.

Teams from the International
Committee of the Red Cross
that are still operating in
Iraq have managed to visit
hospitals in Baghdad to help
treat the wounded there.
Iraqi staff members of the ICRC
have reported treating about 100
casualties at Baghdad's Yarmuk
teaching hospital. Spokesman Muin
Qassis in Amman says the wounded
included about 20 women and several
children.

He says ICRC teams also have brought
help to other hospitals in the Iraqi
capital during a lull in the bombing
raids there.

ICRC teams located in the northern city
of Irbil have reached several hundred of
the thousands of displaced Kurds near the
Iranian border.

"Our teams in the north managed to assist
around 600 persons in the north, so far,"
said Mr. Qassis. "And we have learned that
almost 23,000 displaced persons have been
registered in the Penjuin area, a town near
the border with Iran. So things seem to be
under control there."

VOANews.com
Red Cross Treats Iraqi Casualties
Laurie Kassman
Amman, Jordan
23 Mar 2003, 14:55 UTC

According to Robert Fisk of
The Independent, one Iraqi
doctor by the name of Habib
Al-Hezai, whose FRCS was gained
at Edinburgh University, counted
101 patients of the total 207
wounded in the raids in his
hospital alone, of whom 85 were
civilians – 20 of them women and
six of them children – and 16
soldiers. A young man and a child
of 12 had died under surgery. No
one will say how many soldiers were
killed during the actual attack.

I don't think there's been a post about the financial benefits of numerous politicians in favor of the war as it relates to the rebuilding of Iraq. I find it repulsive that Cheney's former company, Halliburton, is bidding on the reconstruction and he plans to make some major loot if they land the job since I'm sure he has money invested in the company.

>
> I don't think there's been a post about the financial
>benefits of numerous politicians in favor of the war as it
>relates to the rebuilding of Iraq.


I find it repulsive that
>Cheney's former company, Halliburton, is bidding on the
>reconstruction and he plans to make some major loot if they
>land the job since I'm sure he has money invested in the
>company.
>
>

Win,or lose The Bid For Show--one way,or another will it come up that he has a close interest in the other company.

a subsidiary of haliburton has been awarded a non-bid governmental contract for part of the reconstruction.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/18/opinion/18KRUG.html

www.newamericancentury.org

first link is krugman's expression of concern re liberties in the states; the second link is to the "brainchild" of the war, a neo-conservative group that mapped it out when clinton was in office. not familiar with the names of the members? type them into google, and see what you come up with....

has anyone been getting into really heated arguments over this war? i have become so frustrated with pro-war opinions. after a few minutes of debate i completley lose my cool and say something like, "you are an ignorant motherfucker, go fucky yourself, peace".

peace.

No one is really "pro-war" unless they are a psycho. I am pro getting rid of saddam, anti using a war as the means to accomplish this objective. I personally think that the US should have been building up real Iraqi intelligence over the years instead of still spying on Russia, which is now just a relic of the Cold War age. With real intelligence, the US would have been able to assasinate Saddam by now.

>No one is really "pro-war" unless they are a psycho.

I am
>pro getting rid of saddam, anti using a war as the means to
>accomplish this objective. I personally think that the US
>should have been building up real Iraqi intelligence over
>the years instead of still spying on Russia, which is now
>just a relic of the Cold War age. With real intelligence,
>the US would have been able to assasinate Saddam by now.

AMEN TO THAT!
So said Sadaam has women er where.The key to his exit!
Send some for the sons and military.

i would back a plan to assasinate him...i'm pro sniper. heck, can i do it?? i can shoot good..i can borrow a ghillie suit and sneak in like the legendary carlos hathcock, who had 93 confirmed kills in 'Nam and around 300 probable kills.. that would be a lot easier, since this whole thing is about "regime change" and i think the main man in the regime in saddam..

im pro-war and i go insane after 30 minutes of real talk, not okaylayer talk. i feel ya. its very hard and i dont know why i get so angry. honestly, this war is more like a backdrop in my life. it hardly effect me.

The war will cost 80 billion.

peace.

that probably covers about a week or two of it

doubt that covers much reconstruction costs, if at all

http://www.brentflynn.com/brent/useful_idiots.htm

Columnist's note: This was my last column to appear in the Star Community Newspaper cluster. It is ironic that after writing a forceful essay in support of the first amendment, my column was cancelled. I was told that because I had attended an anti-war rally, I had violated the newspaper's ethics policy that prohibits members of the editorial staff from participating in any political activity other than voting. I was also told that my objectivity as a reporter would be called into question. However, my opposition to an invasion of Iraq was well documented in previous columns before I revealed that I had participated in the protest. But instead of taking me off of my beat or terminating my employment as a staff reporter, my opinion column was cancelled-- the aspect of my job that was enhanced by my participation in the rally. In my opinion, a powerful liberal voice was unwelcome in the conservative Republican county served by my newspaper. The fact that the column was cancelled just days before the start of the US invasion of Iraq raises serious questions about the motives for the cancellation.

somebody asked me yesterday how i can separate fact from fiction, determine who's lying.

can't go into it all now, but critical analysis skills are needed... big time.

this morning, on the news i heard it mentioned that the US is looking at a suspected chemical weapons plant. that was the 'headline'. later in the story, they said that it was a chemical plant, which may or may not be used to produce weapons. a quote from a person in the story said that nothing had been found.

the 'outro' to the radio piece said that the US continues to look for evidence although *little* has been found.

*throws flag*. you said in the article that NOTHING has been found. just a tiny semantic difference, interjecting the word *LITTLE*, makes a big difference in people's impressions. it changes the semantics to a statement of fact that there have been some level of chemical weapons found by the US military, when, at least at the time of the broadcast, that was clearly not the case.

headlines have run in news papers with the allegations. when they have to retract, it will be in small type. but the headlines will remain in people's minds. that's how come folks like sceenic are posting this as fact when right now its pure speculation, out of the mouths of folks who have a vested interest in it being true.

the UN weapons inspectors are on record as saying that NONE of the US provided 'intelligence' (sic) panned out or provided any findings -- in all cases they found that rolling terror vehicles were fire trucks, water trucks, etc.


i trust the US military doing weapons inspection as much as i do the rampart cops on a drug bust. think they ain't under pressure to 'plant'?





peace & blessings,

x.

"I'm on the Zoloft to keep from killing y'all." - Iron Mike

>i trust the US military doing weapons inspection as much as
>i do the rampart cops on a drug bust. think they ain't under
>pressure to 'plant'?
>
>
>
>
Initially, I considered this theory. It makes sense. The Allied forces planting weapons of mass destruction in order to justify that it had a cause to bypass the UN Security Council. Sounds good, but why wouldn't Hussein already use the weapons since his troops are getting a pounding? I mean, I've heard that Saddam may be waiting for the Allied troops to get closer to Baghdad before using these weapons of mass destruction...why would he NOT use them if he had them? The notion of having them planted would make no sense.

Saddam might not use those weapons if he is trying to win in the court of world opinion, where the US is currently reeling. Plus the whole deal where he is trying to rally the Arab world around him. If he uses those weapons all of that would fall apart

(nuke deterrent? whatever).

if we were only theorizing (no actual deats involved on either side), it would be 'interesting' if he used them, to see whether the US would counter (as it's said that it would) with nukes, destroying hundreds of thousands of the folks it claims its liberating, and also, prolly kicking off WW3 in the process. but that is too horrible to contemplate, and i pray that it does not come down to that.

peace & blessings,

x.

