures. In all, five men died from their wounds. As the wounded lay in the bazaar the British soldiers drove away." [6]

And sometimes, like these descriptive on-the-scene reports, even anonymous statistics provide shocking glimpses of the war's toll of pain, horror and long-term suffering:

The Red Cross reported from Baghdad that during its heaviest fighting the city's hospitals were so overwhelmed by admissions that no one could any longer keep an accurate count, but that one major hospital alone had been admitting the war-wounded at a rate of about 100 patients an hour. [7] And in one of the most heart-rending of statistics, another aid organization reported just a month into the war that a hospital, situated in one of the poorest parts of Baghdad, "had amputated more than 100 limbs of children in that one month." [8]

When Will The Injured See Justice?

A sizeable if as yet unknown proportion of Iraqi families will contain a relative whose life was ended or put on hold by the US or British forces. Even if only in self-interest, the US and UK administrations should be putting the needs of the injured at the very heart of its strategy to "win hearts and minds". Instead, along with deaths, the maimed civilians of Iraq have been brushed under the carpet, with the exception of a few recipients of "high-profile" rescues (such as the air-lifting to Kuwait of Ali Abbas who lost all his family and both of his arms, recorded in IBC incident x025--Baghdad, March 30).

MASH units, too, provided immediate help to some Iraqi civilians wounded in the fighting, although it would appear that this was dependent upon the goodwill and resources of commanding officers--and likely to be withdrawn when it conflicted with their primary function. [9,10] Iraq's own hospitals, run-down and neglected for years under the sanctions regime, have suffered looting, vandalism, loss of electrical power, the deaths of staff and even (in at least three of them [11]) direct bombardment, all attributable to the war. But however heroic the efforts of their staff, there is no denying that the country's health system is now in a desperate state.

To our knowledge, no US or UK government-directed programme is specifically targeted towards the injured civilians of Iraq: the men, women, children and old people maimed and traumatised by the brutality of military intervention, and no government-directed report is available on the progress, if any, that has been made to assess and address the serious humanitarian and health issues arising from war injuries. It has been left to a few charities and aid-agencies, which have struggled against US obstruction to gain a foothold for their work with the sick and injured. The United Nations has remained ineffectual, firmly kept in the background by US diktat.

It is the most basic of principles that those who cause damage, harm and injury are responsible for repairing these and making amends if they have the power to do so. "But U.S officials," the Washington Post reported in late May, "have made clear to Iraqis that they do not intend to conduct a complete accounting of war damages, nor compensate those who say the occupying army owes them." [12]

Dina Sarhan, 21, who lost a leg to US shrapnel, sought no more than a prosthetic leg from the occupying power, only to be repeatedly turned down because it was "up to a higher authority." One of "thousands who incarnate the collateral damage of [the] war," she is unable to climb the stairs in her house and is "learning to make do" by sleeping in the dining room. She says she has forgiven the anonymous soldiers who injured her, but recognizes all too clearly the gap between the rhetoric and reality of modern warfare: "Mr. Bush said this would be a clean war. Is this a clean war?"

Unfortunately the "higher authorities" have their minds on other matters. "While sympathetic to individual hardships suffered as a result of war, U.S. officials say they are wary of beginning a legal process that could entail millions of claims against them" (when material damages as well as physical injuries are included); they also fret over "the endemic fraud that would creep into this."

But those, surely, are risks the US brought upon itself.

And instead of facing up to its responsibilities, the Pentagon is already ducking them--by restraining those of its more enlightened on-the-ground commanders who have acted in recognition of the strength of war of victims' claims. In a recent briefing US military leaders explicitly ruled out any compensation for injuries (or deaths) sustained during the combat period prior to May 1st. Families will only be eligible for compensation if they can "prove clear-cut negligence or wrongdoing by soldiers" in the "post-combat" phase of the occupation. This ruling will exclude the vast majority of injuries from potential compensation. For example, claims are ineligible in the case of soldiers mistaking civilians for combatants. However, some military commanders have been making ad-hoc discretionary payments to the victims or their families. When this was pointed out, a US official said he would investigate these payments and, if necessary, tell the commanders concerned to stop making them. [13]

So much for the "sympathetic" Pentagon--but exactly how justifiable is the USA's fear of "millions" of claims against it?

Given that most Iraqis who are asking for damages "seek a few thousand dollars to get their lives running again", it is possible to make an estimate of the cost of such reasonable compensation and then compare it to other expenditures in this war. Assuming the Pentagon's "millions" of claims were a credible prediction, then perhaps two million Iraqis (including those seeking only compensation for financial losses) could be awarded $10,000 each. That would amount to $20 billion, or the cost of occupying the country for 5 months, which Sec. of State Rumsfeld has pegged at $4 billion a month. [14]

This is a large sum, to be sure, but not one that the US isn't already countenancing in its open-ended occupation of Iraq. And arguably, the US occupation could be cut short by as many months and its soldiers sent home wreathed in roses if the US were to distribute its money in this way.

If however we restrict our calculations to more realistic scenarios and 20,000 injury claims at $10,000 each, the total amount awarded would be $200 million--less than the US spends every two days on the occupation. (And approximately the amount the UK spends monthly in its role.[15])

What excuse can the US possibly have for declining this opportunity to do some good for those who desperately need it (and for whose hurt it is responsible), and in the process, win back some of that "goodwill" it has lost in Iraq and much of the world? Even if the number of claims or of average awards is ultimately twice or ten times higher than this, it will still be trivial compared to the overall cost of the war and occupation.

Hamit Dardagan, John Sloboda and Kay Williams run the invaluable Iraq Body Count project. They can be reached at: hamit@iraqbodycount.org

Notes:

1. As at July 7th 2003. The Minimum total count of injuries in the IBC database is 16,439. However, given the more limited reporting of injuries by the media and IBC's data-gathering methodology which focuses on reports of deaths, we feel that in this instance the Maximum count (of 19,733) is likely to be a closer approximation to the true number of wounded--and as discussed in the body of this report, may itself be an under-estimate.

2. http://www.un.org/

3. Pepe Escobar, Asia Times Online, April 4 2003 http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/ED04Ak07.html

4. Robert Fisk, Independent, April 3 2003 (IBC incident x030) http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/

5. Michael Weisskopf, Time Magazine, May 3 2003 (IBC incident x072) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/

6. Jason Burke, Guardian, June 26 2003 (IBC incident x100) http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,985237,00.html

7. http://www.icrc.org/

8. "But due to the lack of time and sutures, the limbs after being amputated were sewn up very basically and bandaged. 'They are re-opening the bandages and trying to stitch the wounds up properly.'"--Dr Jemilah Mahmood of Mercy Malaysia, who brought much-needed supplies to the hospital and suffered a bullet wound in the process. Reported in The Star Online, April 18 2003

9. "Medical staff here [at 86th Combat Support Hospital at Tallil Airfield] have admitted more than 500 people since the war began--most of them Iraqi men, women and children. Many more have been treated for ailments that didn't require hospitalization."--Associated Press, April 26 2003. http://www.etaiwannews.com/

10. After the ordeal of seeing their three other children killed when a US tank machine-gunned their car in Nasiriyah, Daham and Gufran Ibed Kassim and their wounded five-year-old daughter Mawra were taken for treatment at a US Army field hospital:

"For two nights, the remains of the family slept in a bed. It appears that the story is reaching an end. 'Wait!' insists Kassim, his tears preparing themselves for what is to come, as if his trials could get any worse. 'Don't ask me questions. I will tell you what happened.' On the third night, that of 27 March, 'there were some Americans wounded that night, in the fighting. Maybe they needed the beds. So they told us we had to go outside. I heard the order--"put them out"--and they carried us like dogs, out into the cold, without shelter, or a blanket. It was the days of the sandstorms and freezing at night. And I heard Zainab crying: "Papa, Papa, I am cold, I am cold." Then she went silent. Completely silent.' Kassim breaks off in anguish. His wife continues the story of the night. 'What could we do? She kept saying she was cold. My arms were broken, I could not lift or hold her. If they had given us even a blanket, we might have put it over her. We had to sit there, and listen to her die.'Ed Vuillamy, The Observer, July 6, 2003 http://observer.guardian.co.uk/

11. 1. Al-Rutbah children's hospital (on March 19) http://www.fortwayne.com/ 2. Al-Yarmouk, Baghdad (on April 7) http://www.28news.com/stories 3. General Surgical Hospital, Nasiriyah (on March 24) http://observer.guardian.co.uk/

12. Scott Wilson, Washington Post, May 31 2003 http://www.washingtonpost.com/

13. "U.S. Limits Payments to Kin of Slain Iraqi Civilians"--Robyn Dixon, LA Times, August 4, 2003 http://www.latimes.com/

14. "The Cost Of Occupation"--Dorothy Pomerantz, Forbes.com, July 15 2003 http://forbesbest.com/2003/07/15/cz_dp_0715conflict.html (It has been widely mooted--including by officials in Dick Cheney's office--that the occupation's costs could be borne directly by Iraqis through the sale of their oil.)

15. "Cost of occupation: ?5m a day--human cost extra"--Richard Norton-Taylor and Larry Elliott, Guardian July 17 2003 http://politics.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4714030,00.html

http://www.jihadunspun.com/intheatre_internal.php?article=71148&list=/home.php&

2003-07-25T10:11:00.000-07:00

This is weird and I am not sure what it means, if anything. It could just be suicide, but then again it could be something else, given his proximity to Roswell.

Navy Chief Nominee May Have Killed Self

By RICHARD BENKE, Associated Press Writer

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - Oilman Colin McMillan, who was awaiting Senate confirmation as Navy secretary, died from a single gunshot wound, and investigators said Friday it might have been self-inflicted.

"All indications are it could be suicide, but we're not going to reach that conclusion until the investigation is over," said District Attorney Scot Key of Alamogordo.

McMillan was nominated as Navy secretary by President Bush (news - web sites) in May. He was 67.

He died around lunch time Thursday and his body was found at his southern New Mexico ranch by two employees, said Roswell Mayor Bill Owen, a family spokesman and longtime McMillan employee. The 55,000-acre Three Rivers ranch is on the edge of the White Sands Missile Range.

McMillan had run Permian Exploration Corp. in Roswell, chaired Bush's New Mexico presidential campaign in 2000 and served as an assistant defense secretary under the first President Bush.

Sen. Pete Domenici (news, bio, voting record) and Rep. Steve Pearce, both New Mexico Republicans, issued statements mourning McMillan's death.

"America has lost a leader, a patriot and statesman," Pearce said.

Domenici said McMillan was "someone who succeeded at everything he tried and everything he did, and yet he was about as humble as anyone you will ever meet."

President Bush had submitted McMillan's nomination to the Senate in May to fill a post left vacant since January, when Gordon England left to become deputy secretary of the new Homeland Security Department.

McMillan had run for the U.S. Senate in 1994, losing to incumbent Jeff Bingaman in a bitter and costly campaign. He was a member of the New Mexico House of Representatives from 1971 to 1982.

Besides managing the 2000 Bush campaign in New Mexico, McMillan was state chairman for Bob Dole's presidential campaign in 1996.

He served in the Marine Corps from 1957-72 and was an assistant defense secretary in the early 1990s when Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites) was the defense secretary.

Owen said he worked for McMillan for about 22 years in the oil and gas industry, at McMillan Production Co. He praised his honesty, ethics and business skill.

"He was involved in numerous types of business, was successful in all those business ventures and did so in a very up-front and honest and straightforward fashion," Owen said.

2003-07-24T10:09:00.000-07:00

Cracking Windows passwords made easy

(article found at theregister.com)

Cryptographic researchers have outlined techniques to greatly reduce the time it takes to crack alphanumeric Windows passwords.

Brute force attacks on such passwords have always been possible but the techniques outlined in a paper from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) show how such passwords could be broken up to eight or 10 times more quickly than previously possible.

The technique involves building a large lookup tables that matches the hashed (encoded) versions of passwords stored in Windows with text entered by a user.

By loading such pre-calculated data stored in memory its possible to reduce the time a particular piece of crypto analysis will take. Crypto analysts like Ron Rivest have understood this time-memory trade-off since the 1980s. The Swiss researchers have simply optimised the process, developing a demo programme than can crack Windows passwords more quickly. This demo is available online here.

A paper on this work, Making a Faster Cryptanalytic Time-Memory Trade-Off, is to be presented by Philippe Oechslin and his colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne during the Crypto'03 conference next month.

An abstract for the paper explains: "Using 1.4GB of data (two CD-ROMs) we can crack 99.9% of all alphanumerical passwords hashes in 13.6 seconds whereas it takes 101 seconds with the current approach using distinguished points. We show that the gain could be even much higher depending on the parameters used."

By email, Oechslin told us the researchers have since refined the techniques, bringing down the average time it takes to crack passwords to five seconds.

The research re-invigorates calls for Microsoft, in particular, to improve the cryptographic security of its passwords. Although NTHash is more secure than LANManager (the password scheme used in Win 9x) it's still insufficiently random, as the Swiss researchers have shown.

Meanwhile users shouldn't be too concerned about the issue since lifting password hash files in only possible where an attacker has control of your machine. If that happens, weak NT passwords will be the least of your worries.

2003-07-24T10:05:00.000-07:00

Microsoft once again proves that big is not beautiful, it's a pain in the ass and flawed:

MS alerts users to Windows DirectX vulnerability
By John Leyden
Posted: 24/07/2003 at 07:40 GMT
Microsoft yesterday warned of security flaws with DirectX's DirectShow component that might be used by an attacker to run hostile code on vulnerable Windows machines.
Redmond has issued a patch - designated as critical - which users are urged to review.
The list of affected software is extensive: Microsoft DirectX 5.2 on Windows 98; MS DirectX 6.1 on Windows 98 SE; DirectX 7.0a and DirectX 9.0a on Windows Me; DirectX and DirectX 9.0a 7.0 on Win 2000; DirectX 8.1 and DirectX 9.0a on Win XP; DirectX 8.1 and DirectX 9.0a on Win Server 2003 are all potentially vulnerable.
So too is Windows NT 4.0 with either Windows Media Player 6.4 or IE 6 SP 1 installed and Microsoft Windows NT 4.0, Terminal Server Edition with either Windows Media Player 6.4 or IE 6 SP 1 installed.
The DirectX APIs are used by Windows programs for multimedia and games support. Within DirectX, DirectShow performs client-side audio and video sourcing, manipulation, and rendering.
Two buffer overrun flaws in the function used by DirectShow to check parameters in a Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) file create a means to inject malicious code into vulnerable machines, hence the alert.
An attacker could seek to exploit this vulnerability by creating a specially crafted MIDI file designed to exploit this vulnerability and then host it on a Web site or on a network share, or send it by using an HTML-based e-mail. Simply visiting a maliciously constructed site might be enough to get infected, Microsoft warns. If the users open a maliciously constructed HTML email the effect will be the same.
Little wonder that Microsoft designates the problem as critical.

2003-07-24T10:02:00.000-07:00

Here is a report from the English website the register:

UK workers talk favourite revenge tactics
By John Leyden
Posted: 24/07/2003 at 15:18 GMT

More than half of UK workers would take revenge against a former employer if they were unhappy about losing their job.

Badmouthing the company (31 per cent), taking customer leads (38 per cent), signing their ex-boss up to an X-rated mailing list (10 per cent) and sending nasty emails (10 per cent) were identified as key revenge tactics by UK workers in a survey commissioned by Novell.

Novell argues that a recent spate mismanaged redundancy announcements, including reports of workers being informed of their job loss by text message or voicemail, make the issue all the more pressing. As well damaging a company's reputation, ex-workers could cost their former employers "millions" by continuing to use company resources and benefits that have not been stopped when they leave.

The research reveals that 58 per cent of employees would continue to use company mobile phones, at a potential cost to UK industry of more than £1m per week. More than half of those questioned would carry on accessing the corporate IT network, and continue to take advantage of their season ticket, company car, laptop and gym membership if they were able to get away with it.

Research by the Department of Trade and Industry suggests that only 27 per cent of UK companies have the necessary documented security policies in place to ensure that access to company resources are stopped when an employee leaves.

According to Government Statistics Office research an average 1.67 per cent of the workforce (465,930 people) part from their employment for various reasons each month.

