[Peace] News notes 2006-04-02

Tue Apr 4 00:00:47 CDT 2006

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	Notes from last week's "global war on terrorism,"
	for the April 2, 2006, meeting of AWARE, the
	"Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort" of Champaign-Urbana.
	(Sources provided on request; paragraphs followed
	by a bracketed source are substantially verbatim.)
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	"What no one seemed to notice was the ever widening gap between
the government and the people. And it became always wider ... the whole
process of its coming into being, was above all diverting, it provided an
excuse not to think ... for people who did not want to think anyway gave
us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about ... and kept us so
busy with continuous changes and 'crises' and so fascinated ... by the
machinations of the 'national enemies,' without and within, that we had no
time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by
little, all around us....
	"Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or,
on occasion, 'regretted,' that unless one understood what the whole thing
was in principle, what all these 'little measures' ... must some day lead
to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his
field sees the corn growing ... Each act is worse than the last, but only
a little worse. You wait for the next and the next.
	"You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others,
when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. You don't
want to act, or even talk, alone ... you don't want to 'go out of your way
to make trouble.' But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or
hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes.
	"That's the difficulty. The forms are all there, all untouched,
all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the
visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you
never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with
the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the
people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves, when everyone is
transformed, no one is transformed.
	"You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years
ago, a year ago, things your father ... could never have imagined."
	--Milton Mayer, *They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1938-45*
(Chicago UP, 1955) <www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11845.htm>

[1] THE SOURCE OF THE PROBLEM. The major Sunday newspapers testify to the
effectiveness of USG propaganda campaigns.  In an obvious administration
plant, the WP reports breathlessly that if and when the US or its
surrogate attacks Iran, Iran may have the temerity to fight back.  (Of
course the papers couch that as, in such circumstances "Iran may
coordinate terrorist attacks.")  And the usual unnamed "U.S. intelligence
officials" tried to get Knight-Ridder newspapers to report the insurgents
in Iraq are providing training to Taliban and al-Qaida members from
Afghanistan and Pakistan.  So you see, it's not just arrogance and
incompetence on the part of the USG in the middle East: the bastards are
actually daring to fight back.

[2] LOOK WHAT IRAN IS MAKING US DO.  A right-wing paper in Britain reports
that British "government officials will consider the consequences of an
attack on Iran.  It is believed that an American-led attack, designed to
destroy Iran's ability to develop a nuclear bomb, is 'inevitable' if
Teheran's leaders fail to comply with United Nations demands to freeze
their uranium enrichment programme ... The United States government is
hopeful that the military operation will be a multinational mission, but
defence chiefs believe that the Bush administration is prepared to launch
the attack on its own or with the assistance of Israel, if there is little
international support. British military chiefs believe an attack would be
limited to a series of air strikes against nuclear plants -- a land
assault is not being considered at the moment. But confirmation that
Britain has started contingency planning will undermine the claim last
month by Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, that a military attack against
Iran was 'inconceivable' ... A senior Foreign Office source said: ... "The
belief in some areas of Whitehall [i.e., the British governmental
administration] is that an attack is now all but inevitable.  There will
be no invasion of Iran but the nuclear sites will be destroyed.  This is
not something that will happen imminently, maybe this year, maybe next
year. Jack Straw is making exactly the same noises that the Government did
in March 2003 when it spoke about the likelihood of a war in Iraq. Then
the Government said the war was neither inevitable or imminent and then
attacked." [Telegraph]
	Meanwhile, the UN Security Council has approved a statement
calling on Iran to suspend uranium enrichment efforts. Both US and Russian
officials ... hailed the measure as a compromise.  [It doesn't seem to
matter that] the head of the UN's nuclear watchdog agency said Thursday
Iran does not pose a nuclear threat and should not be subjected to
sanctions (International Atomic Energy Agency head Mohammed ElBaradei).
[DN]

[3] MORE CIVIL WAR. The NYT's Carlotta Gall traveled to the remote
Baluchistan province of Pakistan and discovered that, even though
officials might deny it, there is fighting going on that increasingly
looks like the beginnings of a civil war. Leaders of the rebel movement,
who say their region is ignored by the central government and are opposed
to Prime Minister Pervez Musharraf's plans to develop the oil and gas
fields in the area, say they have thousands of fighters facing 23,000
Pakistani troops. [Slate]

[4] DETERRING DEMOCRACY. The Los Angeles Times reports that US attempt to
dismiss the leading candidate for Iraqi PM seems to be succeeding -- an
interesting example of building democracy.  Maybe the problem is that the
candidate, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, said he read Noam Chomsky. It is said that
the US ambassador in Iraq simply told the Shi'ite majority in the
parliament selected in December that they couldn't have Jaafari as PM.
	Reuters reported that SOS Rice "appeared awkward" as she and
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw had arrived in Baghdad on an
unannounced visit to push for the formation of a new government without
Jaafari.
	Rice had just finished a trip to England which the AFP described
as "a public relations nightmare. Anti-Iraq protests again dogged Rice [as
she declared] 'We don't want to be the world's jailer' ... and that the
United States had made "thousands' of tactical errors in Iraq ... her
spokesman scrambled to call reporters with assurances she was just
speaking figuratively. [Rice also claimed that the US had] 'unleashed the
forces of democracy in the Middle East.'"