"I'm on the Zoloft to keep from killing y'all." - Iron Mike

does not necesasrily mean Sadaam would have access to them. When cops plant drugs on people, they plant them after they already have them in custody. They don't let them get high first with planted evidence.

I definitely think that, once the bulk of the military action dies down, one of two things will happen:

1) some small cache of "weapons of mass destruction" (Whatever that means...a machine gun can be a "weapon of mass destruction" if used properly) will magically appear, which could have been planted by U.S. in an already secured area (and THEN the question becomes, why didn't sadaam use them if we had them)

2) you will not hear anything else about these so-called weapons, similar to how you suddenly stopped hearing about Osama once the U.S. had pretty firm hold of Afghanistan and it was clear the gov't wasn't going to find him.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2881119.stm

First a missle "aciddentally" strikes Iran, now another one "accidentally" hits a bus full of Syrians. Watch out N. Korea, its wvery likely that I missile could get off track and travel thousands of miles away from its target to strike you.


Oh yeah, there is one more thing............. it's been emotional

With war imminent, President Bush and others are already discussing plans for a post-Saddam, U.S.-occupied Iraq. What do you think?

"I'm sure there are plenty of ambitious young despots out there who would jump at the chance to rule Iraq."
Andrea Crim
Teacher

"I just hope we don't see a repeat of that mess we made a few years back when we tried to install an American ruler in America."
Bruce Wollensky
Attorney


"Can't we just get CNN to run the place?"
Martin Baines
Systems Analyst

"Whatever happens, someone should be there to film the most touching moments."
Meredith Hall
Psychologist


"We should ask ourselves what we would want if Iraq was occupying the U.S."
Ken Franklin
Bus Driver

"Oh, man, we're not gonna make Iraq the 51st state, are we?"
Dennis Doering
Landscaper

1-2-3-4, What The Hell Are We Fighting For???

Complete War Coverage~~>

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


****!!!I HEAR THE SOUND OF MUSIC!!!****

Papa was a rolling stone. Wherever he laid his hat was his home,
and when he died, all he left us was a loan.(smile)...
(c)The Temptations

msnbc is not complete war coverage

msnbc (where your site links to) is owned by:
microsoft and nbc (owned by General Electric)

2 very large multinational corporations with no desire to challenge the status quo or official propoganda

people need to seek out more balanced sources

this site views members of the media as whores:

www.mediawhoresonline.net

current critique of war:
http://www.mediawhoresonline.net/ar031503.htm

http://www.msnbc.com/news/890520_asp.htm

U.S. enlists dolphins to aid Iraq war effort

Mammals used to seek
out mines off Umm Qasr






UMM QASR, Iraq, March 25 — Forget precision bombs, unmanned spy-planes and high-tech weaponry, the U.S. army is about to unveil its most unlikely mine detector — all the way from Florida, the Atlantic Bottle-Nosed Dolphin.






AT THE SOUTHERN Iraqi port of Umm Qasr, secured by U.S and British forces after days of fighting, soldiers made last-minute preparations on Tuesday for the imminent arrival of a team of specially trained dolphins to help divers ensure the coastline is free of danger before humanitarian aid shipments can dock.

U.S. Navy Captain Mike Tillotson told reporters that three or four dolphins would work from Umm Qasr, using their natural sonar abilities to seek out mines or other explosive devices which Iraqi forces may have planted on the seabed.

“They were flown over on a military animal transporter in fleece-lined slings,” Tillotson said. “We keep them in a certain amount of water. They travel very well.”
Staff Sergeant Justin Roberts escorts K-Dog back to the well deck and holding areas aboard the USS Gunston Hall March 18.

“They will be given restaurant quality food and vitamins, and they will work out of wells which we’ve set up here.”

Tillotson said the dolphins were trained not to swim up to mines, but to place a marker a small distance away, minimizing any danger to themselves.

Several mines were discovered last week on the back of ships along the Faw peninsula, but teams of divers searching around Umm Qasr port since Monday have not found any embedded mines.

© 2003 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters.

"“They will be given restaurant quality food and vitamins, and they will work out of wells which we’ve set up here.”

So I guess that means they are going to give them Mickey D's...won't surprise me if some mines go undetected...

let's use fucking dolphins in a world full of sand.

--idle hands spend time at the genitals.--

lol

very imaginative & nice exploitation of most of our laziness...i was a step away from emailing this to someone

...an expose of sorts:

http://baltimore.indymedia.org/newswire/display/3290/index.php

http://www.ew.com/ew/report/0,6115,437198~1~0~michaelmooredefendshis,00.html

Calling Bush a ''fictitious president'' who's unleashed a ''war for fictitious reasons'' in Iraq, Michael Moore -- newly minted Oscar winner for Best Documentary -- let loose a sparky speech Sunday night that was promptly spiked with audience boos. Thus, the ''Bowling for Columbine'' director quickly (and predictably) became the most controversial figure of the 2003 Oscars. Here, Moore speaks with EW.com about the ensuing storm.

Did you know what you were going to say when you got up to the podium?
I felt I had to say something about Bush and the war; it wasn't out of place because that's what my film deals with -- the American culture of violence and why we're such a violent people. It's about why and how our government manipulates us with fear. Specifically, the film the Bush Administration manipulating people with fear to enact their agenda and to get money for war. So I thought whatever I'd say if I won would be along those lines because it was appropriate to the theme of the movie.

You got a standing ovation as you walked up, then you began your speech and promptly got booed. Were you surprised?
It was two different groups of people. You can look at a tape of the show -- there's nobody booing on the main floor. Do you think they're that flaky in Hollywood that I was the first award they stood for -- the first standing ovation -- and within 10 seconds they decided to change their minds? The same people who'd voted for this film?

So where were the boos coming from?
The first shouts were ''No, no!'' and it was almost like the person was miked. It was so loud. But it was so weird because I was looking at the audience, and they were all either sitting there nodding, smiling, applauding, or just listening. I have friends and family who were in the balcony, and they said the first sounds didn't come up from up there, it came through the amplified loud-speaker system in the auditorium. The L.A. Times said stagehands joined in.

Is that what it sounded like to you -- an amplification?
It was so loud my wife, who was standing next to me, couldn't hear what I was saying. One of my buddies who worked on the film and was up on the top balcony said there was a pocket of people there, and I hadn't finished my first sentence and, like, on cue, they just started up there. First the ''No! No!'' going through the sound system and then the up there. Then the people in the balcony who were supportive of what I was saying started booing the booers. They were shouting at them to shut up! So now it's a cacophony of booing, making it sound much worse than it was.

Looking at the main level, which had given you that standing ovation, they were stock-still once your speech and the booing began.
I think they wanted to hear what I was saying. In the cutaways -- I've watched it now -- you see Martin Scorsese starting to applaud, Ed Harris is applauding, a number of them are actually applauding.

A few. Overall you were kind of left hanging.
I think they were kind of stunned by the moment. I don't expect them as actors, as celebrities, to get up there and . It often seems awkward, even to me.

But because you're a political filmmaker you can?
That's what I do for a living. I make political documentaries. If I was upset about anything it was that the band drowned out my last line there.