"Losing your job is upsetting whatever the circumstances and it is vital that employers handle the situation with professionalism and sensitivity," commented Steve Brown, UK MD of Novell. "What concerns me most about this survey is the impact that former employees could have on the remaining staff. The costs will be felt throughout an organisation and could impact on pay, bonuses and benefits. Many organisations are like leaky buckets and companies need to start plugging the holes in their organisations to ensure that they are water tight when an employee leaves."

Having being told they had lost their job, 67 per cent would take information that would help them with their next job and examples of their best work. Four in five (79 per cent) of the survey's respondents confessed that if requested, they would forward company sensitive information to a former colleague, even if they were now working for a rival firm.

Slack security procedures make it easier for ex-employees to take revenge, Novell concludes. The company is calling on firms to invest in access management technology as part of more comprehensive attempts to improve an enterprise's overall security policy.

But that only treats the disease rather than prevents it in the first place. TLC (tender loving care) of soon-to-be ex-employees rather than technology is far more important in preventing the urge for revenge, which is bound to find some outlet. Having said that, putting technology in place to revoke network credentials is a sensible step, not least because such spare credentials are frequently misused by third party crackers.

The survey, conducted by TNS in June 2003, involved quizzing a representative sample of 1174 adults in full and part time work in the UK on their attitudes towards revenge against former employers. ®

2003-07-24T08:59:00.000-07:00

When will these fools simply decide to disappear and accept that theior fifteen minutes of fame was a complete waste of time, money and psychic energy:

WASHINGTON - A federal judge refused to release Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (news - web sites) from a lawsuit by Gennifer Flowers which accuses the senator of masterminding a campaign to discredit Flowers' claim of an affair with Bill Clinton (news - web sites).
U.S. District Judge Philip Pro dismissed Flowers' defamation claim against Mrs. Clinton, but allowed a conspiracy allegation to proceed. Former presidential aide George Stephanopoulos and campaign strategist James Carville also are being sued.
Judicial Watch, a conservative group representing Flowers, said Wednesday it will seek the senator's testimony in the case.
In 1992, a supermarket tabloid wrote that Bill Clinton and Flowers had an affair while he was Arkansas governor. When the presidential candidate denied it, Flowers held a news conference to play audio tapes she said were of secretly recorded intimate phone calls between them.
Carville, now on CNN's "Crossfire," and Stephanopoulos, now an anchor on ABC's Sunday morning program "This Week," said that Flowers had doctored the tapes. Stephanopoulos repeated that allegation in a book.

2003-07-23T07:55:00.000-07:00

This is a ripe one, it turns out that Boyden Gray, who was intimately involved in trying to subvert the law right at the start of the Whitewater scandal, by getting the FBI to announce it was investigating, then presidential candiodate Bill Clinton for ethical improprieties, is now weighing in on judicial appointments, claiming the democrats are anti-catholic:

Ads run in Maine and Rhode Island newspapers last weekend show a sign hanging from closed doors under the words "Judicial Chambers." The sign reads: "Catholics need not apply."

The ads -- probably the toughest so far in the Senate's battle over President Bush's judicial nominations -- accuse "some in the U.S. Senate," apparently meaning Democrats, of opposing the appeals court nomination of Alabama Attorney General William H. Pryor Jr. because he is a devout Catholic.

The ads are being run by the Committee for Justice -- founded by C. Boyden Gray, a White House counsel in the administration of President George H.W. Bush, to help rally support for judicial nominees -- and the Ave Maria List, an organization of lay Catholics that works for the election of antiabortion candidates to Congress.

2003-07-22T09:03:00.000-07:00

It's nice to know that King Ethelred's courtiers do not believe in freedom of speech and ideas. For example a TV station in Madison got the following from the Republican National Committee:

Dear Station Manager:

It has come to our attention that your station will begin airing false and misleading advertisements on July 21, 2003, paid for by the Democratic National Committee. The advertisement in question misrepresents President George W. Bush's January 28, 2003, State of the Union address. The advertisement states that President Bush said, "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

In fact, President Bush said, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." By selectively quoting President Bush, the advertisement is deliberately false and misleading. Furthermore, the British government continues to stand by its intelligence and asserts that it believes the intelligence is genuine.

The Democratic National Committee certainly has a legitimate First Amendment right to participate in political debate, but it has no right to willfully spread false information in a deliberate attempt to mislead the American people. These advertisements will not be run by legally qualified candidates; therefore, your station is under no legal obligation to air them. On the contrary, as an FCC licensee you have the responsibility to exercise independent editorial judgment to not only oversee and protect the American marketplace of ideas, essential for the health of our democracy, but also to avoid deliberate misrepresentations of the facts. Such obligations must be taken seriously.

This letter puts you on notice that the information contained in the above-cited advertisement is false and misleading; therefore, you are obligated to refrain from airing this advertisement.

Respectfully,
Caroline C. Hunter
Counsel
Republican National Committee

2003-07-21T10:07:00.000-07:00

Apologies to Moja at Turning Tables, but I thought the following post was interesting enough to reproduce:

the cursor...it blinks...as it waits...for something prolific...so you type...something heroic maybe...a story of valor...or the mundane...and as soon as you stop...it's blinking again...

i feel like that cursor...in an automatic mode...doing things with out thought...because they have become a part of me and my day...each day...off into the unending infinity of everything...blinking...

still waiting...it hangs on my every word...literally...

i get out of the rack only when i have to...i would be content to sleep the day away...but lately i get up...to go find a story...an event...something to write about...i have to search out something interesting because absolutely nothing of interest happens to me...but i'm not complaining...if i'm bored then i'm safe...my family knows this...my women knows this...i know this...

but i try to pay attention...because there is always something to see...something of note...like today...they called in iraqi vendors to hold a bazaar in our 'moral building'...they call it 'THE CHILLVILLE'...it's equipped with some huge a/c's and a flat screen t.v. pumping in the cnn or foxnews...we watch bootleg copies of the latest movies burned off the internet...it's a good place for the troops...

the vendors like that 'money money'...who doesn't...they bring in persian rugs...jewelry...copper pieces...leather shoes and jackets...video games...oil paintings that i think were recreations of famous iraqi art...and knock off electronics with names like 'SUNY' and 'MAGNAVOK'...we eat it up...because we've got more money then we know what to do with...hazardous fire pay will burn a hole through a flak jacket when a soldier is bored out of his kevlar'd mind...

the vendors aren't dim...in kuwait...at the bazaars...they will research MTV...and they will be up on the latest lingo to grab your attention..."very BLING BLING"..."makes you look dope yo"..."this is how we do it"..."the honies will love it playa"...it's hard to say no to these guys...with their middle eastern accents...they put you in a good mood...because you realize that they probably have absolutely no idea what the hell they are saying...they just know that you think it's funny...

there was a table...in the back...with the rugs...that had some very interesting pieces...either they were very old or they were very ill made...i hope they were old because i liked many of them...amber bracelets and silver necklaces...there was so much to see...i used to love buying souvenirs of my travels...i had always dreamed of a home with walls of shelves filled with tokens and trinkets...glass ware and platters...from my rotations around our earth...but since afghanistan...i just don't care any more...maybe because i'm not enjoying myself...like i did in venice...or san fransisco...or thailand...or amsterdam(where i really enjoyed myself)...

i usually shop for gifts...i'm a gift giver...even if it's small...i know people will cherish it because i lugged all the way around this stinking planet to deliver it to their hand...and most people respect stuff like that...even if its a little MRE tabasco bottle of dirt from afghanistan...they will treasure it always...

2003-07-21T10:01:00.000-07:00

Ah, once again them commies accross the water have nailed the bastards:

The spies who pushed for war
Julian Borger reports on the shadow rightwing intelligence network set up in Washington to second-guess the CIA and deliver a justification for toppling Saddam Hussein by force

Thursday July 17, 2003
The Guardian

As the CIA director, George Tenet, arrived at the Senate yesterday to give secret testimony on the Niger uranium affair, it was becoming increasingly clear in Washington that the scandal was only a small, well-documented symptom of a complete breakdown in US intelligence that helped steer America into war.

It represents the Bush administration's second catastrophic intelligence failure. But the CIA and FBI's inability to prevent the September 11 attacks was largely due to internal institutional weaknesses.

This time the implications are far more damaging for the White House, which stands accused of politicising and contaminating its own source of intelligence.

According to former Bush officials, all defence and intelligence sources, senior administration figures created a shadow agency of Pentagon analysts staffed mainly by ideological amateurs to compete with the CIA and its military counterpart, the Defence Intelligence Agency.

The agency, called the Office of Special Plans (OSP), was set up by the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to second-guess CIA information and operated under the patronage of hardline conservatives in the top rungs of the administration, the Pentagon and at the White House, including Vice-President Dick Cheney.

The ideologically driven network functioned like a shadow government, much of it off the official payroll and beyond congressional oversight. But it proved powerful enough to prevail in a struggle with the State Department and the CIA by establishing a justification for war.

Mr Tenet has officially taken responsibility for the president's unsubstantiated claim in January that Saddam Hussein's regime had been trying to buy uranium in Africa, but he also said his agency was under pressure to justify a war that the administration had already decided on.

How much Mr Tenet reveals of where that pressure was coming from could have lasting political fallout for Mr Bush and his re-election prospects, which only a few weeks ago seemed impregnable. As more Americans die in Iraq and the reasons for the war are revealed, his victory in 2004 no longer looks like a foregone conclusion.

The White House counter-attacked yesterday when new chief spokesman, Scott McClellan, accused critics of "politicising the war" and trying to "rewrite history". But the Democratic leadership kept up its questions over the White House role.

The president's most trusted adviser, Mr Cheney, was at the shadow network's sharp end. He made several trips to the CIA in Langley, Virginia, to demand a more "forward-leaning" interpretation of the threat posed by Saddam. When he was not there to make his influence felt, his chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was. Such hands-on involvement in the processing of intelligence data was unprecedented for a vice-president in recent times, and it put pressure on CIA officials to come up with the appropriate results.

Another frequent visitor was Newt Gingrich, the former Republican party leader who resurfaced after September 11 as a Pentagon "consultant" and a member of its unpaid defence advisory board, with influence far beyond his official title.

An intelligence official confirmed Mr Gingrich made "a couple of visits" but said there was nothing unusual about that.

Rick Tyler, Mr Gingrich's spokesman, said: "If he was at the CIA he was there to listen and learn, not to persuade or influence."

Mr Gingrich visited Langley three times before the war, and according to accounts, the political veteran sought to browbeat analysts into toughening up their assessments of Saddam's menace.

Mr Gingrich gained access to the CIA headquarters and was listened to because he was seen as a personal emissary of the Pentagon and, in particular, of the OSP.

In the days after September 11, Mr Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, mounted an attempt to include Iraq in the war against terror. When the established agencies came up with nothing concrete to link Iraq and al-Qaida, the OSP was given the task of looking more carefully.

William Luti, a former navy officer and ex-aide to Mr Cheney, runs the day-to-day operations, answering to Douglas Feith, a defence undersecretary and a former Reagan official.

The OSP had access to a huge amount of raw intelligence. It came in part from "report officers" in the CIA's directorate of operations whose job is to sift through reports from agents around the world, filtering out the unsubstantiated and the incredible. Under pressure from the hawks such as Mr Cheney and Mr Gingrich, those officers became reluctant to discard anything, no matter how far-fetched. The OSP also sucked in countless tips from the Iraqi National Congress and other opposition groups, which were viewed with far more scepticism by the CIA and the state department.

There was a mountain of documentation to look through and not much time. The administration wanted to use the momentum gained in Afghanistan to deal with Iraq once and for all. The OSP itself had less than 10 full-time staff, so to help deal with the load, the office hired scores of temporary "consultants". They included lawyers, congressional staffers, and policy wonks from the numerous rightwing thinktanks in Washington. Few had experience in intelligence.

"Most of the people they had in that office were off the books, on personal services contracts. At one time, there were over 100 of them," said an intelligence source. The contracts allow a department to hire individuals, without specifying a job description.

As John Pike, a defence analyst at the thinktank GlobalSecurity.org, put it, the contracts "are basically a way they could pack the room with their little friends".

"They surveyed data and picked out what they liked," said Gregory Thielmann, a senior official in the state department's intelligence bureau until his retirement in September. "The whole thing was bizarre. The secretary of defence had this huge defence intelligence agency, and he went around it."

In fact, the OSP's activities were a com plete mystery to the DIA and the Pentagon.

"The iceberg analogy is a good one," said a senior officer who left the Pentagon during the planning of the Iraq war. "No one from the military staff heard, saw or discussed anything with them."

The civilian agencies had the same impression of the OSP sleuths. "They were a pretty shadowy presence," Mr Thielmann said. "Normally when you compile an intelligence document, all the agencies get together to discuss it. The OSP was never present at any of the meetings I attended."

Democratic congressman David Obey, who is investigating the OSP, said: "That office was charged with collecting, vetting and disseminating intelligence completely outside of the normal intelligence apparatus. In fact, it appears that information collected by this office was in some instances not even shared with established intelligence agencies and in numerous instances was passed on to the national security council and the president without having been vetted with anyone other than political appointees."

The OSP was an open and largely unfiltered conduit to the White House not only for the Iraqi opposition. It also forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon's office in Israel specifically to bypass Mossad and provide the Bush administration with more alarmist reports on Saddam's Iraq than Mossad was prepared to authorise.

"None of the Israelis who came were cleared into the Pentagon through normal channels," said one source familiar with the visits. Instead, they were waved in on Mr Feith's authority without having to fill in the usual forms.

The exchange of information continued a long-standing relationship Mr Feith and other Washington neo-conservatives had with Israel's Likud party.

In 1996, he and Richard Perle - now an influential Pentagon figure - served as advisers to the then Likud leader, Binyamin Netanyahu. In a policy paper they wrote, entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, the two advisers said that Saddam would have to be destroyed, and Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iran would have to be overthrown or destabilised, for Israel to be truly safe.

The Israeli influence was revealed most clearly by a story floated by unnamed senior US officials in the American press, suggesting the reason that no banned weapons had been found in Iraq was that they had been smuggled into Syria. Intelligence sources say that the story came from the office of the Israeli prime minister.

The OSP absorbed this heady brew of raw intelligence, rumour and plain disinformation and made it a "product", a prodigious stream of reports with a guaranteed readership in the White House. The primary customers were Mr Cheney, Mr Libby and their closest ideological ally on the national security council, Stephen Hadley, Condoleezza Rice's deputy.

In turn, they leaked some of the claims to the press, and used others as a stick with which to beat the CIA and the state department analysts, demanding they investigate the OSP leads.

The big question looming over Congress as Mr Tenet walked into his closed-door session yesterday was whether this shadow intelligence operation would survive national scrutiny and who would pay the price for allowing it to help steer the country into war.

A former senior CIA official insisted yesterday that Mr Feith, at least, was "finished" - but that may be wishful thinking by a rival organisation.

As he prepares for re-election, Mr Bush may opt to tough it out, rather than acknowledge the severity of the problem by firing loyalists. But in that case, it will inevitably be harder to re-establish confidence in the intelligence on which the White House is basing its decisions, and the world's sole superpower risks stumbling onwards half-blind, unable to distinguish real threats from phantoms.

2003-07-21T09:58:00.000-07:00

Found this at King Ethelred's web portal:

The danger is grave and growing. The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons and is rebuilding facilities to make more. It could launch a biological or chemical attack 45 minutes after the order is given. The regime is seeking a nuclear bomb -- and, with fissile material, could build one within a year.

Iraq's regime has longstanding and continuing ties to terrorist groups -- there are al-Qaida terrorists inside Iraq. The regime also practices the rape of women and the torture of dissenters and their children as methods of intimidation.

Hey Ethelred can you spell the word liar, we can GEORGE BUSH

2003-07-20T06:25:00.000-07:00

Thank youy Ms Dowd. Once again the estimable columnist has nailed Ethelred and his annoying court of dishonor.

What we are witnessing is how ugly it can get when control freaks start losing control.

Beset by problems, the Bush team responds by attacking those who point out the problems. These linear, Manichaean managers are flailing in an ever-more-chaotic environment. They are spending $3.9 billion a month trying to keep the lid on a festering mess in Iraq, even as Afghanistan simmers.

