[Peace-discuss] News notes 041031

Sun Oct 31 20:47:31 CST 2004

        Notes from last week's "global war on terrorism" [GWOT],
        for the AWARE meeting, Sunday, October 31, 2004.
        (Sources provided on request; a paragraph followed by a
	bracketed source is substantially verbatim.)

[1 FALLUJAH ATTACK] The killing in Iraq is worse than we're being told.
Eight US marines were killed [and nine wounded] on Saturday in the
bloodiest attack on American forces in Iraq in the better par of a year,
as the US prepared for a major assault to capture Ramadi and Fallujah.  A
full-scale offensive could be as devastating as the attack by US marines
in April that Washington called off after a world outcry over civilian
casualties; local doctors reported then more than 600 dead in the
fighting. Seven people, including women and children, were killed and 11
wounded in clashes between US forces and insurgents in Ramadi; U.S.
artillery shelled eastern districts of Ramadi; and there were air strikes
on the two cities Saturday and Sunday.
	John Pilger finds a "surreal quality" in a campaign about a war
where "the degree of censorship by omission is staggering," of which "the
coming atrocity in the city of Fallujah ... is a case in point." The
international journalist group Reporters Without Borders has issued its
annual report on press freedom. The U.S. now ranks 22nd in press freedom
among the world's countries. [DN]

[2 IRAQ COSTS] A peer-reviewed study in the British medical journal Lancet
estimates that 100,000 Iraqis have died, either directly or indirectly,
because of the invasion. Most of the deaths were attributed to U.S.
airstrikes. The study is based on a sample survey of about a thousand
households, with researchers writing that "most individuals reportedly
killed by coalition forces were women and children." The study uses a
conservative methodology and only counts deaths above the dreadful
sanctions period before the war.
	The Washington Post reported Tuesday that the White House plans to
ask for some $70 billion more in Iraq spending just a week or two after
the election; USA Today reported that the Pentagon is planning to add
roughly 20,000 more troops to the force in Iraq.

[3. WAR POLICY] A court martial hearing in Britain has revealed that the
Pentagon sent the British army secret plans for war in Iraq five months
before the invasion was launched. Meanwhile, NBC News is reporting
President Bush passed up three opportunities in 2002 to bomb a training
camp run by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi because Bush feared it would undermine
his administration's case for war against Saddam Hussein. At the time the
Jordanian-born Zarqawi was operating in northern Iraq in an area not
controlled by Saddam Hussein. [DN]

[4. TORTURE POLICY] Theo van Boven, the United Nations official charged
with monitoring incidents of torture, has sharply criticized the Bush
administration and its so-called war on terrorism in a new report.
	According to another new report, this one by Amnesty
International, the "war mentality" in the US government led to torture and
abuses of human rights -- "due to a failure of human rights leadership at
the highest levels of government."  In an interview with the Boston
Phoenix, Seymour Hersh calls the management of the Abu Ghraib story "one
of the great successes of the Bush administration" and warns that if Bush
is re-elected "there'll be a sense" among Europeans that "that they have
to mobilize against America. They've had it with Bush, big time."

[5. CIVIL RIGHTS] The LA Times is reporting that Bush administration
lawyers are now attempting to overturn decades of legal precedence by
claiming that only Attorney General John Ashcroft and not individual
voters have a right to ask federal courts to enforce voting rights. In
legal briefs filed in Ohio, Michigan and Florida, the Bush administration
is arguing that the new Help America Vote Act stipulates that only the
Justice Department, and not voters themselves, may sue to enforce the
voting rights. [DN] Meanwhile, The Internal Revenue Service has launched
an investigation to determine whether the non-profit NAACP improperly
"intervened in a political campaign" when its Chairman Julian Bond gave a
major speech condemning the Bush administration's policies. [DN]