Which was?
Which was: Any time you've got the Pope and the Dixie Chicks against you, you're not long for the White House.

What do you think of the people who booed you?
Isn't that why this is such a great country? Everyone can speak their mind. It's a little disconcerting that I get 45 seconds to have my piece and there are those who would try to deny me my right to speak. The only people who looked bad here are the people who want to deny someone 45 seconds of free speech. The director of the show had told all the nominees those were our 45 seconds and it was completely up to us what we want to say and do. We were not threatened in any way to stick to any kind of a script.

Did you consider an alternate version?
The other road I would have gone down is: ''We've taught the children of Columbine an important lesson this week -- that violence is an acceptable method to resolve a conflict.'' That really bothers me. Sometimes violence is unfortunately necessary in self-defense, but what do you call this invasion of Iraq? randomly ask people, ''Do you believe Saddam Hussein is going to kill you this month?'' Most people were raised with a certain set of Judeo-Christian values that say you don't have the right to take another person's life unless it's in self-defense. I have very strong personal beliefs about this, and how can I stop being that person because I walk into the Kodak Theatre? On the other hand, I'm very respectful when I'm a guest in someone's house -- that's the way I was raised. So I put a tux on, I didn't wear a baseball cap, I said what my conscience told me to say and it related in an appropriate way to the message of my film. How wrong would it have been if I'd stood up there and thanked my agent and my lawyer and the designer who gave me the tuxedo? And how could I live with myself?

What are you doing next?
A film tentatively titled ''Fahrenheit 9/11.'' It's about the country since 9/11 and how I believe that event is being used as a cover for the Bush Administration to enact policies that aren't in the best interests of the American people. It's about what led to 9/11 and what's happened since. I live in New York City, so we've all been affected by this and I'm not over it either. We knew somebody on one of the flights who died, and the firemen on our block. So I don't want whatever the important lessons are that we need to learn from this to fade away. I certainly don't like those who died that day being dishonored and being used to pass laws so they can force librarians to give up their reading lists.

http://www.theonion.com/onion3911/pt_the_war_on_iraq.html

this is so atypical for them!

Here's some meat and potatos for ya.




Halliburton Makes a Killing on Iraq War

Cheney's Former Company Profits from Supporting Troops

Special Series
By Pratap Chatterjee
Special to CorpWatch
March 20, 2003



As the first bombs rain down on Baghdad, CorpWatch has learned that thousands of employees of Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney's former company, are working alongside US troops in Kuwait and Turkey under a package deal worth close to a billion dollars. According to US Army sources, they are building tent cities and providing logistical support for the war in Iraq in addition to other hot spots in the "war on terrorism."

While recent news coverage has speculated on the post-war reconstruction gravy train that corporations like Halliburton stand to gain from, this latest information indicates that Halliburton is already profiting from war time contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Cheney served as chief executive of Halliburton until he stepped down to become George W. Bush's running mate in the 2000 presidential race. Today he still draws compensation of up to a million dollars a year from the company, although his spokesperson denies that the White House helped the company win the contract.

In December 2001, Kellogg, Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, secured a 10-year deal known as the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP), from the Pentagon. The contract is a "cost-plus-award-fee, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity service" which basically means that the federal government has an open-ended mandate and budget to send Brown and Root anywhere in the world to run military operations for a profit.

Linda Theis, a public affairs officer for the U.S. Army Field Support Command in Rock Island Arsenal, Illinois, confirmed for Corpwatch that Brown and Root is also supporting operations in Afghanistan, Djibouti, Georgia, Jordan and Uzbekistan.

"Specific locations along with military units, number of personnel assigned, and dates of duration are considered classified," she said. "The overall anticipated cost of task orders awarded since contract award in December 2001 is approximately $830 million."

Kuwait
The current contract in Kuwait began in September 2002 when Joyce Taylor of the U.S. Army Materiel Command's Program Management Office, arrived to supervise approximately 1,800 Brown and Root employees to set up tent cities that would provide accommodation for tens of thousands of soldiers and officials.

Army officials working with Brown and Root says the collaboration is helping cut costs by hiring local labor at a fraction of regular Army salaries. "We can quickly purchase building materials and hire third-country nationals to perform the work. This means a small number of combat-service-support soldiers are needed to support this logistic aspect of building up an area," says Lt. Col. Rod Cutright, the senior LOGCAP planner for all of Southwest Asia.

During the past few weeks, these Brown and Root employees have helped transform Kuwait into an armed camp, to support some 80,000 foreign troops, roughly the equivalent of 10% of Kuwait's native born population.

Most of these troops are now living in the tent cities in the rugged desert north of Kuwait City, poised to invade Iraq. Some of the encampments are named after the states associated with the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 -- Camp New York, Camp Virginia and Camp Pennsylvania.

The headquarters for this effort is Camp Arifjan, where civilian and military employees have built a gravel terrace with plastic picnic tables and chairs, surrounded by a gymnasium in a tent, a PX and newly arrived fast food outlets such as Burger King, Subway and Baskin-Robbins, set up in trailers or shipping containers. Basketball hoops and volleyball nets are set up outside the mess hall.

Turkey
North of Iraq approximately 1,500 civilians are working for Brown and Root and the United States military near the city of Adana, about an hour's drive inland from the Mediterranean coast of central Turkey, where they support approximately 1,400 US soldiers staffing Operation Northern Watch's Air Force F-15 Strike Eagles and F-16 Fighting Falcons monitoring the no-fly zone above the 36th parallel in Iraq.

The jet pilots are catered and housed at the Incirlik military base seven miles outside the city by a company named Vinnell, Brown and Root (VBR), a joint venture between Brown and Root and Vinnell corporation of Fairfax, Virginia, under a contract that was signed on October 1, 1988, which also includes two more minor military sites in Turkey: Ankara and Izmir.

The joint venture's latest contract, which started July 1, 1999 and will expire in September 2003, was initially valued at $118 million. US Army officials confirm that Brown and Root has been awarded new and additional contracts in Turkey in the last year to support the "war on terrorism" although they refused to give any details.

"We provide support services for the United States Air Force in areas of civil engineering, motor vehicles transportation, in the services arena here - that includes food service operations, lodging, and maintenance of a golf course. We also do US customs inspection," explained VBR site manager Alex Daniels, who has worked at Incirlik for almost 15 years.

Cheap labor is also the primary reason for outsourcing services, says Major Toni Kemper, head of public affairs at the base. "The reason that the military goes to contracting is largely because it's more cost effective in certain areas. I mean there was a lot of studies years ago as to what services can be provided via contractor versus military personnel. Because when we go contract, we don't have to pay health care and all the another things for the employees, that's up to the employer."

Soon after the contract was signed Incirlik provided a major staging post for thousands of sorties flown against Iraq and occupied Kuwait during the Gulf war in January 1991 dropping over 3,000 tons of bombs on military and civilian targets.

Central Asian Contracts
Still ongoing is the first LOGCAP contract in the "war on terrorism" which began in June 2002, when Brown and Root was awarded a $22 million deal to run support services at Camp Stronghold Freedom, located at the Khanabad air base in central Uzbekistan. Khanabade is one of the main US bases in the Afghanistan war that houses some 1,000 US soldiers from the Green Berets and the 10th Mountain Division.