The more Bush officials try to explain how the president made the bogus uranium claim in his State of the Union address, despite the C.I.A. red flags and the State Department warning that it was "highly dubious," the more inexplicable it seems. The list of evils the administration has not unearthed keeps getting longer — Osama, Saddam, W.M.D., the anthrax terrorist — as the deficit gets bigger ($455 billion, going to $475 billion).

After 9/11, this administration had everything going for it. Republicans ruled Congress. The president had enormously high approval ratings. Yet it overreached while trying to justify the reasons for going to war.

Even when conservatives have all the marbles, they still act as if they're under siege. Now that they are under siege, it is no time for them to act as if they're losing their marbles.

2003-07-19T20:56:00.000-07:00

Here's another article that I found at the Russian Anmti-Iraq War site:

Careful: The FB-eye may be watching

Reading the wrong thing in public can get you in trouble

07/17/03: (Creative Loafing) "The FBI is here, "Mom tells me over the phone. Immediately I can see my mom with her back to a couple of Matrix-like figures in black suits and opaque sunglasses, her hand covering the mouthpiece like Grace Kelly in Dial M for Murder. This must be a joke, I think. But it's not, because Mom isn't that funny.

"The who?" I say.

"Two FBI agents. They say you're not in trouble, they just want to talk. They want to come to the store."

I work in a small, independent bookstore, and since it's a slow Tuesday afternoon, I figure, "Sure." Someone I know must have gotten some government work, I think; hadn't my consultant friend spoken recently of getting rolled onto some government job? Background check, I think, interviewing acquaintances ... No big deal, right? Then, of course, I make a big deal about it in front of my co-workers.

"That was my mom," I tell them. "The FBI's coming for me." They laugh; it's a good joke, especially when the FBI actually shows up. They are not the bogeymen I had been expecting. They're dressed casually, they speak familiarly, but they are big. The one in front stands close to 7 feet, and you can tell his partner is built like a bulldog under his baggy shirt and shorts.

"You Marc Schultz?" asks the tall one. He shows me his badge, introduces himself as Special Agent Clay Trippi. After assuring me that I'm not in trouble, he asks if there is someplace we can sit down and talk. We head back to Reference, where a table and chairs are set up. We sit down, and I'm again informed that I am not in trouble.

Then, Agent Trippi asks, "Do you drive a black Nissan Altima?" And I realize this meeting is not about a friend. Despite their reassurances, and despite the fact that I haven't committed any federal offenses (that I know of), I'm starting to feel a bit like I'm in trouble.

They ask me if I was driving my car on Saturday, and I say, reasonably sure, that I was. They ask me where I went, and I struggle for a moment to remember Saturday. I make a lame joke about how the days run together when you're underemployed. They smile politely. Was I at work on Saturday? I think so.

"Were you at the Caribou Coffee on Powers Ferry?" asks Agent Trippi. That's where I get my coffee before work, and so I tell him yes, probably, just before remembering Saturday: Harry Potter day, opening early, in at 8:30.

So I would have been at Caribou Coffee that Saturday, getting my small coffee, room for cream. This information seems to please the agents.

"Did you notice anything unusual, anyone worth commenting on?" OK, I think. It's the unusual guy they want, not me. I think hard, wondering if it was Saturday I saw the guy in the really cool reclining wheelchair, the guy who struck me as a potential James Bondian supervillain, but no: That was Monday.

Then they ask if I carried anything into the shop -- and we're back to me.

My mind races. I think: a bomb? A knife? A balloon filled with narcotics? But no. I don't own any of those things. "Sunglasses," I say. "Maybe my cell phone?"

Not the right answer. I'm nervous now, wondering how I must look: average, mid-20s, unassuming retail employee. What could I have possibly been carrying?

Trippi's partner speaks up: "Any reading material? Papers?" I don't think so. Then Trippi decides to level with me: "I'll tell you what, Marc. Someone in the shop that day saw you reading something, and thought it looked suspicious enough to call us about. So that's why we're here, just checking it out. Like I said, there's no problem. We'd just like to get to the bottom of this. Now if we can't, then you may have a problem. And you don't want that."

You don't want that? Have I just been threatened by the FBI? Confusion and a light dusting of panic conspire to keep me speechless. Was I reading something that morning? Something that would constitute a problem?

The partner speaks up again: "Maybe a printout of some kind?"

Then it occurs to me: I was reading. It was an article my dad had printed off the Web. I remember carrying it into Caribou with me, reading it in line, and then while stirring cream into my coffee. I remember bringing it with me to the store, finishing it before we opened. I can't remember what the article was about, but I'm sure it was some kind of left-wing editorial, the kind that never fails to incite me to anger and despair over the state of the country.

I tell them all this, but they want specifics: the title of the article, the author, some kind of synopsis, but I can't help them -- I read so much of this stuff.

"Do you still have the article?" Probably not, but I suggest we check behind the counter. When that doesn't pan out, I have the bright idea to call my dad at work, see if he can remember. Of course, he can't put together a coherent sentence after I tell him the FBI are at the store, questioning me.

"The FBI?" he keeps asking. Eventually I get him off the phone, and suggest it may be in my car. They follow me out to the parking lot, where Trippi asks me if there's anything in the car he should know about.

"Weapons, drugs? It's not a problem if you do, but if you don't tell me and then I find something, that's going to be a problem." I assure him there's nothing in my car, coming very close to quoting Rudy Ray Moore in Dolemite: "There's nothin' in my trunk, man."

The excitement of the questioning -- the interrogation -- has made me just a little bit giddy. I almost laugh out loud when they ask me to pop my trunk.

There's nothing in my car, of course. I keep looking anyway, while telling them it was probably some kind of what-did-they-know-and-when-did-they-know-it article about the buildup to Gulf War II. Trippi nods, unsatisfied. I turn up some papers from the University of Georgia, where I'm about to begin as a grad student. He asks me what I'm going to study.

"Journalism," I say. As I duck back into the car, I hear Agent Trippi informing his partner, "He's going to UGA for journalism" in a way that makes me wonder whether that counts against me.

Back in the store, Trippi gives me his card and tells me to call him if I remember anything. After he's gone, I call my dad back to see if he has calmed down, maybe come up with a name. We retrace some steps together, figure out the article was Hal Crowther's "Weapons of Mass Stupidity" from the Weekly Planet, a free independent out of Tampa. It comes back to me then, this scathing screed focusing on the way corporate interests have poisoned the country's media, focusing mostly on Fox News and Rupert Murdoch -- really infuriating, deadly accurate stuff about American journalism post-9-11. So I call the number on the card, leave a message with the name, author and origin of the column, and ask him to call me if he has any more questions.

To tell the truth, I'm kind of anxious to hear back from the FBI, if only for the chance to ask why anyone would find media criticism suspicious, or if maybe the sight of a dark, bearded man reading in public is itself enough to strike fear in the heart of a patriotic citizen.

My co-worker, Craig, says that we should probably be thankful the FBI takes these things seriously; I say it seems like a dark day when an American citizen regards reading as a threat, and downright pitch-black when the federal government agrees.

Special Agent Trippi didn't return calls from CL. But Special Agent Joe Paris, Atlanta field office spokesman, stressed that specific FBI investigations are confidential. He wouldn't confirm or deny the Schultz interview.

"In this post-911 era, it is the absolute responsibility of the FBI to follow through on any tips of potential terrorist activity," Paris says. "Are people going to take exception and be inconvenienced by this at times? Oh, yeah. ... A certain amount of convenience is going to be offset by an increase in security."

----------------------------------------------------------------

Here is the article that caused the FB eye to interview Mr. Schultz:

Weapons Of Mass Stupidity
Fox News hits a new lowest common denominator

BY HAL CROWTHER

It's the inviolable first rule of democracy that all politicians will praise the wisdom of the people -- an effusive flattery that intensifies when they ask "the people" to swallow something exceptionally inedible. What the people never hear from anyone, or from anyone with further ambitions, is the truth. If a public figure wishes to leave the stage forever, a sound strategy is to offer his fellow citizens a candid and disparaging assessment of their intelligence.

In the aftermath of the conquest of Iraq, as we awake to the bewildering possibility of a United States of Asia, the patriotic pageantry and premature gloating call to mind an obsession that once gripped the great French novelist Gustave Flaubert. (In my recklessness I ignore the halfwit embargo on all things French.) Flaubert, according to W.G. Sebald, became convinced that his own work and his own brain had been infected by a national epidemic of stupidity, a relentless tide of gullibility and muddled thinking which made him feel, he said, as if he were sinking into sand.

At his low point, Flaubert convinced himself that everything he had written had been contaminated and "consisted solely of a string of the most abysmal errors and lies." Sometimes he lay on his couch for months, frozen with the dread that anything he wrote would only extend Stupidity's domain. Flaubert became a scholar of moronic utterances, painstakingly collecting hundreds of what he called betises -- stupidities -- and arranging them in his "Dictionary of Received Opinions."

The wondrous blessing God bestowed on Gustave Flaubert -- and on America's own great chroniclers of contagious stupidity, Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken -- is that they lived and died without imagining a thing like Fox News. It's easy to laugh at Rupert Murdoch's outrageous mongrel, the impossible offspring of supermarket tabloids, sitcom news spoofs, police-state propaganda mills and the World Wrestling Federation.

Fox News is an oxymoron and Cheech and Chong would have made a more credible team of war correspondents than Geraldo Rivera and Ollie North. Neither Saturday Night Live nor the 1973 film Network , Paddy Chayefsky's corrosive satire of TV news, could even approach the comic impact of Geraldo embedded, or of Fox's pariah parade, its mothball fleet of experts who always turn out to be disgraced or indicted Republican refugees. If Ed Meese, Newt Gingrich and Elliott Abrams couldn't fill your sails with mirth, you could count on the recently deposed Viceroy of Virtue and High Regent of Rectitude, my old schoolmate Blackjack Bill Bennett.

With its red-faced, hyperventilating reactionaries and slapstick abuse of lame "liberal" foils who serve them as crash dummies, Fox News could easily be taken as pure entertainment, even as inspired burlesque of the rightwing menagerie. But the problem -- in fact, the serious problem - is that Fox isn't kidding, and brownshirts aren't funny.

Harper's reports that Fox commentator Bill O'Reilly became so infuriated by the son of a 9-ll victim who opposed the war -- "I'm against it and my father would have been against it, too" -- that he cursed the man and even threatened him off-camera. A Fox TV anchor, one Neil Cavuto, celebrated the fall of Baghdad by informing all of us who opposed the war in March, "You were sickening then, you are sickening now." If reports are accurate, these troubled men are neither bad journalists nor even bad actors portraying journalists -- they're mentally unbalanced individuals whose partisan belligerence is pressing them to the brink of psychosis.

But the scariest thing about Fox and Rupert Murdoch, the thing that renders them all fear and no fun in a time of national crisis, is that they channel for the Bush administration as faithfully as if they were on the White House payroll. Like no other substantial media outlet in American history, Fox serves -- voluntarily -- as the propaganda arm of a controversial, manipulative, image-obsessed government. To watch its war coverage for even a minute was to grind your teeth convulsively at each Orwellian repetition of the Newspeak mantra, "Operation Iraqi Freedom." I swear I hate to stoop to Nazi analogies; but if Joseph Goebbels had run his own cable channel, it would have been indistinguishable from Fox News.

Fox's truculent patriotism is misleading, of course. Rupert Murdoch is not exactly an American patriot, he's not even exactly an American. Though he became an American citizen in 1985 (solely to qualify, under US law, as the owner of a TV network), the Australian Murdoch was already 54 and his tabloid formula had already polluted the media mainstreams in Australia and Great Britain. Murdoch is an insatiable parasite, a vampirish lamprey who fastens himself to English-speaking nations and grows fat on their cultural lifeblood, leaving permanently degraded media cultures in his wake. Rabid patriotism is a product he sells, along with celebrity gossip, naked women and smirky bedroom humor, in every country he contaminates. And a little "white rage" racism has always gone into his mix for good measure. ("He tried so hard to use race to sell his newspapers that he became known as "Tar Baby' Murdoch," Jimmy Breslin once charged.)

Murdoch's repulsive formula has proven irresistible from Melbourne to Manhattan, and now, by satellite, he's softening up Beijing. His great fortune rests on his wager that a huge unevolved minority is stupid, bigoted, prurient, nasty to the core. In America today, it's hard to say whether Rupert Murdoch is an agent, or merely a beneficiary, of the cultural leprosy that's consuming us. But the conspicuous success of Fox News, lamentable in the best of times, is devastating in a shell-shocked nation that sees itself at war.

It is and has always been true, in Samuel Johnson's famous words, that "patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel" -- by which, of course, Dr. Johnson meant patriotism as a political and rhetorical weapon, not as a private emotion. Belittling other people's patriotism to achieve political leverage is the lowest road a public scoundrel can travel, the road where neo-conservative meets neo-fascist. In flag-frenzied Fox, an unscrupulous administration found a blunt object ready-made to hammer its critics.

Liars With Secret Agendas

Years ago in Moscow, at the dawn of perestroika, a pair of Russian journalists showed me headlines from the New York Post that made Kruschchev's "We will bury you" sound like "Have a nice day." How can there ever be peace, they asked me, if America hates us so much? Handicapped by the yawning gap between our respective press traditions, I tried to explain that the Post had nothing to do with our government or even the American media machine, that it was owned by an Australian whose Red-baiting and saber-rattling was an act designed to sell newspapers to morons. That he was unconnected to our government was something I believed about Murdoch in 1984, though no doubt Ronald Reagan was eager to naturalize a lonely immigrant with billions to invest in right-wing media.

But now? Is it sheer coincidence that the president's stage manager, Greg Jenkins -- responsible for the notorious flight-suit landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln, and for posing George Bush against Mt. Rushmore and the Statue of Liberty -- was recently a producer at Fox News?

If these elaborate tableaus Jenkins choreographs for President Bush seem clumsy, tasteless, condescending and insulting to your intelligence, you must be some kind of liberal. They bear an uncanny family resemblance to the red-white-and-blue show at Fox News, and heavy-handedness has never harmed its ratings, nor the president's either.

How stupid are we, finally, how easy to fool? Fox News is run by the insidious Roger Ailes -- image merchant for Nixon, Reagan and Bush senior, producer for Rush Limbaugh, newsman never -- and Fox is not what it seems to be. It's not a news service, certainly, nor even the sincere voice of low-rent nationalism. It's a calculated fraud, like the president who ducked the draft during Vietnam, and even welshed on his National Guard commitment, but who puts on a flight suit stenciled "Commander-in-chief" and plays Douglas MacArthur on network TV.

"I almost choked," said my mother's friend Doris, who's 90. "I had to lie down." It's possible that even old George Bush, who served with distinction in World War II, had to stifle a groan over that one.

The invasion of Iraq was in no way what it seemed to be, either. Saddam Hussein was never a threat to the United States. His "weapons of mass destruction" remain invisible, his terrorist connections remain unproven, and he had absolutely nothing to do with the destruction of the World Trade Center. Most cynical of all was the "liberation" lie, the administration's sudden concern for the helpless citizens of Iraq. Saddam, as grotesque as he was, wasn't getting any meaner, and "liberators" like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were doing brisk business with him when he was in his murderous, citizen-eating prime (and in Cheney's case, as recently as 1999). It would take half a page to list all the US-sanctioned dictators, killers of their people, who will be sharing hell's hottest corner with Saddam Hussein.

Liars with secret agendas are treating Americans like frightened children. If that sounds like a cry from the Left, get a transcript of Sen. Robert Byrd's remarks to the Senate on May 21. Byrd, nobody's liberal by any stretch of the imagination, accuses the White House of constructing "a house of cards, built on deceit," to justify its war on Iraq.

According to polls, at least half of us were so eager to be deceived, we believed the one lie Bush never dared to tell us, except by implication: that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

According to a CNN poll, 51 percent believe this -- "The Moron Majority," declares the headline in The Progressive Populist . And at that point, like poor Flaubert, I feel the sand around my ankles. I want to lie down and give up. On the wall above my bed of pain, two familiar quotations: "The tyranny of the ignoramuses is insurmountable and assured for all time" -- Albert Einstein; and "Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies." -- George Santayana.