[6. US WMD] The Pentagon claims it will have a limited missile defense
system in place by year's end.  "Missile defense" is of course Orwellian
language: this is a first-strike weapon, designed to make offensive use of
American nuclear missiles possible by preventing any retaliation.
	Meanwhile, Journalist Frank Sietzen, who recently represented the
Bush camp in a policy debate, told a gathering in Washington, "the
administration is reviewing whether or not we want to be signatory" to the
1967 United Nations Treaty on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. A State
Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity said the
government no longer agrees with the treaty's provisions against placing
weapons of mass destruction in orbit and using celestial bodies such as
the moon and Mars for non-peaceful purposes. [DN]

[7. ELECTION STANDARDS] There's an important presidential election --
Sunday, October 31, in Ukraine, a country between Russia and the eastern
flank of NATO.  The two contesting parties are both led by quondam prime
ministers, one favoring Russia, the other the US.  The AP reports that US
officials have said Ukraine could face punitive measures if the vote
"fails to meet international standards."  Both parties favor withdrawing
Ukrainian troops from Iraq.
	Former US president Carter says that this week's election in
Florida will not meet international standards, but the US is not
threatening punitive measures there.

[8. CUBA EMBARGO] The U.N. General Assembly voted overwhelmingly on
Thursday against the four-decade-old American economic, financial and
commercial embargo against Cuba. The vote, conducted for the 13th
consecutive year, was a lopsided 179 to 4 with one abstention. The United
States, Israel, Palau and the Marshall Islands voted "no" and Micronesia
abstained.  Members of the European Union, along with such U.S. allies as
Japan, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, voted for the resolution. They
again objected to the "extra-territorial" effects of U.S. legislation that
punishes non-U.S. firms for commercial dealings with Cuba. [REUTERS]

[9. OSAMA'S TAPE] Osama Bin Laden said in a video tape aired late Friday
that one of the reasons his organization carried out the September 11
attacks was because of Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon. He also said
that the United States could face renewed attacks because the reasons for
mounting the Sept. 11 strikes still existed. The video tape was aired on
the Qatari-based Al Jazeera satellite television channel. In his clearest
comments yet taking responsibility for the attacks three years ago, he
said, "Despite entering the fourth year after Sept. 11, Bush is still
deceiving you and hiding the truth from you and therefore the reasons are
still there to repeat what happened." He said he thought of the idea of
attacking the U.S. skyscrapers when he saw Israeli aircraft bombing tower
blocks in Lebanon in 1982. "While I was looking at those destroyed towers
in Lebanon, it sparked in my mind that the tyrant should be punished with
the same and that we should destroy towers in America, so that it tastes
what we taste and would be deterred from killing our children and women"  
... The U.S. State Department asked the government of Qatar to discourage
Al-Jazeera from broadcasting a videotaped speech by Bin Laden ... the
State Department spoke to officials in Qatar on Friday before Al-Jazeera
showed a portion of the tape. In it, the al-Qaida leader said the United
States can avoid another attack if it stops threatening the security of
Muslims. [HAARETZ]

[10. ELECTION AMBIGUITY] It's unlikely that Tuesday's presidential
election in the US -- which may turn our to be a Kerry landslide -- will
change US war policy very much.
	A Wall Street Journal article on Tuesday suggested that big
business is bailing on Bush.  And Bush beats out Doctor Octopus and
Leatherface to win "Movie Villain of the Year" for his performance in
"Fahrenheit 9/11," with one voter saying, "He was absolutely terrifying in
that film."
	Bush said this week, "For a political candidate to jump to
conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as your
commander-in-chief"; blogger Whatever It Is I'm Against It wrote, "Oh
lord, it's just too easy; the man has no self-awareness at all."
	Seymour Hersh: "If Bush wins re-election, he will bomb and bomb
and bomb. He's been doing that steadily every since the Allawi government
was put in place by us. Since June 28, the bombing has gone up
exponentially ... But I don't see anyone in the press worrying about it. I
don't see them demanding to know how many sorties we're flying ... The
Europeans so far give us a pass on the grounds that, well, you've got
these crazy leaders and they do crazy things. But if we re-elect them,
then it's not just the president they're mad at. They're going to be mad
at all of us."