In November 2002 Brown and Root began a one-year contract, estimated at $42.5 million, to cover services for troops at bases in both Bagram and Khandahar. Brown and Root employees were first set to work running laundry services, showers, mess halls and installing heaters in soldiers' tents.

Future Contracts in Iraq
Halliburton is also one of five large US corporations invited to bid for contracts in what may turn out to be the biggest reconstruction project since the Second World War. The others are the Bechtel Group, Fluor Corp, Parsons Corp, and the Louis Berger Group.

The Iraq reconstruction plan will require contractors to fulfill various tasks, including reopening at least half of the "economically important roads and bridges" -- about 1,500 miles of roadway within 18 months, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The contractors will also be asked to repair 15% of high-voltage electricity grid, renovate several thousand schools and deliver 550 emergency generators within two months. The contract is estimated to be worth up to $900 million for the preliminary work alone.

The Pentagon has also awarded a contract to Brown and Root to control oil fires if Saddam Hussein sets the well heads ablaze. Iraq has oil reserves second only to those of Saudi Arabia. This makes Brown and Root a leading candidate to win the role of top contractor in any petroleum field rehabilitation effort in Iraq that industry analysts say could be as much as $1.5 billion in contracts to jump start Iraq's petroleum sector following a war.

Wartime Profiteering
Meanwhile Dick Cheney's 2001 financial disclosure statement, states that the Halliburton is paying him a "deferred compensation" of up to $1million a year following his resignation as chief executive in 2000. At the time Cheney opted not to receive his severance package in a lump sum, but instead to have it paid to him over five years, possibly for tax reasons.

The company would not say how much the payments are. The obligatory disclosure statement filled by all top government officials says only that they are in the range of $100,000 and $1million. Nor is it clear how they are calculated.

Critics say that the apparent conflict of interest is deplorable. "The Bush-Cheney team have turned the United States into a family business," says Harvey Wasserman, author of The Last Energy War (Seven Stories Press, 2000). "That's why we haven't seen Cheney - he's cutting deals with his old buddies who gave him a multimillion-dollar golden handshake. Have they no grace, no shame, no common sense? Why don't they just have Enron run America? Or have Zapata Petroleum (George W. Bush's failed oil-exploration venture) build a pipeline across Afghanistan?"

Army officials disagree. Major Bill Bigelow, public relations officer for the US Army in Western Europe, says: "If you're going to ask a specific question - like, do you think it's right that contractors profit in wartime - I would think that they might be better at a higher level, to people who set the policy. We don't set the policy, we work within the framework that's been established."

"Those questions have been asked forever, because they go back to World War Two when Chrysler and Ford and Chevy stopped making cars and started making guns and tanks. Obviously it's a question that's been around for quite some time. But it's true that nowadays there are very few defense contractors, but go back sixty years to the World War Two era almost everybody was manufacturing something that either directly or indirectly had something to do with defense," he added.

Sasha Lilley and Aaron Glantz helped conduct interviews for this article.


Pratap Chatterjee is an investigative journalist based in Berkeley, California. He traveled to Afghanistan and Uzbekistan in January 2002 and to Incirlik, Turkey, in January 2003 to research this article.

Oh, the irony!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,926422,00.html

Halliburton misses $600m Iraq contract

Mark Tran
Monday March 31, 2003

Halliburton, the company once headed by the US vice-president, Dick Cheney, has failed to make the shortlist for an American government contract to rebuild Iraq, it emerged today.
Halliburton, an oil services company, was one of five companies invited by the US agency for international development (USAid) to bid for a $600m (£381m) contract to rebuild Iraq's basic infrastructure.

Only US companies were invited to bid, to the fury of British industrialists and unions, who pointed out that British troops are fighting alongside American soldiers.

The five companies also had close ties to the Bush administration, sparking accusations that the White House was returning favours for generous political campaign contributions.

Allegations of unduly cozy ties between the Bush administration and corporate benefactors has dogged the White House, going back to the scandal over Enron, the failed energy company.

Last week, Richard Perle, a leading US hawk, stepped down as chairman of the Defence Policy Board, a Pentagon advisory panel. His move followed allegations of a conflict of interest given his relationship with Global Crossing - a telecommunications firm that had sought his help in winning government approval for a deal with an Asian firm.

As for Halliburton, USAid has confirmed a Newsweek report that the company is not on the shortlist of two companies to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure. What is not clear is whether Halliburton's bid was uncompetitive or whether it was withdrawn because of unfavourable publicity.

A UN official told Newsweek that the bad publicity for Halliburton made the deal more trouble than it was worth, as the company depends on a lot of oil-related business in the Arab world, which is overwhelmingly against the war in Iraq.

"That kind of political interest was not in their corporate interests," the UN official said. The five US companies invited to bid for the infrastructure deal were Halliburton, Bechtel, Fluor, Parsons and Louis Berger.

Under the war budget request that President George Bush sent to Congress last week, USAid will receive $2.4bn for humanitarian as well as reconstruction aid.

Aside from the construction project, the agency has been soliciting bids on helping to restore Iraq's public health service, administering its airports, printing textbooks and training teachers.

The scale of the work has astonished experts who have examined the plans.

"We are embarking on a very aggressive effort, both figuratively and literally, at nation-building - far, far bigger than anything we have seen since the Marshall Plan," said Steven Kelman, a professor of public management at Harvard's John F Kennedy School of Government.

Rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure after war and years of sanctions will be a mammoth task and companies are eager to win contracts in an industry suffering from the global economic slowdown.

Some analysts estimate that the final bill for rebuilding and improving Iraq would be roughly equivalent to the operating budget of a US state with a comparable population. Texas, with 22 million people, has a budget of $57bn.

As construction companies position themselves for lucrative contracts, the rebuilding of Iraq has already emerged as a politically contentious issue. Tony Blair is at odds with the Bush administration on wanting the UN to take the lead role in running and reconstructing the country once the war ends. But administration hawks argue that the spoils of war should go to American companies as the US is bearing the brunt of the war effort.

In a possible foretaste of what is to come, the US and Britain clashed on who should rebuild the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr. USAid awarded a $4.8m to rebuild Iraq's only deep water port, which is under British military control, to an American company, Stevedoring Services of America.

Britain argued in favour of returning the port to local control to win Iraqi confidence.

USA: Inside Lockheed's $250 Billion Pentagon Connection

By Geoffrey Gray
Village Voice
March 19, 2003

George Bush has said if he is fortunate enough to be elected president, he is going to look at our whole military situation, including the tactical air account. He's noted that the 3000 number seems a bit much.
--Bush campaign adviser Richard Armitage, September 2000