[5] DIVIDE ET IMPERA. The New York Times reports in Iraq a "migration
pattern that shows an increased physical separation of Shi'ite and Sunni
Arabs" -- without noting that it could be interpreted as the result of a
successful US campaign of divide and rule. After the bombing of the
Samarra shrine in February, 30,000 to 36,000 Iraqis have left their homes.

[6] BUSH LIES, WHO DIES? In the months of March, U.S. soldiers died in
Iraq at the rate of one a day, fewer than in previous months, but severe
injuries averaged more than sixteen per day.  And civilian casualties in
Iraq were greatly on the increase.  Also this week US reporter Jill
Carroll was released.

[7] LYING TO THE WORLD. After the Downing Street memo, we now have the
White House memo -- more evidence of the administration's scheming to
launch an aggressive war against Iraq.  On Monday the NYT published the
contents of a once-secret British memo of a meeting between Bush and Blair
on 1/31/03: Bush said the start date of the invasion would be March 10.
The contents of the memo first became public almost two months ago in the
book *Lawless World* by British international law professor Philippe
Sands, who said, "It confirms the absence of evidence of weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq [and that Bush and Blair knew that!] Why would the
British prime minister and the American president be talking about the
possibility of provoking a material breach if they had clear and
compelling evidence? But more importantly, it also confirms, as some have
thought and some have said, that the road to a second resolution was a
sham. The decision had already been taken that already, by the end of
January, a start date for the war was penciled in and the decision was set
in stone and that both Bush and Blair had agreed." [DN]

[8] NOT INCOMPETENCE BUT POLICY. The Bush administration can't seem to
find anyone who is willing to take the job of FEMA director, reports the
NYT on Page One. All the top emergency response experts around the country
who have been asked have rejected the job, largely because they don't
believe the administration is serious about fixing the agency ... people
who were appointed on an "acting basis" are filling 11 of the 30 top jobs
at FEMA. [Slate] The problem is not limited to FEMA, as is shown by Mike
Davis' excellent article in the current Nation, "Who's Killing New
Orleans?"

[9] WHAT RIGHTS? The WP fronts the story of two British citizens who were
detained even though they were never accused of breaking any laws. It
seems British and American intelligence officials cooperated to arrest the
men in Gambia, and using extraordinary rendition they were then
transferred to Guantanamo. At the detention center, the men say that
British officials offered them freedom and money if they agreed to become
informants for MI5. [Slate]

[10] LOOTERS ON THE LOOSE. The NYT mentions that the Government
Accountability Office, which is generally respected as impartial and
nonpartisan, is facing accusations from one of its investigators that it
covered up fraud among some contractors. The investigator says the agency
failed to report evidence that the contractors who were supposed to build
a system to protect the country from nuclear attack "doctored data, skewed
test results, and made false statements." The GAO denies the charges.
[Slate]

[11] A REMARKABLE SUGGESTION. The Dalai Lama says that, were Al-Qaeda
chief Osama bin Laden to be killed, hatred would cause another 10 like him
to spring up, in an interview with a British newspaper.  The exiled
Tibetan spiritual leader told The Daily Telegraph that terrorists should
be treated humanely. [AFP]

[12] AND ANOTHER. Mikhail Gorbachev, the USSR leader who instituted
perestroika 20 years ago, said recently, "America is intoxicated by its
position as the world's only superpower ... I think some people may be
pushing President Bush in the wrong direction ... This talk of pre-emptive
strikes, of ignoring the U.N. Security Council and international legal
obligations -- all this is leading toward a dark night." [Time]

[13] EVEN THAT'S NOT ENOUGH.  Several former judges of the FISA court,
including Harold Baker of Champaign .. voiced skepticism at a Senate
hearing about the president's constitutional authority to order
wiretapping on Americans without a court order ... Judge Baker, a sitting
federal judge in Illinois who served on the intelligence court until last
year, said the president was bound by the law "like everyone else." If a
law like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is duly enacted by
Congress and considered constitutional, Judge Baker said, "the president
ignores it at the president's peril." ... The intelligence court, created
by Congress in 1978, meets in a tightly guarded, windowless office at the
Justice Department. The court produces no public findings except for a
single tally to Congress each year on the number of warrants it has issued
more than 1,600 in 2004. [NYT 3/29]

[14] THERE'S SOME EVIDENCE. Here in the United States, an Arab-American
man has been sentenced to 30 years in prison for joining al-Qaeda and
plotting to assassinate President Bush. Ahmed Omar Abu Ali was convicted
in November after spending nearly two years in a Saudi Arabian prison,
where he says was tortured into making a confession. The US court
nevertheless admitted it.  [DN]

[15] PEACE ON WHOSE TERMS? The Kadima party won a plurality of seats in
the Israeli parliament.  Its leader Ehud Olmert plans to impose unilateral
borders on the West Bank ... including the three largest Jewish-only
settlement blocs ...  Meanwhile, Arab leaders meeting at the annual Arab
League summit in Sudan issued a statement reiterating a four-year-old
land-for-peace offer to Israel. Under the proposal, the Arab states would
offer diplomatic recognition in exchange for a full Israeli withdrawal
from land occupied in the 1967 war. Israel has rejected the offer. [DN]

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  C. G. Estabrook, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  109 Observatory, 901 South Mathews Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801
  ### <www.carlforcongress.org> <www.newsfromneptune.com> ###
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