It violates democratic etiquette to call your fellow citizens "idiots." (Unless they're liberals -- "We all agree that liberals are stupid," writes Charles Krauthammer.) Fortunately, the PC wordworks has coined a new euphemism to replace the ugly word "retarded." It's "intellectually disabled," and we have it just in time. How else could we describe a majority that accepts the logic of "supporting the troops"? Protest as I might, a local columnist explained to me, once the soldiers are "locked and cocked" I owe them not only my prayers for their safe deliverance but unqualified endorsement of their mission, no matter how immoral and ill-advised it may seem to me.

According to this woeful logic, whoever controls the armed forces in the country where you live owns your conscience and your soul. It mandates unanimous civilian support for King Herod's soldiers smashing Hebrew babies against doorposts. It holds our soldiers hostage to silence our common sense, independent judgment and moral autonomy -- the foundations of each thinking individual's self-respect, not to mention the foundations of every theory of democratic government.

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public," said President Theodore Roosevelt.

The Madhouse Choir

They don't make Republicans like they used to. The troop-support doctrine, so universally and smugly conceded, is logic for the intellectually disabled, for people who've been hit in the head repeatedly with a heavy shovel. The stupidity of those who buy it is no more astonishing than the hypocrisy of those who sell it -- Republicans who preach our sacred duty to the army's morale and simultaneously cancel $15 billion in veteran's benefits and 60 percent of federal education subsidies for servicemen's children. If you can't believe that, look it up.

When is it too late to wake the sleeping masses? When a Fox TV show for amateur entertainers turns up more voters than Congressional elections? The marriage of television and propaganda may well have been the funeral of reason. In the meantime, Iraq is a bloody mess and Afghanistan a tragic mess, and most of the earth's one billion Muslims think the US and Israel are trying to conquer their world and destroy their religion. America's economy is suffocating ("A sickly economy with no cure in sight" says this morning's paper), her currency is in free fall and her reputation flies below half mast on every continent. We've been instructed to hate the French, our allies since the days of Lafayette, because they dared to tell us the truth.

What our best friends think of us is epitomized by a new play in Paris titled George W. Bush, or God's Sad Cowboy. Another in London is called The Madness of George Dubya. Our only original enemies, the terrorists of Al-Qaeda, seem to be thriving -- and quite naturally gaining recruits. There's a chilling suspicion that major architects of our current foreign policy are insane. Listen to Bush adviser Richard Perle, known since his Reagan years as the Prince of Darkness: "If we let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy but just wage total war , (my italics) our children will sing great songs about us years from now."

Is that the children I hear singing, or the madhouse choir? (Calling Dr. Strangelove. . .) But polls tell us that through all the wars and lies and logical meltdowns that followed 9-11, 70 percent of adult America declared itself well satisfied and well served.

"I think it is terrifying," said the late Bishop Paul Moore, a Yale aristocrat who, like most mainstream clergymen, did not support the Bush wars. "I believe it will lead us to a terrible crack in the whole culture as we have come to know it."

I believe it has, and I believe that the split between liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican is inconsequential compared to the real fracture line, between Americans who try to think clearly and those who will not or cannot. What hope, a cynical friend teased me, for a country where 70 percent believe in angels, 60 percent believe in literal, biblical, blazing Armageddon, and more than half reject Charles Darwin? He didn't need to add that creationists, science-annihilating cretins, have now recruited President Bush, who assures fundamentalists he "has doubts" about evolution.

Whether the president is that dumb or merely that dishonest is beside the point. He knows his constituency. New research published by the National Academy of Sciences asserts that human beings and chimpanzees share 99.4 percent of their DNA. Would the polls (or the elections) change if subjects had to submit to DNA tests to prove they possess the qualifying .6 percent? American readers have purchased 50 million copies of Tim LaHaye's gonzo Apocalypse novels, still more evidence that what awaits the United States of America is not a physical but an intellectual Armageddon.

Was it dry, desert sand or quicksand that the despairing Flaubert imagined? When we look down, can we still see our knees? Novelist Michael Malone, a notorious optimist, offered a faint ray of hope when he urged me to ignore all the polls -- if the government has intimidated most of the media, he argued, what makes you think the polls are credible?

When the sand begins to grip us and no lifeline appears, we clutch at straws. Yet there's anecdotal evidence that the polls could be wrong. Brownshirts targeted the Dixie Chicks, and they survived handsomely. At the Merle Watson bluegrass festival in rural Wilkes County, singer Laura Love ridiculed President Bush from the main stage and harvested thousands of cheers to perhaps a hundred catcalls. At a crowded bookstore in Charlottesville last month, I tossed aside the book I hoped to sell and read a white-knuckled antiwar essay I wrote in 1991. One woman walked out, but everyone else applauded and grinned at me. Come to think of it, nearly everyone I know hates these wars and these lies as much as I do.

Are we so few, or are the numbers we see part of the Bush-Fox disinformation campaign -- like Saddam's missing uranium and his 25,000 liters of anthrax? This faint last hope will be tested in the presidential election of 2004. If the polls are right and Malone is wrong, as I fear, it's going to be a long, sandy century for the United States of America, for our children and grandchildren and all those sweet singing children yet unborn.

2003-07-19T20:53:00.000-07:00

Here's an article from the European edition of Stars and Stripes:

Iraq casualties keep Landstuhl full
20.07.2003 [01:11]

LANDSTUHL, Germany — Landstuhl Regional Medical Center is receiving more than twice the number of patients from Operation Iraqi Freedom that it did during the major combat phase of the war.

An average of 48 patients a day were being treated last week, compared with 22 patients a day in March, said Col. David Rubenstein, who relinquished command of the hospital last week for a new post.

Of those patients admitted, about 5 percent were combat-related injuries, “although that’s starting to grow a bit,” Rubenstein said last week, referring to continued attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq. During major combat, which officially ended May 1, 40 percent of Landstuhl’s patients had battle injuries.

Last Thursday, 140 patients arrived at the hospital from Operation Iraqi Freedom, said Air Force Maj. Kenny Fink, director of Landstuhl’s Deployed Warrior Medical Management Center. “As far as I know, that was the largest number of patients arriving from OIF in one day,” he said Monday.

The center processes every patient from OIF and Operation Enduring Freedom, the military campaign in Afghanistan.

The hospital, the largest military medical center outside the United States, remains at its 322-bed capacity, nearly twice the number of pre-war beds.

As of Monday, the hospital was handling 400 OIF and OEF patients, Fink said. The increasing patient load comes with no sign of relief.

Evidence can be found at Naval Station Rota, Spain, where a tent hospital that had 250 beds closed last week; now any patients who would have gone to Spain will be routed to Germany. The temporary hospital treated almost 1,400 patients between February and this month.

Rubenstein said the patient load at Landstuhl is likely to remain high for the foreseeable future. He calls the latest phase of the war — for the hospital — “the grind,” because it just keeps going “day in and day out.”

“We knew the American military would not [simply] go in and come back very quickly,” Rubenstein said.

On Monday, a line of patients waiting to meet with case managers snaked out the warrior management center’s door.

Two busloads of patients, among them at least three servicemembers heading for the intensive-care ward, arrived in a 30-minute period at the emergency room door.

Rubenstein said the number of patients has increased with each new phase of the war.

As troops entered Baghdad, the hospital received an average of 24 patients a day. By the end of May, an average of 27 patients a day arrived.

In June, about 31 patients a day arrived at the hospital and in the first eight days of July, 40 patients a day arrived, Rubenstein said.

“There are still soldiers with some pretty horrendous wounds, as well as a lot of disease and nonbattle injuries,” Rubenstein said.

Fink said roughly 80 percent of the new arrivals are outpatients being treated for chronic problems such as back pain, kidney stones and respiratory ailments. Some others are pregnant.

Among those with battle injuries at Landstuhl on Monday were three Florida National Guard soldiers from Company C, 1st Battalion, 124th Infantry Regiment. The 1st Platoon soldiers shared a three-bed room.

Spc. Jason Recio, 22, of Miami said they had been attacked July 5 while conducting a traffic control point in Ramadi, a city west of Baghdad.

To Recio’s left, Spc. Ramiro Mayorga, 21, of Miami, watched television from bed. Across the room, Sgt. 1st Class Jose Mateo, 33, the platoon sergeant from Port St. Lucie, Fla., was writing a letter.

The men got shrapnel wounds when they were hit either by a rocket-propelled grenade or another explosive device.

Recio, who has serious leg wounds and a large bruise on his left arm, said the three were glad to finally make it to the hospital. They had been in field hospitals in Iraq and Kuwait for a week.

“I’m alive. That’s what counts,” Recio said, adding that the three wounded servicemembers are worried about the rest of their platoon still fighting in Ramadi.

2003-07-19T15:15:00.000-07:00

Watching the collapsing credibitity of Ethelred and his courtiers is too much fun. The jesters at Reuters have joined the fray. The press has finally realized that the uopper class twits have taken over the assylum. Note to Ethelred, just admit you lied and get on with your plans for an early retirement

Here is what Reuters has too say about the released classified documents:

Iraq Nuke Evidence Was Thin, Experts Say
46 minutes ago

By JOHN J. LUMPKIN and DAFNA LINZER, Associated Press Writers

WASHINGTON - Even as the Bush administration concluded Iraq (news - web sites) was reviving its nuclear weapons program, key signs — such as scientific data of weapons work and evidence of research by Iraq's nuclear experts — were missing, according to several former intelligence officials.

The public case that Iraq was pursuing nuclear weapons was built primarily on several suspicious items Iraq reportedly tried to import, such as uranium, aluminum tubes and precision machinery. But the uranium story is now in dispute, and many of the other items had possible uses unrelated to nuclear weapons.

Other information was either lacking, or suggested that no nuclear program was in the works, said the former intelligence officials, who analyzed Iraq's weapons during the run-up to the war. Some spoke on the condition of anonymity.

For example, "There was no solid evidence that indicated Iraq's top nuclear scientists were rejuvenating Iraq's nuclear weapons program," said Greg Thielmann, the former manager of the State Department office that tracked chemical, biological and nuclear weapons issues. Thielmann retired in September 2002.

Other former officials said the scientists weren't performing activities or going to places normally associated with work on a nuclear weapons program.

However, the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons program said Iraq was trying to "re-establish and enhance its cadre of weapons personnel." The estimate was published in October.

The section of the classified document released Friday by the White House provided no details.

Before the war, U.N. nuclear inspectors at the International Atomic Energy Agency interviewed Iraq's nuclear scientists and found no indication that they were working on a weapons program.

"The whole thing was antiquated," said IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming. "These guys were aging, they weren't working collectively and the facilities and infrastructure was dilapidated."

In its estimate, the CIA (news - web sites) and military intelligence agencies concluded that Saddam was again trying to realize his long dream of becoming a nuclear power.

"Although we assess that Saddam does not yet have nuclear weapons or sufficient material to make any, he remains intent on acquiring them. Most agencies assess that Baghdad started reconstituting its nuclear program about the time that (U.N. weapons) inspectors departed — December 1998," says the estimate, a summary of intelligence analyses on Iraq's weapons programs that was assembled by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The estimate predicted, with "moderate confidence," that Saddam could build a nuclear weapon between 2007 and 2009.

The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research dissented: "The activities we have detected do not, however, add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing what (the bureau) would consider to be an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons."

On Oct. 7, President Bush (news - web sites) framed it this way: "Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." National security adviser Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites) had used similar language Sept. 8, saying, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

U.S. officials have announced no discovery in postwar Iraq that would validate that Iraq had revived its nuclear program.

Senior Iraqi nuclear scientists interviewed by The Associated Press in Baghdad said their efforts to build a weapon remained dismantled after the 1991 Gulf War (news - web sites). Shakher Hameed, a physicist who was one of Iraq's top nuclear officials in recent years, said there was no program.

"This whole American story of an Iraqi nuclear program is a lie," said Hameed, a frequent interviewee of both U.N. inspectors and U.S. intelligence officers. "The IAEA knew exactly what was going on here and they made it clear there was no program."

The suspected nuclear program in North Korea (news - web sites) may show more compelling signs of having been revived: The North Koreans, unlike the Iraqis, claim they have a nuclear program. U.S. intelligence has learned of imports of materials useful in nuclear programs, tracked loading and offloading of trucks and other activity at known nuclear sites. U.S. and U.N. officials are now watching for signs that Pyongyang has begun reprocessing plutonium, a process that emits a kind of krypton that U.S. sensors can detect.

Saddam's well-established, pre-1991 pursuit of nuclear weapons led most intelligence analysts to assume he was still after them in recent years, said a defense official familiar with intelligence information. Reports of the Iraqis attempting to import suspicious items reinforced that thinking, the official said, on condition of anonymity.

A report that Iraq tried to import uranium from Africa was primarily based on documents, later determined to be forgeries, that alleged Iraq had sought uranium in Niger. President Bush's repetition of the allegation in his State of the Union address has led to a political firestorm, with critics accusing him of exaggerating intelligence to push for the U.S. invasion.

Other reports suggested Iraq was importing aluminum tubes for use in centrifuges to make weapons-grade uranium. While some CIA analysts believed the tubes were intended for centrifuges, experts with the Department of Energy (news - web sites) and the United Nations (news - web sites) concluded they were probably for conventional artillery rockets.

Other materials Iraq allegedly tried to import included magnets and precision machinery, which the United States said could be used in a nuclear weapons effort. But the IAEA noted that most of those items also have conventional industrial uses.

The U.S. intelligence estimate also notes "activities at several suspect nuclear sites." U.N. nuclear inspectors found no signs of new weapons programs at the scores of sites they checked out and neither did U.S. weapons hunters.

"We investigated every single intelligence claim that was provided alleging Iraq was pursuing nuclear weapons and did not find any evidence of the revival of a nuclear weapons program," the U.N.'s Fleming said.

Some kinds of uranium-enrichment programs require vast amounts of electricity; many need large, secure industrial sites, U.S. government scientists say. The soil around sites that are home to uranium weapons work also has greater traces of the substance than regular soil.

Andrew Wilkie, a senior Australian intelligence analyst who resigned in protest of his government's handling of prewar intelligence, said intelligence services did not pick up on telltale emissions and other signs that would point to a large-scale nuclear program.

"Every stage of the weapons cycle was missing," he said.

2003-07-19T14:58:00.000-07:00

The Spectre of Vincent Foster rises in the countryside around Oxford

The death of defence ministry biologist David Kelly, whose body was found on Friday, has caused a political storm in Britain and raised questions over the government's handling of a dispute over Iraq's weapons that has eroded trust in Blair.
After meeting Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi near Tokyo, an emotional Blair told a news conference that a judicial inquiry had been set up and people should await its conclusions.
''In the meantime, we should show respect and restraint, and let me express once again my deep sorrow for the tragedy that has come about,'' he said.
He tried to turn the focus of the news conference to the North Korean nuclear crisis, which is supposed to be a central issue on his Asian tour in talks with leaders of Japan, South Korea and China.
But British reporters travelling with Blair wouldn't let up on the Kelly story, with one asking if the death was on his conscience.
His voice occasionally cracking, Blair said he would say no more until the inquiry was complete. A question on whether he was considering resigning was left unanswered, so too was one asking if he had blood on his hands.
British ministers had identified Kelly as the probable source of a BBC report that alleged that government officials had ''sexed up'' evidence of Iraq's lethal weapons to justify the war.

DRAMATIC TWIST
The death of Kelly, who led a team of biological weapons inspectors in Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War, marked a dramatic twist in a political crisis over Britain's intelligence before the Iraq conflict.
News of his death, which British police said on Saturday was the result of a slashed wrist, hit sterling on international currency markets as strategists said it further damaged the government's credibility, undermined by the raging weapons row.
The opposition has called for Blair's resignation, saying he exaggerated the case for war.
Kelly's death puts a question mark over the future of a top Blair aide, communications chief Alastair Campbell, and a number of government ministers who had named Kelly as the likely source of the BBC report.
The affair looked set to overshadow Blair's week-long tour of the Far East, but his spokesman insisted on Saturday that the trip would not be cut short, as the opposition had demanded.
Kelly was grilled in parliament on Tuesday after admitting he had met a BBC correspondent who aired the report over the alleged doctoring of intelligence.
Two days after the inquisition, Kelly, visibly uncomfortable in the media spotlight, went missing. British police said on Friday they had found a body matching his description. They were not treating his death as suspicious.