After one month of military strikes against Afghanistan, terrorism alerts, anthrax scares, and record-breaking flag sales, the Pentagon has recently announced the largest defense contract in U.S. military history, a potential $250 billion deal that calls for the construction of approximately 6000 stealthy, supersonic Joint Strike Fighter combat planes to protect the nation's shores and sell to foreign governments.
On October 26, Air Force Secretary James G. Roche awarded the contract to Lockheed-Martin and Northrop Grumman, the dynamic defense duo who edged off the only other competitor, Boeing. The order, expected to provide over 40 years' worth of work and revenue, calls for the development and manufacturing of 3000 fighters to be used by the Air Force, Navy and Marines. It also entails an a similar number of planes to be sold abroad to countries like Turkey, Israel, and Canada.
The Department of Defense won't comment on Roche's specific reasons for choosing the Lockheed-Northrop team. Some experts say America's largest defense contractor produced a slicker-looking model. Others thought the debt-plagued company needed the economic boost. But arms-policy experts and watchdog groups are examining the move, questioning the timing of the deal, the need for such an extensive air fleet, and the connections between the Pentagon officials who made the decision and the corporations who will benefit from the contract.
Before his nomination this summer, Air Force Secretary Roche worked as a top executive for Northrop Grumman for 17 years. Deciding who should get the fighter contract was finally Roche's decision, according to his spokesperson. He looked at benchmarks in performance, test and cost runs, radars and electronic mission systems ?omplicated gizmos whose development Roche oversaw in his role at Northrop Grumman, the Voice has learned.
By the end of his tenure, Roche had been promoted to president of the Electronic Sensors and Systems Sector, a division that, according to the company, will now be a "key" subcontractor for the fighter deal, responsible for the production of an advanced fire-control radar system and primary elements of the aircraft's integrated mission systems. What's more, on the day before Roche's nomination hearing before the Senate's Armed Services Committee, Northrop Grumman made two unusually large donations to sectors within the Republican Party: $100,000 to the president's 2001 Dinner Committee (a joint trust split between House and Senate Republicans) and an additional $15,000 to the Republican National State Elections Committee.
"It's a conflict of interest," says William Hartung, a research fellow who follows the arms trade at the New School's World Policy Institute. "The guy's only been out of the company a few months." Defense officials "don't seem to be particularly sensitive that someone might consider that they're lining the pockets of former colleagues and business partners."
A spokesperson for the secretary said neither he nor his wife have any remaining financial interest in Northrop. "He has complied completely with all ethical and legal guidelines," said Major Chet Curtis.
Roche might face more public scrutiny in the near future. Two weeks ago, the federal government accused Northrop of fraud in the fulfillment of multimillion-dollar defense contracts, including parts for the B-2 stealth bomber? fighter now in action over Afghanistan, with radar and avionics components manufactured by the company's Electronic Systems and Services. During his Senate confirmation hearings, Roche pushed the Northrop product, saying the company had made some "exquisite" new developments. Through Major Curtis, Roche declined comment on the government's accusation against Northrop. In a written statement, Northrop said the case had already been investigated by the U.S. attorney's office from 1989 to 1992, resulting in a decision not to prosecute. The compay said that the accusations stemmed from "disgruntled former employees" and that it's confident "it will prevail at trial."
Lockheed made its own headlines in the mid 1980's when the Defense Department found the company was producing $640 toilet seats. For Hartung, the matter just seems too far removed from public oversight. "The Constitution says that civilians should be in charge of the militia, but the Bush administration has put a lot of corporate and military people in charge of the Pentagon," Hartung said. "Where's the watchdog? Who's going to hold these people accountable?"
Navy secretary Gordon England served as president of Lockheed's Fort Worth division, which will build the fighter planes. Bush's secretary of transportation, Norman Mineta, ditched his term as a Congressional representative to join the Lockheed team back in 1995. The undersecretary for the air force, Albert E. Smith, was a Lockheed vice president who oversaw the company's space program. And Vice President Dick Cheney's wife, Lynne, served on the Lockheed board of directors from 1994 to 2001? $120,000-a-year post she gave up shortly before her husband's inauguration.
Bruce Jackson, a current Lockheed vice president, served as financial chair and fundraiser for Bush's presidential campaign. At a 1999 conference, Jackson bragged that he would personally "write the Republican platform" on defense if the Texas governor made it to the Oval Office.
For over five years, Lockheed and Boeing battled for the contract. They spent millions building prototypes and millions wooing politicians. Since the 1999-2000 election cycle, Lockheed has spent $12,725,000 on lobbying and campaign contributions, with nearly $2 million going to the Republican Party, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Boeing, in contrast, spent $9.8 million on lobbying and campaign contributions, with some $1.9 million split almost evenly between the two parties.
"The defense industry is one of the major industries that enjoys close ties with the U.S. government," says Pete Eisner, managing director at the Center for Public Integrity. "It's a long-standing practice of revolving door, and it's not the first time the door's spun more than once. With Americans preoccupied with the war on terrorism, there should be heightened scrutiny on these contracts. They might be coming around the back door when we may not be giving it our full attention."
This story is part of the Voice's ongoing coverage of the war on terror. http://www.villagevoice.com/specials/war

http://www.phillyimc.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/26/1951228&mode=thread
WEARNICA - An International Day of Artistic Reactions to War
By Athomas Goldberg
132 Douglass Street, Brooklyn. NY 11217
718 858 7583
On May 3rd, in response to the U.N. cover-up of Picasso's famous anti-war mural, "Guernica", The Works on Shirts Project is staging "Wearnica" an international exhibition of artistic reactions to war created on the backs of white dress shirts to help "uncover" the realities of war in our time.

n May 3rd, 2003, The Works on Shirts Project invites you to take part in "WEARNICA", an international exhibition of artistic reactions to war. On the day of the event, participants in cities around the world will form walking art galleries, wearing original works they've created on the backs of white dress shirts into museums and monuments, parks and shopping malls to help raise public awareness of the realities of war in our time.
On February 5th, Colin Powell stood before the U. N. to make his case for a new resolution authorizing the U.S. to take military action against Iraq. Notably absent was Picasso's "Guernica", perhaps one of the the twentieth century's greatest, most unsettling artistic images depicting the brutal, self-destructive nature of war. Under pressure from the U.S. Government, The tapestry was covered prior to the Secretary of State's speech out of concern that the painting's message might speak to historical parallels that the Bush administration and UN officials were clearly determined that the media or the public should not make.

In response, the Works on Shirts Project has initiated this historic event to give people in the U.S. and around the world an opportunity to follow Picasso's example by publicly expressing their own personal reactions to the war in Iraq and continuing conflicts throughout the world.

Here's what YOU can do:

By staging an event in your area, making a financial contribution or just spreading the word, you can help send a message to the Bush administration, the U.N. and the world that the power of art to reveal the horrors of war and the promise of peace cannot be covered up.

The Idea is Simple:

By creating original war-inspired artwork that can be worn as clothing, it's possible to stage an art exhibition in any location open to the public. As long as the participants conform to the standard behavior for the general public in the space, the white dress shirts will visually tie the pieces together, and the images will speak for themselves.

Toronto Star art critic Peter Goddard wrote of the Guernica coverup: "If there is a war with Iraq, there's already been the first casualty — art." We can change that. Where one image has been silenced, a thousand may drown out the drums of war forever.

Those interested in learning more about this event and how they can participate should visit: http://www.worksonshirts.org

I'm sure it's a bunch of teenagers and not the CIA . . . I've been waiting for a long time for an independant english Arab news service and the propoganda police in Washington are making me wait even longer . . .

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1035779892677&call_pageid=968332188854&col=968350060724

It's been a difficult week for Al-Jazeera, the largest Arab satellite news network.

Al-Jazeera's new English-language Web site (english.aljazeera.net) launched Monday, was flooded with Internet traffic.

Whether that traffic came from hackers or was due to an abundance of interested readers is still unclear. But the net effect was the same: many Web surfers found they couldn't view the site yesterday.

Two Al-Jazeera reporters also had their credentials revoked by the New York Stock Exchange.

