[Peace-discuss] News notes 041017

Thu Oct 21 11:43:30 CDT 2004

        Notes from last week's "global war on terrorism" [GWOT],
        for the AWARE meeting, Sunday, October 17, 2004.
        (Sources provided on request.)

[1] Begin with three stories from weekly mags:
	[a] The Nation (yes, The Nation) publishes Naomi Klein's damning
expose of how two former Secretaries of State, one Republican and one
Democrat, planned to profit thru the Carlyle Group by manipulating Iraqi
debt.  See also her article â"Reparations in Reverse" on her web site.
	[b] The NYTBR publishes a sneakily hostile review of Seymour
Hersh's new book, Chain of Command:  In a secret order dated Feb. 7, 2002,
President Bush declared, as Hersh puts it, that ''when it came to Al Qaeda
the Geneva Conventions were applicable only at his discretion.'' Based on
memorandums from the Defense and Justice Departments and the White House
legal office that, in Anthony Lewis's apt words, ''read like the advice of
a mob lawyer to a mafia don on how to . . . stay out of prison,'' Bush
unilaterally withdrew the war on terror from the international legal
regime that sets the standards for treatment and interrogation of
prisoners. Abu Ghraib was not the work of a few bad apples, but the direct
consequence, Hersh says, of ''the reliance of George Bush and Donald
Rumsfeld on secret operations and the use of coercion -- and
eye-for-an-eye retribution -- in fighting terrorism.''
	''There is so much about this presidency that we don't know, and
may never learn,'' he writes. ''How did they do it? How did eight or nine
neoconservatives who believed that war in Iraq was the answer to
international terrorism get their way? How did they redirect the
government and rearrange longstanding American priorities and policies
with so much ease? How did they overcome the bureaucracy, intimidate the
press, mislead the Congress and dominate the military? Is our democracy
that fragile?''
	[c] That graveyard of good prose, the NYT Mag publishes Ron
Suskind's piece on "the president's unique form of faith-based,
rock-solid, doubt-free governing. Suskind talks to many insiders who
reveal troubling signs of a leader who does not question, analyze, or
waver from gut instinct."
	E.g., a senior aide (unnamed): "We're an empire now, and when we
act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that realityâ--
judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities,
which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're
history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what
we do."

[2] Bombings, two Army helicopter crashes and a possible rocket strike on
a hospital -- all in Baghdad -- killed two American soldiers, one Iraqi,
and injured others Saturday. Also, U.S. forces continued to drop bombs on
Fallujah for hours on end. In Ramadi, they attacked a mosque.

[3] Many detainees at Guantanamo Bay were regularly subjected to harsh and
coercive treatment, reports the NYT.  None of the detainees have been
given a chance to appear in a courtroom despite the Supreme Court's ruling
three months ago that declared the jailed men have the right to challenge
their imprisonment in U.S. courts ... the government has broken a
court-ordered Sept. 30 deadline to justify why they are detaining each
man.
	A just-completed army criminal investigation has implicated 28
active-duty and reserve personnel in the homicides of two Afghan men
detained at the U.S. airbase at Bagram, Afghanistan.

[4] Polls this week tend to show Bush ahead by about 4%. A state by state
summary shows Kerry 238, Bush 247 (with 270 needed to win).  Florida and
Iowa are too close to call.

[5] The U.S.-led war in Iraq hasn't made the world any safer, U.N.
Secretary General Kofi Annan said in a British TV interview aired Sunday.
Tony Blair has warned that British troops in Iraq could face a dangerous
backlash if US attempts to seize the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah
ended in mass bloodshed.

[6] "The NYT buries a story (plucked from the AP wire) about independent
examiners locating more documents -- 31 pages in all -- of previously
unreleased National Guard records about President Bush. This comes weeks
after Texas National Guard officials signed an oath promising they had
turned all of Bush's records over (Defense Department officials have also
repeatedly sworn that all Bush-related docs have been handed over)."
[SLATE]

[7] About half of the roughly $5 billion in Iraq reconstruction funds
disbursed by the US government in the first half of this year cannot be
accounted for, according to an audit commissioned by the United Nations.
On October 21, Iraq will pay $200m in war reparations to some of the
richest countries and corporations in the world.

[8] Israel is guilty of severe human rights violations in the West Bank
and Gaza Strip, including "wanton destruction" of houses and
infrastructure, according to a United Nations report obtained by The
Associated Press.

[9] The Independent (UK) reports that Britain has withdrawn its ambassador
to Uzbekistan after the diplomat wrote a "furious memo" in which he
denounced the use of information passed on to MI6 by the CIA but
"originally obtained in Uzbek torture cells." [CURSOR]

[10] An entire 17-member Army Reserve platoon is reportedly under arrest
in Iraq for refusing orders to undertake what the soldiers called a
"suicide mission." The story come from relatives fo the soldiers,
contacted by cell-phone, in the Jackson (MI) Clarion-Ledger.

[11] a group of soldiers who recently returned from Iraq have taken the
unusual step of producing a TV advertisement criticizing the war. The
group is known as Operation Truth. The ad features Robert Acosta who lost
his arm in the war.
	A coalition of over 650 foreign affairs specialists calling
themselves "Security Scholars for a Sensible Foreign Policy," have signed
an open letter opposing President Bush and are accusing of him of having
the most misguided foreign policy since the Vietnam War era. The letter
charges that American actions in Iraq have made Osama Bin Laden more
popular in some countries than President Bush.  The signatories include
former staff members at the Pentagon, the State Department and the
National Security Council, as well as six of the last seven Presidents of
the American Political Science Association.

[12] Haaretz is reporting today that the CIA is running a top-secret
interrogation facility in Jordan where it is detaining at least 11 of Al
Qaida's top leaders including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (and his children, as
hostages to get him to talk). The news comes a day after Human Rights
Watch issued a report criticizing the top-secret detentions center and the
US torture policy.

[13] The Senate Monday approved a $137 billion corporate tax cut marking
the biggest restructuring of the corporate tax code in two decades

[14] Three Oregon school teachers were threatened with arrest and thrown
out of the Bush's rally in Portland Thursday night, after they showed up
wearing T-shirts with the slogan "Protect our civil liberties." ... When
Cheney visited Eugene last month, the Register-Guard newspaper reported
that Perry Patterson, 54, was cited for criminal trespassing for blurting
out the word "No" after Cheney claimed that the Bush administration had
made the world safer. In a separate and unrelated case Thursday, two
protesters were arrested in nearby Jacksonville, outside the historic inn
where President Bush was spending the night ... City officials said police
fired projectiles known as "pepper balls" -- similar to paint balls, but
filled with cayenne pepper to break up the demonstrators. [KGW-TV Portland
OR 10/15]

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