[11 ISRAELI OPPRESSION] In Gaza, Israeli forces have ended a 30-hour
attack on the Khan Younis refugee camp that left as many as 17
Palestinians dead and more than 90 injured. An estimated 30 houses were
demolished leaving 200 families homeless. A new report by the United
Nations has found that 22 percent of Palestinian children in the West Bank
and Gaza are malnourished. The report was written by a Swiss sociologist
named Jean Ziegler who works for the UN as an expert on starvation.

[12. HALLIBURTON INVESTIGATION] The FBI has launched a criminal
investigation into whether the Pentagon improperly awarded Halliburton
no-bid contracts worth billions of dollars. The FBI has sought permission
to interview Bunnatin Greenhouse, the chief contracting officer of the
Army Corps of Engineers who has publicly questioned if Halliburton had
unfairly been awarded the contracts. [DN]

[13. MISSING EXPLOSIVES] A front page Post piece says the focus on the
actually not so special explosives at al Qaqaa is misleading and misses
the larger issue. "There is something truly absurd about focusing on 377
tons of rather ordinary explosives, regardless of what actually happened
at al Qaqaa," said one analyst. "The munitions at al Qaqaa were at most
around 0.06 percent of the total"â-- roughly 700,000 tons of munitions --
only about half of which has been accounted for. One "senior military
officer" told Knight Ridder that during the invasion there were plenty
reports of ammo dumps being looted: "We weren't able to respond because we
didn't have anyone to send." A Knight Ridder report on the weapon of
choice for Iraq's insurgents -- homemade bombs, or "improvised explosive
devices" -- quotes an Iraqi police official as saying that "the terrorists
took all the explosives they would ever need" when the coalition failed to
guard ammunitions depots. David Morris calls the missing 380 tons "only
the tip of the iceberg." [SLATE]

[14. MISSING EXPLOSIVES, II] The LAT and NYT front a video that puts seems
to put a stake in the administration's suggestions that the al-Qaqaa depot
was emptied before the war. The April 18, 2003 footage, taken by a
Minneapolis station embedded with troops, shows GIs breaking the locks on
storage bunkers, along with what former inspectors said were U.N. seals,
to reveal barrels and barrels labeled "explosives." The soldiers soon
left, doors ajar. They had orders to get to Baghdad.  White House Chief of
Staff Andrew Card accuses Sen. Kerry of "dwelling on the past" by talking
about the explosives missing from al-Qaqaa, which Bush found out about
within the past 10 days, and which Card calls "yesterday's news." Kerry is
also accused of "vilifying the U.S. military and cozying up to the UN" for
criticizing the failure to guard al-Qaqaa. [SLATE]

[15. CONGRESSIONAL CONTROL] Democratic hopes of overturning the
Republicans' shaky 51-vote majority in the Senate are unlikely to be
realized. Democratic candidates would have to win all four tossup races
and defeat one favored Republican to emerge with 50 seats and a tie that
John Edwards could break if he and Kerry win. Senate Minority Leader
Thomas A. Daschle (D) is fighting for his political life in South Dakota
against former representative John Thune (R), a race that both sides
expect to be won or lost by fewer than 2,000 votes. In the House, few
analysts see Republicans losing more than three seats net from their
24-seat majority or adding more than that number. [WP] (Republicans
currently rule the Senate by 51 to 48, with one independent who usually
votes Democratic. Five of the eight key races are currently held by
Democrats: South Dakota, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, and South
Carolina. The GOP holds the other three: Alaska, Colorado and Oklahoma.)

FINALLY, Leslie Cockburn (sister-in-law of CounterPunch's Alex) has
produced a powerful piece for 60 Minutes that aired Sunday, October 31. (I
have a tape, which I'll lend.)  It describes the conditions for US troops
in Iraq, including the fact that some of them have had to construct their
own makeshift armor out of sandbags and ... plywood.

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