Al-Jazeera's English site was unavailable yesterday from four out of five locations in the U.S., said Roopak Patel, a senior analyst at Keynote Systems Inc., a San Mateo, Calif., company that tracks Web performance.

The site had experienced periods of very poor availability — which may have been caused by hackers, Patel said.

The Web host is based in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar. The servers that host the Al-Jazeera site are in France and the U.S. Ayman Arrashid, Internet system administrator at Horizons Media and Information Services, the site's Web host, said the attack began yesterday morning local time.

He said he could not determine the attack's origin, but only the U.S. servers were affected, leading him to suspect that the attackers were in the U.S.

The news network has faced much criticism from the United States for broadcasting Iraqi footage of five U.S. prisoners of war and at least eight dead Americans. The English-language Web site contained photos from the footage, which potentially also made it a target.

In what's known as a "denial-of-service" attack, hackers send bogus download requests to the target Web site so it is unavailable to the general public.

Nabil Hegazi, assistant to the managing editor of the English Web site, denied an attack was the reason the site was unavailable. He said it was difficult to access because of traffic that was almost four times more than expected.


Meanwhile, the New York Stock Exchange barred Al-Jazeera from broadcasting from its floor, citing a lack of space.

The network, which has broadcast from the facility for about five years, claimed the move was retaliation for its war reporting, and said it would seek an alternative venue, such as the Nasdaq Stock Market studio in Times Square.

Nasdaq spokesperson Scott Peterson said the request would be denied "in light of Al-Jazeera's recent conduct during the war ..."

With files from Star wire services

good articles from various media groups from AP to the LA Times to the London Guardian. check these sites out, always bringing fresh articles together in one (actually two) places:

www.commondreams.org

www.truthout.org

check them out. depressing, but necessary.

The punchline of this piece is that:

in 1995 Saddam's then-son-in-law, Lieut. Gen. Hussein Kamel, former minister of Iraq's military industry and the person in charge of its nuclear/chemical/biological programs, defected and provided what was deemed scrupulously accurate, detailed accounts of those weapons. that he had personal knowledge that Iraq had "destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them." To be sure, Kamel said, Iraq had not abandoned its WMD ambitions, had retained the design and engineering details, and was likely to return to production given an opportunity. But his last information was that Iraq's VX arsenal no longer existed.

Yet:
Kamel's information has been cited as central evidence and a key reason for attacking Iraq."

In his February 5 presentation to the UN Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell said: "It took years for Iraq to finally admit that it had produced four tons of the deadly nerve agent VX. A single drop of VX on the skin will kill in minutes. Four tons. The admission only came out after inspectors collected documentation as a result of the defection of Hussein Kamel, Saddam Hussein's late son-in-law."

So Powell blatantly omitted half of what Kamel told them, that the weapons were destroyed years ago.
Anyway here's the whole thing:

The Big Lie
by Russ Baker

How bad can things get, how fast? Are we already at the point where literally nothing can derail the war machine? That's exactly what some powerful media outlets seem to have decided, with predictable effects on public opinion and policy. In its March 3 issue, Newsweek disclosed that the Bush Administration had deliberately suppressed information exculpating Iraq--information from the same reliable source previously cited by the Administration as confirming that Iraq had developed weapons of mass destruction since the 1991 Gulf War. As damning as this disclosure was, Newsweek chose to underplay it, perhaps out of a belief that the Bush Administration's Big Lie techniques have become so pervasive that another instance of tendentious truth-twisting is no longer front-page news.

Here's the background: In the summer of 1995 Saddam's then-son-in-law, Lieut. Gen. Hussein Kamel, former minister of Iraq's military industry and the person in charge of its nuclear/chemical/biological programs, defected and provided what was deemed scrupulously accurate, detailed accounts of those weapons. Kamel's information has been cited as central evidence and a key reason for attacking Iraq. In his February 5 presentation to the UN Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell said: "It took years for Iraq to finally admit that it had produced four tons of the deadly nerve agent VX. A single drop of VX on the skin will kill in minutes. Four tons. The admission only came out after inspectors collected documentation as a result of the defection of Hussein Kamel, Saddam Hussein's late son-in-law."

But Newsweek's John Barry revealed that the Administration had excised a central component of Kamel's testimony--that he had personal knowledge that Iraq had "destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them." To be sure, Kamel said, Iraq had not abandoned its WMD ambitions, had retained the design and engineering details, and was likely to return to production given an opportunity. But his last information was that Iraq's VX arsenal no longer existed.

According to the story, UN inspectors had reasons to hush up this revelation, as they were trying to bluff Saddam into revealing more. But what is Powell's excuse for using only half of Kamel's claim? And why did Newsweek and the rest of the American media make so little of this major story?

Newsweek chose to run a short, 500-word item in its "Periscope" section rather than put the story on the cover or make it the focal point of a longer article showing that the Bush Administration is rushing to war for no reason at all.

I was curious why Newsweek did not think this warranted a more muscular presentation. Communications director Ken Weine argued that the mag breaks many of its best stories in short sections like "Periscope," citing as an example a brief piece two years ago showing that Sony had fabricated print movie reviews, a piece, he noted, that garnered worldwide attention.

But fake movie reviews flacking dubious entertainment and fake missile reviews flacking a war in which thousands may die are two different things entirely, and it is a sad comment on the media that such comparisons would even be made.

Newsweek, and Barry in particular, deserve kudos for bringing this important item to the public's attention at all. But if Newsweek's editors had the guts to put something like this on the cover, with the kind of dramatic headline they use for lesser subjects, they could really affect the debate. Instead, that issue of Newsweek featured a cover story on the African-American gender gap in jobs, education and other areas--a worthy story, but nothing that could not have waited a week.

For what it's worth, one insider explained that Newsweek has changed and no longer tries to shake the earth on major issues of the day, preferring to tweak the zeitgeist on softer things or muse elegantly about the "big picture" behind the details.

Perhaps it's not surprising that other media failed to pick up on the Kamel story: The big papers and magazines hate to acknowledge they've been scooped by competitors. Of course, you might think they'd want to outdo Newsweek with some hard-hitting inquiries of their own. You'd be wrong. It's not that the American media have ignored Iraq--obviously, it's been a near-obsession. But in the absence of intrepid investigative reporting and editorial courage, they smothered the audience in inconsequential material about the most consequential of topics.

The Hussein Kamel revelation is probably the biggest Iraq story to get punted, but it isn't the only significant example. It's worth noting that British revelations that the National Security Agency spied on diplomats representing UN Security Council members during the Iraq deliberations got a small mention in the Washington Post and prompted no questions at Bush's press conference. Another revelation, that a British government employee was arrested for allegedly leaking this information, which Daniel Ellsberg says is more timely and potentially more important than his own Pentagon Papers in informing the public, again got little notice in this country. And the unprecedented resignations of two career US diplomats over Iraq policy hasn't generated any noteworthy examinations of how people inside the government really feel about the race to hostilities.

Cumulatively, Barry's item on Kamel, the revelation that Colin Powell was citing a graduate student's thesis as British "intelligence" and a new revelation that more British "evidence" of Iraqi nuclear arms development cited by the Administration was (according to weapons inspectors themselves) fabricated suggest that a monstrous Big Lie is in process--an effort to construct falsified evidence and to trick this country and the world.