2003-07-19T14:46:00.000-07:00

Just found this at MacAddict, and boy do I feel safer to know that Microsoft and Dell are saving us from terrorists:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Department of Homeland Security said on Tuesday it has awarded a five-year, $90 million enterprise agreement to Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) to become the department's primary technology provider.

Under the contract, Microsoft will supply desktop and server software to the newly created department, which has merged parts of 22 different agencies into one entity.

The agreement delivers licensing coverage for about 140,000 desktops and will help the department to establish a common computing environment, Homeland Security said in a statement.

Dell Marketing LP. was selected as the reseller, to provide the day-to-day management of the enterprise agreement, it said.

2003-07-19T09:47:00.000-07:00

I cannot be silent any longer, it was me who snuck in those 18 words into the President's State of the Union Address.

2003-07-19T09:44:00.000-07:00

Here is the latest report from the incomparable Daily Howler

THE PERFECT STORM! Scribes constructed a Perfect Storm. They used an old tried-and-true method:

FRIDAY, JULY 18, 2003

BUILDING A PERFECT STORM: Here at THE HOWLER, we’re still amazed by that Harold Meyerson piece from yesterday’s Washington Post (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 7/17/03). Amazingly, it only took a couple of days to reach this point—to reach the point where the Post was running a high-profile piece which is almost bizarrely inaccurate. (It will be interesting to see how the Post handles the matter. The statements about Cheney are blatantly false.) But that’s the way the press tends to work when it starts creating a Perfect Storm, as the mainstream press corps has been doing in the case of those “16 words.” Our readers continue to shake their fists, insisting that the coverage is all quite appropriate. But, whatever a real probe of Bush-on-Iraq might show, this particular event has indeed been spun. Let’s start again with Meyerson’s claim that Bush’s 16-word statement was “baseless.”

“Baseless?” It’s a strange word to choose for a short, simple statement which carried an explicit citation. As we all know, the basis for Bush’s statement was noted; the statement was explicitly cited to British intelligence, and British intelligence stands by its assessment, as Tony Blair said again yesterday. That doesn’t mean that the British assessment is accurate; it doesn’t mean the assessment should have been in the speech. But readers, it’s hardly shocking to see an American. president cite an assessment by his country’s top ally. Face it: If that were the worst thing the Bush Admin ever did, this conversation wouldn’t even be happening.

But if you read the Meyerson piece in the Post, you never learned what Bush actually said. Meyerson said that Bush’s statement was “baseless”—then failed to mention the “basis” Bush cited. This was certainly small potatoes compared to the howling misstatements about Cheney. But this small part of Meyerson’s column fits the template for a certain type of spun press event. To consider a roughly similar case, let’s review the memorable way the Buddhist Temple was spun against Gore.

Simply put, the press corps wanted the Buddhist Temple to be a Perfect Storm. They wanted it to be the perfect example of fund-raising misconduct by Gore. Unfortunately, the actual facts of the temple case made it a rather weak parable. In fact, there was no charge to attend the temple luncheon, making it one of the strangest “fund-raisers” in political history. That same night, Gore spoke at a fund-raising dinner in San Jose; attendees paid $5000 per plate. But attendees at the luncheon paid nothing. And why was there no charge for the temple luncheon? Because when the luncheon was switched to the temple venue, the DNC dropped its plan to charge. Those who say “there is no free lunch” have failed to recall this event.

No, it was hard to make this a Perfect Storm—if you included all the facts. But the press simply loved this event. They had video of funny Asian monastics which they could play to their hearts’ content, and they had an inaccurate joke about “vows of poverty” which they all loved to recite. (Many of the temple monastics were actually millionaires.) So, to help make the luncheon a Perfect Storm, they simply decided to dump certain facts. Though they flogged the event again and again, they knew not to say that the luncheon was free, and they knew not to say that the DNC had dropped its charges because of the temple venue. With those facts removed, the story worked! Routinely, those facts were suppressed.

So too with the 16-word statement. To all appearances, the corps had reached a global judgment—Bush hyped the facts on Iraq. That overall view may be perfectly fair. But here’s the problem—even if that’s a valid view, “238-gate” just doesn’t cut it as the Perfect Illustration. Perhaps the statement didn’t belong in the speech. The statement may not even be true. But if you say that Bush was citing British intelligence, the tale becomes an Imperfect Storm. So, just as with the free temple luncheon, scribes began leaving facts out.

Kristof called Bush’s statement a “hoax”—and forgot to mention the British intelligence. Meyerson said Bush’s charge was “baseless”—and he failed to mention the Brit intell, too. Many of you have written in, insisting that this is all deeply moral. Sorry, you’re wrong—and yesterday’s stunning column showed how quickly things devolve when scribes are allowed to dump basic facts. In paragraph one, Meyerson’s column was omitting key facts. By paragraph two, it was making facts up.

Just as with the Buddhist temple, there are reasons why this item appealed to the press corps as a Perfect Storm. The famous forged documents were irresistible, just as the Asian ascetics had been. And the Joe Wilson story provided a plot: Honest ambassador’s passage to Africa. Meanwhile, why does the press corps just luvvv Perfect Storms? Simple. Once you come up with a Perfect Storm, you don’t have to do any real reporting. You repeat the Standard Story again and again. Then you break for a three-margy lunch.

American citizens deserve a full look at how their government handled intelligence on Iraq. But their press corps is lazy; it wants Perfect Storms. We’ve expressed a simple point this week: As a point of fairness and simple honesty, you can’t accuse officials of a “baseless” “hoax” unless you state their basic explanation. But you know that press corps! By Tuesday, they were dumping key facts. By Thursday, they were making facts up.

RICHARD’S LARGER ALMANAC: For our money, Richard Cohen offered a more instructive view with part of his own Thursday column:
COHEN: At the moment, the brouhaha is over Bush’s assertion in his State of the Union address that Iraq had sought to import weapons-grade uranium from Africa. That turns out not to be true—or at least not provable. It is also probably not true that Iraq was importing aluminum tubing for its purported nuclear weapons program. In fact, it may well be that Iraq had no active nuclear weapons program. At least none has been found.
Cohen makes one fleeting error; clearly, no one has shown that Bush’s statement “turns out not to be true.” (Though it clearly hasn’t been proven.) But why is Cohen’s account more significant than Meyerson’s? Cohen looks at the Bush Admin’s larger claim—the general claim that Saddam was trying to kick-start a nuclear program. This claim was frequently made in the run-up to war. But was this serious claim accurate? The tubing claim appears to have been hyped (or worse), and the uranium claim was imperfectly based. Cohen doesn’t offer a Perfect Storm—but he sketches the shape of a larger probe that might suggest that a Big Bush Claim was based on slender, hyped evidence.

Incidentally, accurate information is hard to obtain in all of these murky, security areas. For example, when the New Republic did its lengthy report on Bush-on-Iraq, it included two paragraphs on uranium from Africa. Viewed from the present perspective, the account seems to be riddled with errors:
ACKERMAN AND JUDIS: In his State of the Union address on January 28, 2003, Bush introduced a new piece of evidence to show that Iraq was developing a nuclear arms program: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa…Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide.”

One year earlier, Cheney’s office had received from the British, via the Italians, documents purporting to show Iraq’s purchase of uranium from Niger. Cheney had given the information to the CIA, which in turn asked a prominent diplomat [Joe Wilson], who had served as ambassador to three African countries, to investigate. He returned after a visit to Niger in February 2002 and reported to the State Department and the CIA that the documents were forgeries. The CIA circulated the ambassador’s report to the vice president’s office, the ambassador confirms to TNR. But, after a British dossier was released in September detailing the purported uranium purchase, administration officials began citing it anyway, culminating in its inclusion in the State of the Union. “They knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie,” the former ambassador tells TNR. “They were unpersuasive about aluminum tubes and added this to make their case more persuasive.”
Though it culminates in a serious charge by Wilson (then still unnamed), much of this account is inaccurate or unproven. For example, Wilson did not “report that the documents were forgeries;” he acknowledges that he never saw them. And CIA head George Tenet says that the CIA did not “circulate the ambassador’s report to Cheney’s office.” It’s clear from Wilson’s later appearances that this was his surmise, not something he can “confirm.” Meanwhile, Ackerman and Judis are somewhat unclear when they say that “the purported [Niger] uranium purchase” was included in the State of the Union. If we ever do get that larger probe, each piece will be murky and subject to confusion and error.

2003-07-19T09:43:00.000-07:00

Ok so the jesters are getting downright uppity in King Ethelred's court. For example here is a piece from the Times-Union

Mistakes of arrogance are hard to accept

By JAY BOOKMAN

Some people are born humble. Others have humility thrust upon them.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, for example, was asked in a recent interview whether he still had faith in prewar intelligence claiming a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

"I think that the, the, information we had over a period of time that I cited that the intelligence community gave to me and I read as opposed to ad-libbing was correct. It, it, it was carefully stated ..."

Talk about carefully stated.

It's telling to see the bantam rooster of the Bush administration turn so halting and defensive, insisting that, hey, he had only been reading what somebody else handed him. Then again, there's a lot of that going around these days.

In fact, if Vietnam was the place where America lost her innocence, Iraq may be the place where we lose our arrogance.

The once-triumphant Richard Perle has gone underground. The sublimely smug William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard and stalwart champion of empire, no longer looks as though he just swallowed a canary. Crow is more like it. And we've heard more from Saddam Hussein in recent weeks than from Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.

Maybe because Saddam, unlike Wolfowitz, has a plan that's actually working.

The humility of Rumsfeld and others, while belated, is well earned. Too many of our soldiers are still dying. Too many others, living every day with the knowledge that an attack could come from anywhere, now find themselves acting with the brutality that has long been required of occupying forces. The transformation is no doubt necessary for their self-defense, but it may haunt their nights for years.

Contrary to previous assurances, our top generals now admit that we will be stuck in Iraq for years at a current cost of a billion dollars a week, not including substantial reconstruction costs. The need to keep at least 150,000 soldiers stationed in Iraq for the foreseeable future also means that our military will be seriously overextended for a long time.

Globally, the credibility of the United States is in tatters. At a time when both North Korea and Iran truly do seem to be moving toward a nuclear capability -- as contrasted with the fictitious nuclear program attributed to Iraq -- we find ourselves in a weak position, both militarily and diplomatically, to challenge them.

We've even been reduced to asking, all but begging, other nations to contribute troops to Iraq, but most are declining. They want no part of a war that they advised against, a war they were ridiculed by U.S. officials for opposing, a war that now seems to be going bad.

Anybody can make mistakes, of course. But mistakes born of arrogance are particularly hard to accept, and our leaders made plenty, right from the beginning.

The United Nations would never dare to withhold its approval for an invasion, yet it did. The Iraqi people would welcome us with parades and confetti, but instead it's been rocket-propelled grenades. Weapons of mass destruction posed a grave threat to our safety of our loved ones, yet so far none has been found. And the notion that we could create a democratic Iraq to serve as a beacon to the rest of the Islamic world is now exposed for the romantic claptrap it had always been.

For a year now, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Vice President Dick Cheney and others have treated U.S. intelligence agencies as little more than public-relations flacks, tasked to produce propaganda that the CEO needed to sell a product. They drew up no Plan B in case they were wrong about Iraq, because the notion that they could be wrong never entered their minds. Any who dared suggest otherwise were dismissed as fools, traitors or appeasers.

Even when smart people, experienced people, such as Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, tried to tell them that an occupation of Iraq might be expensive and require a lot of manpower, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz publicly scoffed.

And in that willful blindness, they have led us here.

Today, and tomorrow, and for the foreseeable future, our men and women in uniform will be dealing with the consequences of their leaders' misinformed arrogance. But surely, those who made the mistakes should face consequences, too.

"If Donald Rumsfeld was here," Spc. Clinton Deitz of the 3rd Infantry Division told ABC News in Baghdad, "I'd ask him for his resignation."

2003-07-17T20:07:00.000-07:00

So Microsoft seem to have finally managed to kill Netscape, and gotten AOL to use Internet Explorer as it's default browser. My only reaction iks who cares. AOL sucks, Microsoft is not as good as Safari and Mozilla has been spun off into it's own non-profit organization. In the long run this will be good for all of us.

James

2003-07-16T11:52:00.000-07:00

House committee votes to block FCC from easing limits on TV station ownership

By ALAN FRAM
The Associated Press
7/16/03 12:56 PM

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A House committee voted Wednesday to block federal regulators from letting companies purchase larger numbers of television stations, ignoring a Bush administration veto threat and handing a setback to the commercial television networks.

By a bipartisan 40-25 vote, the House Appropriations Committee voted to derail a new Federal Communications Commission rule that would let a single company own TV stations reaching 45 percent of American households. That new rule replaced a 35 percent limit, which has been favored by smaller broadcasters and an amalgam of groups ranging from the National Rifle Association to consumer advocates.

The Appropriations Committee's approval of the provision, which was attached to a must-pass spending bill for the Commerce, Justice and State departments, breathed new life into an effort by congressional opponents to undo the June 2 FCC decision. Separate House and Senate bills to thwart the new FCC have bogged down, having run into opposition from pivotal committee chairmen.

Even so, with the White House threatening a veto, House Republican leaders backing the administration and continued opposition from the major commercial broadcast networks, the prospects for the provision approved on Wednesday were unclear.

Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., sponsor of the amendment, cast it as an attempt to keep national corporations from dictating what will be aired on local television stations. He and others complained about prime-time broadcasts of Victoria Secrets models and other programming they said was unsuitable for young children.

"I don't want ownership factors to get in the way of districts like mine from being able to preserve their own cultural attitudes," Obey said.

Supporters of the new FCC rules said they reflected the growing competition that large network broadcasters face from cable and satellite television and the Internet. Blocking those rules won't change the programming, they said.

"It doesn't matter whether they're owned by a guy in that town or a conglomerate," said Rep. Henry Bonilla, R-Texas.

Obey's amendment did not affect other parts of the FCC decision that ended many of the prohibitions against a single company owning newspapers and broadcast stations in the same community.

Prior to approving the amendment, the committee by voice vote killed an effort to broaden it by also blocking the part of the FCC ruling having to do with joint newspaper-broadcast ownership.

The sponsor of that amendment, Rep. Anne Northup, R-Ky., said she wanted to contain the expansion of all media organizations, not just television networks. But Obey said her proposal, if approved, would have spelled the defeat of the entire amendment by increasing the number of groups -- and lawmakers -- opposed to it.

2003-07-16T08:32:00.000-07:00

According to CNN, there have been 266 confirmed coalition deaths in the war as of July 16, 2003.

There have also been (according to Iraq Body Count website) 7779 Iraqi civilians killed.

I am not sure how many Iraqi soldiers have been killed.

Please take a minute to reflect on the human cost of the war.

2003-07-16T05:41:00.000-07:00

This from the Observer proves we might just be completely fucked as a species:

Big Brother is key to winning next election: Politicians must learn from reality TV in battle to get voters off the sofa and into ballot booths

Gaby Hinsliff, chief political correspondent
Sunday June 1, 2003
The Observer

Politicians' never-ending quest for public approval could lead them to seek inspiration from the most unlikely source.

This week MPs will be warned that they should adopt the tricks of the reality TV show Big Brother to re-engage with voters or risk fading into irrelevance.

Just as the housemates nominate each other in confidence for eviction, MPs could vote by secret ballot in the House of Commons, while regular online votes on issues of importance would help to make parliament more interactive, suggests Peter Bazalgette, the TV executive behind the cult programme.

Almost twice as many votes were cast in the last series of Big Brother as in May's local elections, prompting the Hansard Society, the respected constitutional think tank, to produce a report - to be published on Tuesday - on the lessons to be learnt on boosting the turnout at general elections.

In his foreword to the report, Bazalgette - who chairs Endemol UK, the producer of Big Brother - warns that British politics is in decline. 'The relationship between electors and elected is fracturing. Parliament is unresponsive; the government cynically dominates the agenda; backbenchers have become invertebrate lobby fodder.'

The Commons and the Big Brother set are both 'televised houses in which a popularity contest takes place', he adds. But parliament is failing to satisfy the demands of a generation raised on text-messaging and email, instead allowing its electorate to express an opinion on the Westminster housemates only once every few years at the ballot box.

The report, A Tale of Two Houses, compares the views of regular Big Brother viewers uninterested in politics (BBs) with serious-minded, chattering-class Political Junkies (PJs).