How's that for zeitgeist material, Newsweek?

Boy did we miss Saddam! http://www.iraqpeaceteam.org/pages/al_kindi_hospital.html

These are people dying at our taxpayer hands and 70% approval ratings. http://www.nationalphilistine.com/

How the hell do you know if these people were injured from US missiles? It's from an Iraqi site against war, of course they'll blame it on the US... I'm not saying it's absolutely not the US that did these things, but with all the other possibilities such as totally non-war-related injuries, a misguided Iraqi missile, or make-up being used, and it being an Iraqi anti-war site, you might not want to blame the US for every single report like this.

God, you’re more willing to assume that during a time of war hospitals are full of people wearing makeup to fake injuries rather than concede that the US/British forces are killing civilians. talk about deluded

you're more than willing to believe everything off an iraqi anti-war site during war time...

What, you mean in contrast to believing all the stuff the networks and the government tell us? So tell us, where do YOU get your objective info? Just wondering, cuz I'd like to see for myself. Thanks.

http://www.markfiore.com/animation/liberation.html


_____________________________
peace.
wisdom.
sanity.
clarity.
justice.

"The best way to support 'our boys' is to create enough dissent that will pressure the leadership of this country to end this illegal and immoral war." ~okp HoChiGrimm

www.poetsagainstthewar.org

man, is this for real? Wow.

than it was before, no

and the "president" we put in is living in london or something right now because of the price on his head.

_____________________________
peace.
wisdom.
sanity.
clarity.
justice.

"The best way to support 'our boys' is to create enough dissent that will pressure the leadership of this country to end this illegal and immoral war." ~okp HoChiGrimm

www.poetsagainstthewar.org

while the US troops take time out to shoot each other instead:

"There have also been reports that dozens of US Marines were injured by other American troops in the clashes around the town of Nasiriya.

As many as 37 Marines are believed to have been injured, some critically.

Reports from the area suggest that two US units sent to attack a group of Iraqis firing on them ended up shooting at each other instead of the hostile troops."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/1/hi/world/middle_east/2890523.stm

But the war is....
Anybody else have a problem with how the media is scrambling to get the "scoop"? How immoral is it for a televised version of murder in armed conflict, and to have all these taglines like " Showdown with Saddam"and "Shock and Awe" does it seem 2 u that it's licensing that pretty soon they'll have action figures depicting the key players as "G.I. Joe & Cobra" Anybody like this sh*t like Dan Rather or whoever the f*ck his name is reporting from the front lines? I don't know but it just seems like it's got a watered down effect that people can't see.
I was watching that shock & awe thing and all these people around me were hooting & hollering and I was the only one who realized right away we were watching actual human death. Noone else saw that.I had to say something to a couple of people andthen they were so cavalier about it it didn't seem real. Might as well have been a movie or made for t.v. movie.

War with Iraq As seen on T.V. God help us all

Trying to get a good response I ain't ignorin ya Sampaguita but I need some good input on reactions on the corproate side...It isn't that that is my only news source (corporate t.v.) but for a lot of people it is. And that's what i'm tryin ta tap into...

I recall a news item, maybe 1-2 months old that was a transcript of a Kate Adie Interview with a Irish Radio station. Kate Adie a veteran war reporter with the BBC had announced that she would not be reporting for the BBC on the invasion of Iraq but would now be reporting as an independent news reporter, behind a desk. In the interview she explained actions being taken by the US military they informed her that any independent news reporter attempting to transmit reports not cleared by the US military would be considered as a legitimate hostile target. See:
http://www.ccmep.org/2003_articles/Iraq/031003_pentagaon_threatens_to_kill_inde.htm
Also I heard a rumor last night expressed from an ex editor of Japan Times on CCTV9 (English Language Chinese channel on satellite TV) that the ITN news crew that were killed as a result of 'friendly fire' were NOT being pursued by Iraqi vehicles (as reported by mainstream press) and therefore mistaken as part of an Iraqi convoy. Apparently the ITN crew, with translator, were discovered by the US 'all seeing eyes' to have met with a Iraqi force and had recorded interviews showing how the Iraqi military were experiencing the conflict. The rumor has it that the US military then decided that the ITN crew were considered as a 'legitimate hostile target', as per Kate Adie's statement above, and were targeted and killed before retuning to transmit their report. Note: no evidence of the pursuing Iraqi vehicles or the bodies of the ITN crew have been found. the operation has been cleaned up by the US 'special forces' and all main stream media reporting concerning this incident has been silent

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-2510806,00.html

Kick in the ass ain't it...Also the presidents papers are declassified like 20 or so years after he leaves office,
with our current pres., he has signed an order last year or '01 that pres. may deny access to his presidential papers. leaving them to be sealed FoReVeR & eVeR. What is this guy hiding?

Of cours if he does deny access, we will never know everything about 9/11, which is truly disheartening.

******************************
I'm not a gangster/ not a thug, nor a blood or crip/ strugglin brotha tryin hard to get rich/ Pete Rock
******************************
Only after the last tree has been cut down
Only after the last fish has been caught
Only after the last river has been poisoned
Only then will you realize that money cannot be eaten
Sitting Bull

.

I put this in another post but since there is no traffic appearing there I will say it here:
I think the powers of the military should only be granted to one man, IF he is elected by the popular vote, and not given the powers by a judicial body, like an election for the president and an election for military commander. Maybe thats too improbable but it might work out better.

******************************
I'm not a gangster/ not a thug, nor a blood or crip/ strugglin brotha tryin hard to get rich/ Pete Rock
******************************
Only after the last tree has been cut down
Only after the last fish has been caught
Only after the last river has been poisoned
Only then will you realize that money cannot be eaten
Sitting Bull

From Buzzflash.com:


The Perfect War

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

This is the Bush Cartel's Perfect War

With virtual full control of the images and messages that make their way through the spigot of television, the Bush Cartel has lied its way into a war that America would have opposed had it known the true facts.

Using doctored documents, aged studies, pulsating scare alerts, and an onslaught of outright lies (leading Americans to believe that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and that the hijackers were Iraqi, for instance), the Bush Cartel has created the perfect war.

Every way it turns, it only sees benefits for its incipient creation of a one-party, police state government in which the federal government and crony capitalism merge into one seamless entity.

Take Bush's little war, for instance. Bush uses a volunteer army, filled -- in part -- with many young men and women who couldn't find decent paying jobs because of the shambles our Bush economy is in, to destroy a nation's infrastructure. The Bush Cartel conducts a secret contracting process, including a large no-bid contract for Dick Cheney's Halliburton, that dispenses million and billion dollar fees to Bush/GOP campaign contributors. The more of Iraq that is destroyed, the larger the contracts dispensed to corporate sponsors of the Bush royal dynasty. The larger the fees paid, the more that returns in the form of contributions to Bush and the GOP. It's a grand scam, ain't it? It's too bad our young men and women -- and thousands of Iraqis -- have to die in the process. But everything has its costs, right?

Of course, then there is the gain of perpetual rule to the radical right wing -- their most fervent dream. The Bush Cartel has used propaganda techniques worthy of Goebbels to instill an unrelenting state of fear in Americans, producing an agitated psychological condition in which almost no other issue other than the urge for self-survival dominates the national agenda. Not only does this prevent any discussion of Bush's ruinous two-year effect on our economy, it also allows the Bush Cartel to pass extremist legislation in a Republican Congress controlled by GOP leadership who are radical ideologues (including the truly psychotic Tom DeLay).