Both groups were asked by pollsters YouGov what MPs could learn from Big Brother. While the BBs made constructive suggestions - including adapting the confessional 'diary room' formula to allow MPs to speak directly to voters about issues, and televising the decision-making process on important issues such as the euro - many PJs were so appalled at the idea of learning from a game show that they could not bring themselves to mention Big Brother in their answers, the report notes.

Of those who did, one proposed legislation to ban reality TV and another suggested improving state education so that fewer people watched such low-brow fare. The polling found that PJs considered people who watched Big Brother to be 'voyeuristic' and 'dull'.

Yet BBs - who were overwhelmingly women and more likely to vote Labour, while PJs were mostly male and Conservative - were only slightly less likely to have gone to university than PJs.

Stephen Coleman, professor of e-democracy at Oxford University, said snobbery was stopping Britain's political elite reconnecting with the masses. 'Political junkies detest the BB people; they don't want to understand them, but they do want little BBs in their schools to have citizenship lessons, which will teach them to become more like the PJs. That won't work unless they understand what makes BBs tick.'

Interactive television dissolved the boundaries between programme and viewer and politicians must try to do the same, he added.

'John Prescott punching someone was one of the few moments of interactivity in the last general election campaign - it's a tragedy that it had to involve someone getting punched.'

BBs more often change their minds on politics - they swung from opposing war against Iraq to supporting it once military action began, which explains why Stephan Shakespeare, the YouGov pollster now working for the Conservative Party, has advised Iain Duncan Smith to target the Big Brother-watching classes. Shakespeare also warns against politicians dismissing more gossipy news as 'froth', pointing out that issues such as William Hague drinking 14 pints interest BBs.

2003-07-16T05:28:00.000-07:00

Poor King Ethelred, his jesters are getting more restless daily:

Bush Faced Dwindling Data on Iraq Nuclear Bid

By Walter Pincus (Washington Post Staff Writer, Wednesday, July 16, 2003; Page A01)

In recent days, as the Bush administration has defended its assertion in the president's State of the Union address that Iraq had tried to buy African uranium, officials have said it was only one bit of intelligence that indicated former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was reconstituting his nuclear weapons program.

But a review of speeches and reports, plus interviews with present and former administration officials and intelligence analysts, suggests that between Oct. 7, when President Bush made a speech laying out the case for military action against Hussein, and Jan. 28, when he gave his State of the Union address, almost all the other evidence had either been undercut or disproved by U.N. inspectors in Iraq.

By Jan. 28, in fact, the intelligence report concerning Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa -- although now almost entirely disproved -- was the only publicly unchallenged element of the administration's case that Iraq had restarted its nuclear program. That may explain why the administration strived to keep the information in the speech and attribute it to the British, even though the CIA had challenged it earlier.

For example, in his Oct. 7 speech, Bush said that "satellite photographs reveal that Iraq is rebuilding facilities at [past nuclear] sites." He also cited Hussein's "numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists" as further evidence that the program was being reconstituted, along with Iraq's attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes "needed" for centrifuges used to enrich uranium.

But on Jan. 27 -- the day before the State of the Union address -- the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported to the U.N. Security Council that two months of inspections in Iraq had found that no prohibited nuclear activities had taken place at former Iraqi nuclear sites. As for Iraqi nuclear scientists, Mohamed ElBaradei told the Security Council, U.N. inspectors had "useful" interviews with some of them, though not in private. And preliminary analysis, he said, suggested that the aluminum tubes, "unless modified, would not be suitable for manufacturing centrifuges."

The next night, Bush delivered his speech, including the now-controversial 16-word sentence, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Of his October examples, only the aluminum tubes charge remained in January, but that allegation had a subtle caveat -- he described the tubes as merely "suitable" for nuclear weapons production. Without the statement on uranium, the allegation concerning aluminum tubes would have been the only nuclear-related action ascribed to Hussein since the early 1990s.

And the tubes had already been questioned not only by IAEA, but also by analysts in U.S. and British intelligence agencies.

The idea that Iraq was acquiring tubes for a nuclear program became public in September, shortly after the Bush administration began a campaign to marshal public, congressional and U.N. support for authority to attack Iraq if it did not disarm.

On Aug. 26, Vice President Cheney, the official most publicly vocal about Iraq as a nuclear threat, began the campaign when he told a Veterans of Foreign Wars audience: "Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon. Just how soon we cannot gauge."

On Sept. 8, the New York Times disclosed that intelligence showed that Iraq had "embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb" by trying to purchase "specially designed aluminum tubes" that unidentified administration sources believed were for centrifuges to enrich uranium.

The story referred to Bush "hardliners" who argued that action should be taken because if they waited for proof that Hussein had a nuclear weapon, "the first sign of a smoking gun may be a mushroom cloud."

That day, Bush national security adviser Condoleezza Rice appeared on CNN's "Late Edition" and confirmed the Times story. She said the tubes "are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs." She also said, "The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons, but we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

Cheney also confirmed the Times story that day, on NBC's "Meet the Press," saying that "we don't have all the evidence," but enough of a picture "that tells us that he [Hussein] is in fact actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons."

What neither Rice nor Cheney said at the time was that Baghdad's first attempts to purchase the aluminum tubes, more than a year earlier, had by Sept. 8 led to a fairly open disagreement in the U.S. intelligence community on whether the tubes were for centrifuges or for artillery rockets in Iraq's military program.

Analysts from the State and Energy departments said the tubes were too long and too thick for centrifuges; CIA and Pentagon analysts said they could be cut down and reamed out. Their debate was continuing as the agencies were putting together the still-classified national intelligence estimate on Hussein's weapons program.

In July, the United States had intercepted one shipment and obtained a tube; it was coated with a protective chemical that would have had to be removed if it were to be put to a nuclear purpose.

The intelligence estimate, completed in mid-September, reflected the different views, but the final judgment said that "most" analysts leaned toward the view that the tubes had a nuclear purpose. When the British dossier on Iraq's weapons program was published on Sept. 24, it referred to the tubes, but noted that "there is no definitive intelligence that it is destined for a nuclear program."

In his State of the Union address, Bush did not indicate any disagreement over the use of the tubes. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, however, outlined the arguments involved when he spoke eight days later before the Security Council, where inspectors already had challenged the U.S. position on them.

On March 7, ElBaradei gave his final report to the Security Council before his inspectors were removed from Iraq on March 18. His conclusion was that "the IAEA had found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq." He also said the documents that gave rise to the allegation that Iraq had tried to buy African uranium were forged.

On March 16, Cheney appeared again on "Meet the Press" and reiterated his views of the previous August about Hussein's nuclear program. "We know he's been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons, and we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." The war began three days later

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2003-07-15T21:05:00.000-07:00

Peaceful Warrior
Chris Strohm is a freelance reporter and volunteer with the DC Independent Media Center. Ingrid Drake is a correspondent for Pacifica Radio's Peacewatch program.

As the U.S. occupation of Iraq extends with no end in sight, and the death toll for both U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians continues to mount, more voices of dissent from military personnel and families are surfacing every day.

One of the most poignant so far comes from a young Marine who gave an interview with Pacifica Radio's Peacewatch program the night before he was deployed to Iraq. He discussed his strong commitment to peace, and said the Bush administration was violating constitutional principles and misleading the country into an unjust war.

He was killed in late June, fighting a war he didn’t believe in.

Because the interview was given under the condition of anonymity, and out of respect for the current wishes of his family, the Marine will be identified in this story only as John (not his real name). John’s friends describe him as a passionate, intense person with an insatiable appetite for knowledge and a commitment to peace. He studied philosophy and peace with an emphasis on Middle Eastern affairs, particularly Iraq and Israel.

His friends say he went into the military under the Clinton administration to gain credibility, so that perhaps someday his beliefs on how to build a lasting peace in the Middle East would be taken seriously. In the months before his deployment, he helped organize anti-war campaigns, mainly working behind the scenes.

In his interview with Pacifica, John expressed outrage that a legitimate public debate on the war had not occurred. Many alternatives to combat were available, he explained, such as using money being spent for war to finance a grassroots Iraqi democracy movement that would rival the Baath regime, or promoting democracy throughout the Middle East to show people alternative forms of government.

"It is almost unimaginable to expect that this war is going to create a better peace for anybody with the exception of a very small percentage of people," he said.

He accused the administration of not talking honestly with the American public about potential consequences of a U.S. war on Iraq, such as the potential for urban combat, the psyche of the Iraqi people, the impact on the United Nations and the fate of the Middle East.

"This could have repercussions in terms of the war on terrorism," he said. "It could have repercussions on international diplomacy. It could have repercussions on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It could have repercussions in terms of our ability to get anything else done in the United Nations. And even if... everything goes the way it's supposed to go, what does that mean for the world order? It says that we basically can do whatever we want to do whenever we want to do it because we are the world's sole superpower."

But even as he expressed doubts about the Bush administration’s decision, he spoke eloquently about his patriotism, and looked to the highest ideals of the country for inspiration:

"I believe in the United States. I believe in the Constitution. I think it's perhaps one of the greatest documents ever written. I believe in the idea that we the people are sovereign and we determine our own destiny. We have a democracy and the Bill of Rights and freedom of expression, freedom of speech, freedom of religion and due process. Until the world is such a place that we can really live without the military, individual Americans have to step up and they have to serve."

The Bush administration, he claimed, had not made a credible case for war with Iraq, and was violating constitutional principles by sending troops into combat. He spoke of the Declaration of Independence, and how its writers vowed to be free of England, where their lives were ruled and determined by one man. "The constant rhetoric of the administration is that there's going to be one person who decides when we go to war," he said, "and that is such a blatant violation of every constitutional principle that our founding fathers came up with."

"But even beyond that, it's ‘we the people’ that this nation is about," he continued. "It isn't about politics or personal agendas or political agendas or economic agendas. And I believe that this war is not the right thing for America because it hasn't yet been proven conclusively that there is a threat to ‘we the people’ -- and I think that is the sole determining factor as to whether or not this nation should ever go to war."

With chilling foresight, John predicted that much could go wrong in a war with Iraq, saying the outcomes outlined by the administration were based on highly optimistic and rosy scenarios. He said it was unlikely that Iraqis would cheer the arrival of a U.S. occupying force, and that long-term urban combat could be a likely outcome.

Yet he went to Iraq, believing it to be his duty. And continued, even in the midst of combat, to exercise his belief in nonviolent resolution. One of his commanders wrote a letter after his death explaining a situation in which John negotiated a peaceful settlement to a potentially deadly situation. A group of Baath Party officials were found inside a house. Because he spoke Arabic, John entered the house and talked with the officials until he negotiated a surrender. His actions potentially saved the lives of both U.S. soldiers and Iraqis.

In letters home, John described the peace movement as "awesome," and said he hoped it would grow larger, never relent against the Bush administration, and help bring an end to the war.

Around June 20, those letters stopped.

As of July 14, 32 American soldiers have died from hostile action since Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq on May 1, according to the Pentagon. Forty-three other service members have died in incidents unrelated to hostilities.

Nancy Lessin, co-founder of Military Families Speak Out, says more people are becoming outraged now that the war against Iraq has turned into a highly risky occupation.

"Too many U.S. military personnel and way too many innocent Iraqis have been killed," she says. "And what we predicted to be true has come true, that there are no weapons of mass destruction. Everything we said was going to happen is coming to pass, and one of the most frightening aspects of this is that the people of this country haven't completely risen up in opposition to what's going on."

Her words are echoed, and answered, by John’s. Before he was deployed, John wrote a final letter as part of his will.

"That I have died means I have failed to achieve the one thing in life I truly longed to give the world -- peace," the letter reads. "The plight of human suffering consumed me and I dedicated much to trying to find the ideas that might lead humankind toward alleviating it for all. It was a quest which was inextricably intertwined with my quest for freedom. If you know anything about me you know that. Understand it and come to understand how the suffering of others tormented my soul. Then seek to honor my memory by trying to achieve what I could not."

Andrew Korfhage provided additional reporting for this article.

2003-07-15T20:57:00.000-07:00

King Ethelred the Unready should clear his comments with a brain before he utters a word. Here he is justifying war with Iraq, because Sadam would not let inspectors in:

THE PRESIDENT: Well, the speech that I gave was cleared by the CIA. And, look, the thing that's important to realize is that we're constantly gathering data. Subsequent to the speech, the CIA had some doubts. But when I gave the -- when they talked about the speech and when they looked at the speech, it was cleared. Otherwise, I wouldn't have put it in the speech. I'm not interested in talking about intelligence unless it's cleared by the CIA. And as Director Tenet said, it was cleared by the CIA.

The larger point is, and the fundamental question is, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer is, absolutely. And we gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power, along with other nations, so as to make sure he was not a threat to the United States and our friends and allies in the region. I firmly believe the decisions we made will make America more secure and the world more peaceful.

2003-07-15T12:26:00.000-07:00

In the land of the weird only the weird news is worth reporting. Here is a little something found on the BBC's disability sports pages:

-------------------------------------------------------------

England came through a bruising encounter against Greece to win 3-2 and go top of the round-robin group at the European Blind Football Championships in Manchester.

England took a fifth-minute lead against the Greeks with captain Darren Harris slotting home a penalty after the Greek keeper was penalised for coming out of his area.

Greece looked much stronger than in their opening defeat to Spain and five minutes later they levelled when wing-back Ioannis Petsas cut inside two defenders and drove the ball into Jon Pugh's bottom left hand corner.

Greece were denied what seemed to be a clear penalty after 21 minutes and they fell behind again when England's star striker Dave Clarke chipped the keeper after good work by Darren Cooke.

England suffered a blow when Lee Greatbatch had to be permanently substituted 13 minutes into the second half after committing five fouls.

But Clarke made the win safe two minutes from time with a penalty - his sixth goal of the tournament - to put him on top of the scoring charts

The Greeks pulled a goal back late on through an eight-metre penalty by Dimitrios Amatzis but it was not enough to dampen England's spirits.

In the day's other game France beat Italy 3-0 but their victory was overshadowed by the lodging of a formal complaint against wing-back Frederich Villeraux.

Villeraux, who scored against England on Sunday, was accused of lifting up the blindfold which all players are required to wear and using his limited sight to gain an advantage.

The organisers' response was to force France players to wear bigger blindfolds.

-------------------------------------------------------------

Ok so maybe I am not politically correct, but I think this is an example of life imitating Python. However, they do not just have blid and blindfolded football, they also have deaf football.

In keeping with this theme of the blind leading the blid, here is another piece from the BBC disability sports pages on blind cricket.

---------------------------------------------------

Blind cricket is heading for the Caribbean with the West Indies about to set up their first team.

The England blind cricket team and former stars Desmond Haynes and Devon Malcolm will help the move which will increase the sport's growing international network.

Also assisting is the London Community Cricket Association, which set up and coached the England team.

England blind cricket team coach Andy Sellins said: "West Indies is one of only two Test playing nations not to have a blind team.

"But the island is mad keen on cricket and I know the idea of the game being played by blind and visually impaired players really grips people's imaginations."

England star Tim Gutteridge agreed: "Such is the enthusiasm out there I'm sure they'll be beating us in a few years.

"But it goes beyond sport as it will help those with a disability and those without the opportunities to develop and maximise their talents."

There are few better equipped to help achieve that goal - Gutteridge was voted Player of the Tournament in last year's Blind Cricket World Cup in India.

Coaching sessions for young and adult players will be held across the island and cricket clothing, equipment and coaching material will also be supplied.

The trip will also feature a match between the England team and a team of past and present West Indian players skippered by Haynes.

The legendary batsman said: "With such a rich history of cricket success in the West Indies, it makes perfect sense for us to finally have our own blind team."

2003-07-15T08:02:00.000-07:00

So Pat Robertson is a caring man, who like all good Christians hope we live long and prosper, except of course for three supreme court justices that he hopes god will strike dead or at least strike with a terminal illness. As is reported in today's Guardian:

Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson urged his nationwide audience Monday to pray for God to remove three justices from the Supreme Court so they could be replaced by conservatives.... Robertson has launched a 21-day ``prayer offensive'' directed at the Supreme Court in the wake of its 6-3 June vote that decriminalized sodomy. Robertson said in a letter on the CBN Web site that the ruling ``has opened the door to homosexual marriage, bigamy, legalized prostitution and even incest.''

I say we all pray for 28 days that Pat will be struck down by lightning, get a bad case of rectal colon cancer or at least get run down by a truck driven by Satan.

2003-07-15T07:39:00.000-07:00

OK, so here I am scratching out a living as a web designer, like so many other digital fucking peasants, desperately hoping that the economy may finally turn around and that King Ethelred the Unready will finally fall flat on his ass. It seems that finally the his lackeys and court jesters at CNN and MSNBC are getting restless. I guess the bullshit and lies have gotten too much for them to swallow even more. As Marc Almond proved, twenty years ago, there is only so much jism you can swallow before you need to get your stomach pumped.

So here is the latest, as far as I can tell, the bullshit about Saddam and his yellow cake has clued them into the fact that all the other claims might also be suspect. This can be seen in the fact that Scott Ritter is finally being allowed to speak in public again. On MSNBC yesterday they reported that the aluminum tubes may not have been destined to for a centifuge but instead were parts of rockets allowed under the UN sanctions. Gosh, I thought that had been clarified moths ago.

OH in case anyone noticed the deficit is now projected to be $450,000,000,000 this year. How a government can take in $2,200,000,000,000,000,000 and still come up $450,000,000,000 short beats the living piss out of me.

Anyway, here I am going to the only website about the war that I bother with http://www.iraqwar.ru/?userlang=en and on there is a piece about a blog being written by a GI in Baghdad and it is freakin awesome so I heartily reccomend all who have the time go visit http://turningtables.blogspot.com/ Enough for now

James

2003-07-12T13:42:00.000-07:00

George Bush has once again proved that he is a spineless sack of shit, who not only thinks "his shit don't stink" to cite Molly Ivins, but like Hitler he has no balls. To prove my point, one only need consuder the following from CBS news:

(CBS/AP) President Bush said Saturday he had confidence in CIA Director George Tenet despite his agency's failure to warn Mr. Bush against making allegations about Iraq's nuclear weapons program later found false.

"Yes I do, absolutely," Mr. Bush said. "I've got confidence in George Tenet. I've got confidence in the men and women who work at the CIA and I look forward to working with them as we win this war on terror."

The president spoke in Abuja, Nigeria, at the end of a five-country trip through Africa.
Mr. Bush asserted in his State of the Union address in January that Iraq had sought nuclear materials from Africa. Nearly six months later, the White House acknowledged the charge was false, and the tempest that followed has shadowed Mr. Bush on his five-country trip through Africa.

"The president considers the matter closed and wants to move on," White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said.

"The president is pleased that the director of Central Intelligence acknowledged what needed to be acknowledged, which was the circumstances surrounding the State of the Union speech," Fleischer continued. "The president said that line because it was based on information from the intelligence community, and the speech was vetted."

All I have to say, is please mister president, EAT SHIT AND DIE

2003-07-12T13:38:00.000-07:00

To disprove the Flying Lizards, who once sang "The best things in life are free, but you can give them to the birds and bees" one only need compare and contrast the war in Iraq which is costing a couple of thousand dollars a minute, with the virtual bubble wrap page, which can be found at:http://www.virtual-bubblewrap.com/popnow.shtml, to see which is more fun.

2003-07-12T13:22:00.000-07:00

OK so I have failed, dear readers in avoiding the war. I found this fine piece at the Weakly Standard Website:

Washington, D.C. Noting that one of the recent American casualties in Baghdad was the victim of a drive-by shooting, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld asserted that gang violence, rather than anti-American sentiment, is to blame for recent attacks on U.S. troops. “This is not a situation where you have Islamic militants or Saddam loyalists making some kind of political statement,” Rumsfeld said. He then added, “The Iraqi people view us as their liberators and, by and large, are delighted that we’re there. These attacks appear more likely to be the work of young ‘gangstas’ intent on earning their ‘colors’ by committing acts of violence.” Rumsfeld's comments came shortly after he analogized violence in Baghdad to crime in major American cities, particularly Washington, D.C. The secretary told reporters, “You got to remember that if Washington, D.C., were the size of Baghdad, we would be having something like 215 murders a month. There’s going to be violence in a big city.” That remark prompted angry reactions from District of Columbia officials, and Secretary Rumsfeld appeared to distance himself from that statement today. Rumsfeld insisted that his remarks “were in no way meant to disparage the city of Washington, where most violent crime is, after all, largely due to the presence of so many registered Democrats.” He also denied calling Washington “Baghdad on the Potomac.”

2003-07-11T07:44:00.000-07:00

If you enter weapons of mass destruction into the google search field, and then hit the "I'm feeling lucky" button you get the following message:

These Weapons of Mass Destruction cannot be displayed

The weapons you are looking for are currently unavailable. The country might be experiencing technical difficulties, or you may need to adjust your weapons inspectors mandate.

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2003-07-11T06:54:00.000-07:00

The Violence of the Global ^[1]

Jean Baudrillard

Translated byFrançois Debrix

Found at CTheory.net

Today's terrorism is not the product of a traditional history of anarchism, nihilism, or fanaticism. It is instead the contemporary partner of globalization. To identify its main features, it is necessary to perform a brief genealogy of globalization, particularly of its relationship to the singular and the universal.

The analogy between the terms "global" [2] and "universal" is misleading. Universalization has to do with human rights, liberty, culture, and democracy. By contrast, globalization is about technology, the market, tourism, and information. Globalization appears to be irreversible whereas universalization is likely to be on its way out. At least, it appears to be retreating as a value system which developed in the context of Western modernity and was unmatched by any other culture. Any culture that becomes universal loses its singularity and dies. That's what happened to all those cultures we destroyed by forcefully assimilating them. But it is also true of our own culture, despite its claim of being universally valid. The only difference is that other cultures died because of their singularity, which is a beautiful death. We are dying because we are losing our own singularity and exterminating all our values. And this is a much more ugly death.

We believe that the ideal purpose of any value is to become universal. But we do not really assess the deadly danger that such a quest presents. Far from being an uplifting move, it is instead a downward trend toward a zero degree in all values. In the Enlightenment, universalization was viewed as unlimited growth and forward progress. Today, by contrast, universalization exists by default and is expressed as a forward escape, which aims to reach the most minimally common value. This is precisely the fate of human rights, democracy, and liberty today. Their expansion is in reality their weakest expression.

Universalization is vanishing because of globalization. The globalization of exchanges puts an end to the universalization of values. This marks the triumph of a uniform thought [3] over a universal one. What is globalized is first and foremost the market, the profusion of exchanges and of all sorts of products, the perpetual flow of money. Culturally, globalization gives way to a promiscuity of signs and values, to a form of pornography in fact. Indeed, the global spread of everything and nothing through networks is pornographic. No need for sexual obscenity anymore. All you have is a global interactive copulation. And, as a result of all this, there is no longer any difference between the global and the universal. The universal has become globalized, and human rights circulate exactly like any other global product (oil or capital for example).

The passage from the universal to the global has given rise to a constant homogenization, but also to an endless fragmentation. Dislocation, not localization, has replaced centralization. Excentricism, not decentralization, has taken over where concentration once stood. Similarly, discrimination and exclusion are not just accidental consequences of globalization, but rather globalization's own logical outcomes. In fact, the presence of globalization makes us wonder whether universalization has not already been destroyed by its own critical mass. It also makes us wonder whether universality and modernity ever existed outside of some official discourses or some popular moral sentiments. For us today, the mirror of our modern universalization has been broken. But this may actually be an opportunity. In the fragments of this broken mirror, all sorts of singularities reappear. Those singularities we thought were endangered are surviving, and those we thought were lost are revived.

As universal values lose their authority and legitimacy, things become more radical. When universal beliefs were introduced as the only possible culturally mediating values, it was fairly easy for such beliefs to incorporate singularities as modes of differentiation in a universal culture that claimed to champion difference. But they cannot do it anymore because the triumphant spread of globalization has eradicated all forms of differentiation and all the universal values that used to advocate difference. In so doing, globalization has given rise to a perfectly indifferent culture. From the moment when the universal disappeared, an omnipotent global techno-structure has been left alone to dominate. But this techno-structure now has to confront new singularities that, without the presence of universalization to cradle them, are able to freely and savagely expand.

History gave universalization its chance. Today though, faced with a global order without any alternative on the one hand and with drifting insurrectionary singularities on the other, the concepts of liberty, democracy, and human rights look awful. They remain as the ghosts of universalization past. Universalization used to promote a culture characterized by the concepts of transcendence, subjectivity, conceptualization, reality, and representation. By contrast, today's virtual global culture has replaced universal concepts with screens, networks, immanence, numbers, and a space-time continuum without any depth. [4] In the universal, there was still room for a natural reference to the world, the body, or the past. There was a sort of dialectical tension or critical movement that found its materiality in historical and revolutionary violence. But the expulsion of this critical negativity opened the door to another form of violence, the violence of the global. This new violence is characterized by the supremacy of technical efficiency and positivity, total organization, integral circulation, and the equivalence of all exchanges. Additionally, the violence of the global puts an end to the social role of the intellectual (an idea tied to the Enlightenment and universalization), but also to the role of the activist whose fate used to be tied to the ideas of critical opposition and historical violence.

Is globalization fatal? Sometimes cultures other than ours were able to escape the fatality of the indifferent exchange. Today though, where is the critical point between the universal and the global? Have we reached the point of no return? What vertigo pushes the world to erase the Idea? And what is that other vertigo that, at the same time, seems to force people to unconditionally want to realize the Idea?

The universal was an Idea. But when it became realized in the global, it disappeared as an Idea, it committed suicide, and it vanished as an end in itself. Since humanity is now its own immanence, after taking over the place left by a dead God, the human has become the only mode of reference and it is sovereign. But this humanity no longer has any finality. Free from its former enemies, humanity now has to create enemies from within, which in fact produces a wide variety of inhuman metastases.

This is precisely where the violence of the global comes from. It is the product of a system that tracks down any form of negativity and singularity, including of course death as the ultimate form of singularity. It is the violence of a society where conflict is forbidden, where death is not allowed. It is a violence that, in a sense, puts an end to violence itself, and strives to establish a world where anything related to the natural must disappear (whether it is in the body, sex, birth, or death). Better than a global violence, we should call it a global virulence. This form of violence is indeed viral. It moves by contagion, proceeds by chain reaction, and little by little it destroys our immune systems and our capacities to resist.

But the game is not over yet. Globalization has not completely won. Against such a dissolving and homogenizing power, heterogeneous forces -- not just different but clearly antagonistic ones -- are rising everywhere. Behind the increasingly strong reactions to globalization, and the social and political forms of resistance to the global, we find more than simply nostalgic expressions of negation. We find instead a crushing revisionism vis-à-vis modernity and progress, a rejection not only of the global techno-structure, but also of the mental system of globalization, which assumes a principle of equivalence between all cultures. This kind of reaction can take some violent, abnormal, and irrational aspects, at least they can be perceived as violent, abnormal, and irrational from the perspective of our traditional enlightened ways of thinking. This reaction can take collective ethnic, religious, and linguistic forms. But it can also take the form of individual emotional outbursts or neuroses even. In any case, it would be a mistake to berate those reactions as simply populist, archaic, or even terrorist. Everything that has the quality of event these days is engaged against the abstract universality of the global, [5] and this also includes Islam's own opposition to Western values (it is because Islam is the most forceful contestation of those values that it is today considered to be the West's number one enemy).

Who can defeat the global system? Certainly not the anti-globalization movement whose sole objective is to slow down global deregulation. This movement's political impact may well be important. But its symbolic impact is worthless. This movement's opposition is nothing more than an internal matter that the dominant system can easily keep under control. Positive alternatives cannot defeat the dominant system, but singularities that are neither positive nor negative can. Singularities are not alternatives. They represent a different symbolic order. They do not abide by value judgments or political realities. They can be the best or the worst. They cannot be "regularized" by means of a collective historical action. [6] They defeat any uniquely dominant thought. Yet they do not present themselves as a unique counter-thought. Simply, they create their own game and impose their own rules. Not all singularities are violent. Some linguistic, artistic, corporeal, or cultural singularities are quite subtle. But others, like terrorism, can be violent. The singularity of terrorism avenges the singularities of those cultures that paid the price of the imposition of a unique global power with their own extinction.

We are really not talking about a "clash of civilizations" here, but instead about an almost anthropological confrontation between an undifferentiated universal culture and everything else that, in whatever domain, retains a quality of irreducible alterity. From the perspective of global power (as fundamentalist in its beliefs as any religious orthodoxy), any mode of difference and singularity is heresy. Singular forces only have the choice of joining the global system (by will or by force) or perishing. The mission of the West (or rather the former West, since it lost its own values a long time ago) is to use all available means to subjugate every culture to the brutal principle of cultural equivalence. Once a culture has lost its values, it can only seek revenge by attacking those of others. Beyond their political or economic objectives, wars such as the one in Afghanistan [7] aim at normalizing savagery and aligning all the territories. The goal is to get rid of any reactive zone, and to colonize and domesticate any wild and resisting territory both geographically and mentally.

The establishment of a global system is the result of an intense jealousy. It is the jealousy of an indifferent and low-definition culture against cultures with higher definition, of a disenchanted and de-intensified system against high intensity cultural environments, and of a de-sacralized society against sacrificial forms. According to this dominant system, any reactionary form is virtually terrorist. (According to this logic we could even say that natural catastrophes are forms of terrorism too. Major technological accidents, like Chernobyl, are both a terrorist act and a natural disaster. The toxic gas leak in Bhopal, India, another technological accident, could also have been a terrorist act. Any plane crash could be claimed by any terrorist group too. The dominant characteristic of irrational events is that they can be imputed to anybody or given any motivation. To some extent, anything we can think of can be criminal, even a cold front or an earthquake. This is not new. In the 1923 Tokyo earthquake, thousands of Koreans were killed because they were thought to be responsible for the disaster. In an intensely integrated system like ours, everything can have a similar effect of destabilization. Everything drives toward the failure of a system that claims to be infallible. From our point of view, caught as we are inside the rational and programmatic controls of this system, we could even think that the worst catastrophe is actually the infallibility of the system itself.) Look at Afghanistan. The fact that, inside this country alone, all recognized forms of "democratic" freedoms and expressions -- from music and television to the ability to see a woman's face -- were forbidden, and the possibility that such a country could take the totally opposite path of what we call civilization (no matter what religious principles it invoked), were not acceptable for the "free" world. The universal dimension of modernity cannot be refused. From the perspective of the West, of its consensual model, and of its unique way of thinking, it is a crime not to perceive modernity as the obvious source of the Good or as the natural ideal of humankind. It is also a crime when the universality of our values and our practices are found suspect by some individuals who, when they reveal their doubts, are immediately pegged as fanatics.

Only an analysis that emphasizes the logic of symbolic obligation can make sense of this confrontation between the global and the singular. To understand the hatred of the rest of the world against the West, perspectives must be reversed. The hatred of non-Western people is not based on the fact that the West stole everything from them and never gave anything back. Rather, it is based on the fact that they received everything, but were never allowed to give anything back. This hatred is not caused by dispossession or exploitation, but rather by humiliation. And this is precisely the kind of hatred that explains the September 11 terrorist attacks. These were acts of humiliation responding to another humiliation.

The worst that can happen to global power is not to be attacked or destroyed, but to suffer a humiliation. Global power was humiliated on September 11 because the terrorists inflicted something the global system cannot give back. Military reprisals were only means of physical response. But, on September 11, global power was symbolically defeated. War is a response to an aggression, but not to a symbolic challenge. A symbolic challenge is accepted and removed when the other is humiliated in return (but this cannot work when the other is crushed by bombs or locked behind bars in Guantanamo). The fundamental rule of symbolic obligation stipulates that the basis of any form of domination is the total absence of any counterpart, of any return. [8] The unilateral gift is an act of power. And the Empire of the Good, the violence of the Good, is precisely to be able to give without any possible return. This is what it means to be in God's position. Or to be in the position of the Master who allows the slave to live in exchange for work (but work is not a symbolic counterpart, and the slave's only response is eventually to either rebel or die). God used to allow some space for sacrifice. In the traditional order, it was always possible to give back to God, or to nature, or to any superior entity by means of sacrifice. That's what ensured a symbolic equilibrium between beings and things. But today we no longer have anybody to give back to, to return the symbolic debt to. This is the curse of our culture. It is not that the gift is impossible, but rather that the counter-gift is. All sacrificial forms have been neutralized and removed (what's left instead is a parody of sacrifice, which is visible in all the contemporary instances of victimization).

We are thus in the irremediable situation of having to receive, always to receive, no longer from God or nature, but by means of a technological mechanism of generalized exchange and common gratification. Everything is virtually given to us, and, like it or not, we have gained a right to everything. We are similar to the slave whose life has been spared but who nonetheless is bound by a non-repayable debt. This situation can last for a while because it is the very basis of exchange in this economic order. Still, there always comes a time when the fundamental rule resurfaces and a negative return inevitably responds to the positive transfer, when a violent abreaction to such a captive life, such a protected existence, and such a saturation of being takes place. This reversion can take the shape of an open act of violence (such as terrorism), but also of an impotent surrender (that is more characteristic of our modernity), of a self-hatred, and of remorse, in other words, of all those negative passions that are degraded forms of the impossible counter-gift.

What we hate in ourselves -- the obscure object of our resentment -- is our excess of reality, power, and comfort, our universal availability, our definite accomplishment, this kind of destiny that Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor had in store for the domesticated masses. And this is exactly the part of our culture that the terrorists find repulsive (which also explains the support they receive and the fascination they are able to exert). Terrorism's support is not only based on the despair of those who have been humiliated and offended. It is also based on the invisible despair of those whom globalization has privileged, on our own submission to an omnipotent technology, to a crushing virtual reality, to an empire of networks and programs that are probably in the process of redrawing the regressive contours of the entire human species, of a humanity that has gone "global." (After all, isn't the supremacy of the human species over the rest of life on earth the mirror image of the domination of the West over the rest of the world?). This invisible despair, our invisible despair, is hopeless since it is the result of the realization of all our desires.

Thus, if terrorism is derived from this excess of reality and from this reality's impossible exchange, if it is the product of a profusion without any possible counterpart or return, and if it emerges from a forced resolution of conflicts, the illusion of getting rid of it as if it were an objective evil is complete. [9] For, in its absurdity and non-sense, terrorism is our society's own judgment and penalty.

Notes

---------------

[1] Initially published as "La Violence du Mondial," in Jean Baudrillard, Power Inferno (Paris: Galilée, 2002), pp. 63-83.

[2] "Mondial" is the French term for "global" in the original text.

[3] "Pensée unique" in French.

[4] "Espace-temps sans dimension" in French.

[5] "Contre cette universalité abstraite" in French.

[6] "On ne peut pas les fédérer dans une action historique d'ensemble" in French.

[7] Baudrillard refers here to the US war against Afghanistan in the Fall of 2001 in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.

[8] "L'absence de contrepartie" in French.

[9] Emphasis in original text.

2003-07-10T05:46:00.000-07:00

Ken Knabb has posted a new translation of Debord's Society of the Spectacle, it can be found at http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/index.htm

It is copyright free and can be distributed without attribution.

2003-07-10T05:28:00.000-07:00

I had thought I could escape the war, but it throbs in the background like an obscene soundtrack and George Bush struts around like some chicken shit version of Travis Bickle, so to make myself feel better I thought I would post the followin

To date the war has cost just under 68 billion dollars

Here are the latest casualty figures (according to CNN):

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- For the first time since the start of the war in Iraq, Pentagon officials have released the number of U.S. troops wounded from the beginning of the war through Wednesday.
Responding to a request by CNN, the Pentagon said more than 1,000 U.S. troops have been wounded or injured in Iraq since March 20, when a U.S.-led airstrike started the war.
The Defense Department provided these figures:
• 791 troops were wounded or injured during combat
• 253 troops were wounded or injured in action not related to combat operations, such as traffic accidents or accidental gunshot wounds
The Pentagon not disclose the type of wounds or injuries sustained. But the numbers shed more light on the overall toll the fighting has taken on U.S. troops during the war and subsequent occupation of the country.
Wednesday, a U.S. military base in the central Iraqi town of Fallujah came under attack as a rocket-propelled grenade hit its perimeter, military sources said. There were no reports of injuries.
From the time President Bush announced the end of major combat operations May 1, U.S. troops have been enduring sneak attacks on almost a daily basis around the country, resulting in deaths or injuries.
According to Pentagon numbers, between May 1 and Tuesday, 73 U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq.
• 29 by hostile fire around Iraq
• 44 troops from non-hostile fire or in accidents
Since the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 211 U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq.
• 143 troops by hostile fire
• 68 troops by accidents or other non-hostile incidents
As for the dollar cost of the Iraqi war and occupation, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told a Senate committee Wednesday that it is projected to cost the Pentagon an average of nearly $4 billion a month through September.

----------------------------------------------

2003-07-09T21:43:00.000-07:00

I hate Andrew Sullivan, he is a washed up self-rigteous old hack whose main goal in life now seems to be (pardon my crudity) blow Arnold Schwarzenegger. To illustrate what I mean I just found this on his blog:

The political emergence of Schwarzenegger is a wonderful development.... Arnold is an "eagle": he's tough on terror, open-minded on cultural issues, fiscally conservative. He's also a brilliant politician. How do I know? Just rent "Pumping Iron," the legendary bodybuilding documentary of the 1970s. It captures Shwarzenegger's extraordinary ease with people, his irony, his composure, his wit, his gift with strategy and his determination. If I'm not mistaken, it also shows him lighting up a big fat joint after one of the contests. If ever there was a moment for that type of Republican, this is it. Boomshock fills in the details. Arnold's my man.

I rest my case

2003-07-09T21:33:00.000-07:00

While I am in the mood to post shit, and incase anyone cares, Runtime Revolution have not only released versions 2 and 2.0.1 of their remarkable software, but the company has bought the metacard engine on which it was built. For information about, and a free (script limited) version of, this wonerful product go to their website at http://www.runrev.com

2003-07-09T21:23:00.000-07:00

The Beano is on line, yeehaw. For those of you who do not know what the Beano is, go to http://www.beanotown.com/index2.htm and en joy yourselves. For everybody else, especially former and current member of the Dennis the Menace and Gnasher fan club, i need not say more

2003-07-09T21:19:00.000-07:00

Having gotten wiped out by the war and trying to keep my head above water, I have decided that and inspite of the fact nobody reads my blog to start updating it again and focus on shit other than the war in Iraq, even though I am thinking of starting a running tally of rumored and real deaths and injuries among U$ forces. Instead, like all other bloggers, I will focus on ME, my likes, dislikes, pet peeves and other bull shit so hear we go with the new and improved Rake.

2003-04-16T06:17:00.000-07:00

This may be a little out of date (seeing as it was written in the aftermath of the first Gulf War,) but it is still relevant and deserves to be distributed as widely as possible:

The War and the Spectacle

The orchestration of the Gulf war was a glaring expression of what the situationists call the spectacle — the development of modern society to the point where images dominate life. The PR campaign was as important as the military one. How this or that tactic would play in the media became a major strategical consideration. It didn’t matter much whether the bombing was actually “surgical” as long as the coverage was; if the victims didn’t appear it was as if they didn’t exist. The “Nintendo effect” worked so well that the euphoric generals had to caution
against too much public euphoria for fear that it might backfire. Interviews with soldiers in the desert revealed that they, like everyone else, depended almost totally on the media to tell them what was supposedly happening. The domination of image over reality was sensed by everyone. A large portion of the coverage consisted of coverage of the coverage. The spectacle itself presented superficial debates on the new level of instant global spectacularization and its effects on the spectator.

Nineteenth-century capitalism alienated people from themselves and from each other by alienating them from the products of their own activity. This alienation has been intensified as those products have increasingly become “productions” that we passively contemplate. The power of the mass media is only the most obvious manifestation of this development; in the larger sense the spectacle is everything from arts to politicians that have become autonomous representations of life. “The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation among people, mediated by images” (Debord, The Society of the Spectacle).

Along with arms profits, oil control, international power struggles and other factors which have been so widely discussed as to need no comment here, the war involved contradictions between the two basic forms of spectacle society. In the diffuse spectacle people are lost amid the variety of competing spectacles, commodities, styles and ideologies that are presented for their consumption. The diffuse spectacle arises within societies of pseudoabundance (America is the prototype and still the unchallenged world leader of spectacle production, despite its decline in other regards); but it is also broadcast to less developed regions — being one of the main means by which the latter are dominated. Saddam’s regime is an example of the rival concentrated spectacle, in which people are conditioned to identify with the omnipresent image of the totalitarian leader as compensation for being deprived of virtually everything else. This image concentration is normally associated with a corresponding concentration of economic power, state capitalism, in which the state itself has become the sole, all-owning capitalist enterprise (classic examples are Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China); but it may also be imported into Third World mixed economies (such as Saddam’s Iraq) or even, in times of crisis, into highly developed economies (such as Hitler’s Germany). But for the most part the concentrated spectacle is a crude stopgap for regions as yet incapable of sustaining the variety of illusions of the diffuse spectacle, and in the long run it tends to succumb to the latter, more flexible form (as recently in eastern Europe and the USSR). At the same time, the diffuse form is tending to incorporate certain features of the concentrated one.

The Gulf war reflected this convergence. The closed world of Saddam’s concentrated spectacle dissipated under the global floodlights of the diffuse spectacle; while the latter used the war as a pretext and a testing ground for implementing typically “concentrated” methods of control — censorship, orchestration of patriotism, suppression of dissent. But the mass media are so monopolized, so pervasive and (despite token grumbling) so subservient to establishment policies that overtly repressive methods were hardly needed. The spectators, under the impression that they were expressing their own considered views, parroted the catch phrases and debated the pseudoissues that the media had instilled in them day after day, and as in any other spectator sport loyally “supported” the home team in the desert by rooting for it.

This media control was reinforced by the spectators’ own internalized conditioning. Socially and psychologically repressed, people are drawn to spectacles of violent conflict that allow their accumulated frustrations to explode in socially condoned orgasms of collective pride and hate. Deprived of significant accomplishments in their own work and leisure, they participate vicariously in military enterprises that have real and undeniable effects. Lacking genuine community, they thrill to the sense of sharing in a common purpose, if only that of fighting some common enemy, and react angrily against anyone who contradicts the image of patriotic unanimity. The individual’s life may be a farce, the society may be falling apart, but all complexities and uncertainties are temporarily forgotten in the self-assurance that comes from identifying with the state.

War is the truest expression of the state, and its most powerful reinforcement. Just as capitalism must create artificial needs for its increasingly superfluous commodities, the state must continually create artificial conflicts of interest requiring its violent intervention. The fact that the state incidentally provides a few “social services” merely camouflages its fundamental nature as a protection racket. When two states go to war the net result is as if each state had made war on its own people — who are then taxed to pay for it. The Gulf war was a particularly gross example: Several states eagerly sold billions of dollars’ worth of arms to another state, then massacred hundreds of thousands of conscripts and civilians in the name of neutralizing its dangerously large arsenal. The multinational corporations that own those states now stand to make still more billions of dollars restocking armaments and rebuilding the countries they have ravaged.

Whatever happens in the Middle East in the complex aftermath of the war, one thing is certain: The first aim of all the states and would-be states, overriding all their conflicting interests, will be to crush or coopt any truly radical popular movement. On this issue Bush and Saddam, Mubarak and Rafsanjani, Shamir and Arafat are all partners. The American government, which piously insisted that its war was “not against the Iraqi people but only against their brutal dictator,” has now given Saddam another “green light”: to slaughter and torture the Iraqis who have courageously risen against him. American officials openly admit that they prefer continued police-military rule in Iraq (with or without Saddam) to any form of democratic self-rule that might “destabilize” the region — i.e., that might give neighboring peoples the inspiration for similar revolts against their own rulers.

In America the “success” of the war has diverted attention from the acute social problems that the system is incapable of solving, reinforcing the power of the militarist establishment and the complacency of the patriotic spectators. While the latter are busy watching war reruns and exulting at victory parades, the most interesting question is what will happen with the people who saw through the show.

The most significant thing about the movement against the Gulf war was its unexpected spontaneity and diversity. In the space of a few days hundreds of thousands of people all over the country, the majority of whom had never even been at a demonstration before, initiated or took part in vigils, blockades, teach-ins and a wide variety of other actions. By February the coalitions that had called the huge January marches — some factions of which would normally have tended to work for “mass unity” under their own bureaucratic guidance — recognized that the movement was far beyond any possibility of centralization or control, and agreed to leave the main impetus to local grassroots initiative. Most of the participants had already been treating the big marches simply as gathering points while remaining more or less indifferent to the coalitions officially in charge (often not even bothering to stay around to listen to the usual ranting speeches). The real interaction was not between stage and audience, but among the individuals carrying their own homemade signs, handing out their own leaflets, playing their music, doing their street theater, discussing their ideas with friends and strangers, discovering a sense of community in the face of the insanity.

It will be a sad waste of spirit if these persons become ciphers, if they allow themselves to be channeled into quantitative, lowest-common-denominator political projects — tediously drumming up votes to elect “radical” politicians who will invariably sell them out, collecting signatures in support of “progressive” laws that will usually have little effect even if passed, recruiting “bodies” for demonstrations whose numbers will in any case be underreported or ignored by the media. If they want to contest the hierarchical system they must reject hierarchy in their own methods and relations. If they want to break through the spectacle-induced stupor, they must use their own imaginations. If they want to incite others, they themselves must experiment.

Those who saw through the war became aware, if they weren’t already, of how much the media falsify reality. Personal participation made this awareness more vivid. To take part in a peace march of a hundred thousand people and then see it given equal-time coverage with a prowar demonstration of a few dozen is an illuminating experience — it brings home the bizarre unreality of the spectacle, as well as calling into question the relevance of tactics based on communicating radical viewpoints by way of the mass media. Even while the war was still going on the protesters saw that they had to confront these questions, and in countless discussions and symposiums on “the war and the media” they examined not only the blatant lies and overt blackouts, but the more subtle methods of media distortion — use of emotionally loaded images; isolation of events from their historical context; limitation of debate to “responsible” options; framing of dissident viewpoints in ways that trivialize them; personification of complex realities (Saddam = Iraq); objectification of persons (“collateral damage”); etc. These examinations are continuing and are giving rise to a veritable industry of articles, lectures and books analyzing every aspect of media falsification.

The most naïve see the falsifications as mere mistakes or biases that might be corrected if enough members of the audience call in and complain, or otherwise pressure the mass media into presenting a somewhat wider range of viewpoints. At its most radical this perspective is expressed in the limited but suggestive tactic of picketing particular media.

Others, aware that the mass media are owned by the same interests that own the state and the economy and will thus inevitably represent those interests, concentrate on disseminating suppressed information through various alternative media. But the glut of sensational information constantly broadcast in the spectacle is so deadening that the revelation of one more lie or scandal or atrocity seldom leads to anything but increased depression and cynicism.

Others try to break through this apathy by adopting the manipulative methods of propaganda and advertising. An antiwar film, for example, is generally assumed to have a “powerful” effect if it presents a barrage of the horrors of war. The actual subliminal effect of such a barrage is, if anything, prowar — getting caught up in an irresistible onslaught of chaos and violence (as long as it remains comfortably vicarious) is precisely what is exciting about war to jaded spectators. Overwhelming people with a rapid succession of emotion-rousing images only confirms them in their habitual sense of helplessness in the face of a world beyond their control. Spectators with thirty-second attention spans may be shocked into a momentary antiwar revulsion by pictures of napalmed babies, but they may just as easily be whipped into a fascistic fury the next day by different images — of flag burners, say.

Regardless of their ostensibly radical messages, alternative media have generally reproduced the dominant spectacle-spectator relation. The point is to undermine it — to challenge the conditioning that makes people susceptible to media manipulation in the first place. Which ultimately means challenging the social organization that produces that conditioning, that turns people into spectators of prefabricated adventures because they are prevented from creating their own.

BUREAU OF PUBLIC SECRETS

3 April 1991

Reprinted from Public
Secrets: Collected Skirmishes of Ken Knabb.

No copyright.

[French
translation of this text]

[Spanish
translation of this text]

[Russian
translation of this text]

The Rake # 14 - IRaq, IRan, IRolll

The Violence of the Global [1]

Jean Baudrillard

The War and the Spectacle

The Violence of the Global ^[1]