And of course, a weakened economy means more volunteers for the military (because of lack of jobs). That means more cannon fodder for more wars. That means a larger military budget. That means billions of dollars that needs to be cut from social services, Medicare and social security (all creations of Satan, according to the right wing extremists running the Bush Cartel.) That means more contracts to corporate contributors as the military is increasingly privatized. That means a shrinking federal government, with the exception of the military, the executive branch, "homeland security," and a growing national police force. That means a dismantling of our sacred Constitution in the name of "national security."

Anyone who is an expert on the Islamic world (we are not talking about the self-appointed right wing chickenhawk administration and media pundits) believes that Bush's Iraq war will lead to more terrorist attacks, not fewer. (See: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/oped/chi-0303260147mar26,1,2651219.story) This means, when the next terrorist attack comes, Bush will further consolidate police and investigative powers in a cloak of executive branch secrecy, with the passage of Patriot Act II. It is almost impossible now to expose the betraying acts of the Bush Cartel, because any leak of the truth could likely subject such a patriot to a charge of aiding terrorists. By creating more terrorists, the Bush Cartel will be ensuring its own perpetual survival. Anyone who believes that what BuzzFlash is saying here is an extremist conspiracy theory is a fool. If you don't think that this is what is in the back of Karl Rove's mind and some other of the Bush Cartel strategists, you are a fool.

Whenever an act of terrorism occurs, people will again fully support Bush, no matter his perfidy, because they have, it would appear to them, no one else to turn to.

Remember that the goal of the Bush Cartel, like a crime family, is the consolidation of power and monopoly control over markets. For a crime family, this is usually control over an area for the purposes of selling drugs, stolen goods, and prostitution. For the Bush Cartel, it is the control or acquisition of new markets that can be awarded as "concessions" to its campaign contributors. If you think this is an outrageous accusation, please explain the secret contracting process for "rebuilding" Iraq. Please explain how Halliburton got a no-bid contract. Please explain why the American and British oil companies will split up the oil fields. Please explain the secret Cheney energy plan meetings with energy providers. Please explain the benefits that will accrue to the Carlyle group. Please explain the proposed Unocal pipeline in Afghanistan.

What they will do with Iraq is what they have already begun to do with America: divide up the nation's assets (through deregulation, corporate consolidation, government contracts and privatization of the federal workforce) to contributors.

And what about the media? The corporate media is a megaphone for the Bush Cartel game plan, because they too benefit from the corporate cronyism that infects the White House like a cancer. Take for instance Clear Channel, which is using its vast radio station empire to rev up anger against antiwar protesters. Clear Channel also owns a national billboard company. We wonder if Clear Channel gets any military contracts for recruiting on any of those billboards? Does anyone have an answer for that? Are Clear Channel executives big Bush Cartel financial supporters? Maybe someone has an answer for that, too.

Clear Channel is heading a nationally organized campaign "to support our troops." Their effort is part of what appears to be a White House orchestrated effort to imply that anyone who challenges the war is betraying our men and women in uniform. Of course, this is meant to divert attention from the fact that our men and women in uniform are dying and being captured in Iraq due to an ill-begotten war and inept strategy. But that won't stop the "patriotic" war cries of the national media ownership that benefits from Bush's efforts to further deregulate ownership regulation (and thus increase profits).

There are so many ways that this is a "perfect war" for the cynical power mongers who control our nation. It would take a much longer piece than this editorial to enumerate them all.

For instance, the Bush Cartel's partnership of deception and fear mongering with the mainstream media, built upon a foundation of corporate cronyism, has managed to keep even the most bizarre and macabre statements and viewpoints of this administration from emerging as national scandals.

Take one Harlan Ullman, for instance. He is the "creator" of the now perversely celebrated "shock and awe" theory. The Bush Cartel was so successful in gaining mainstream acceptance for this thinly veiled term for a rain of death and destruction that the bombing of Baghdad was greeted with the "Oohs" and "Aahs" normally reserved for a Fourth of July fireworks display. Television commentators on CNN and FOX, among other stations, referred to the bombing as breathtaking and exciting. The Chicago Sun-Times ran a headline, "Awestruck."

But Mr. Ullman described his theory in more basic terms:

That iteration is based on the "selective, instant decapitation of military or societal targets to achieve shock and awe," Ullman writes.

He cites a story in which Sun Tzu was asked to prove his military skills by turning the king's concubines into a marching troop. At first the concubines laughed at Sun Tzu. Then, the story goes, he ordered the head cut off the lead concubine in front of the others.

The women still balked, so Sun Tzu ordered a second decapitation, and the women soon were marching with precision

(See: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0303240208mar24,1,5059964.story?coll=chi%2Dnewsnationworld%2Dhed)

Of course, barely an editorial word has been expended on the grotesque analogy that is the basis for our bombing of Baghdad. Newspaper editorials in America are too busy denouncing the barbarism of Saddam Hussein to take issue with the perverse infatuation with death of the Bush Cartel. In the age of "shock and awe," nothing is any longer shocking.

As we have said from 9/11 on, everyone in America is opposed to terrorism. It's not a question of whether or not one is against terrorism -- although that is the way the Bush Cartel tries to frame it. It's not a question of whether or not Saddam is a bad man (a man who Rumsfeld, senior Bush and Reagan all supported in the '80's); everyone agrees he is.

The question is whether or not the current White House leadership is looking out for the best interests of the American people or their own best interests.

To us, the answer is clear. We remember Jonestown.

We aren't going to drink the Bush Cartel Kool Aid.

*GOOD FOR HIM!!!!!!!!!!*

http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20030327-052846-4480r

UNITED NATIONS, March 27 (UPI) -- U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte walked out of the U.N. Security Council Thursday in protest to remarks by Baghdad's envoy that Washington sought to destroy the Iraqi people.

The incident occurred at the end of two days of speeches by about 80 members of the world organization before the 15-member council as Iraq's Ambassador Mohammed Aldouri thanked the majority of speakers and criticized the U.S.-led coalition.

"The United States and the United Kingdom were hoodwinked when they were told that the Iraqi people would receive them with flowers and hugs," he said. "The Iraqi people, the women, the students, the peasants are now facing the American and United Kingdom forces in Iraq today. Therefore, when the United States found itself before a fierce resistance of the Iraqi people who are keen of their independence and the sovereignty and when they know that the Iraqi people and the Muslim people all over the world support it and call upon it to resist, the United States has started to destroy this Iraqi people."

Then, Negroponte and some aides got up and left the council chamber.

Afterward, a reporter asked, "Did you personally get up and leave the room during Ambassador Aldouri's speech to show your rejection of his statement?"

Negroponte responded, "I did sit through quite a long part of what he had to say but I think that -- I'd heard enough after a certain amount of time and I didn't hear anything new in what he had to say. And of course, I don't accept any of the kinds of allegations and preposterous propositions that he put forward."

What Negroponte didn't hear, was Aldouri's continuing allegations, among others, of the allies targeting residential areas.

"The United States will destroy the Iraqi people because they hate it and because they will resist it and because they will pay the price in blood to get it out," said Aldouri. "The Iraqi people will defend the principles of the United Nations and all your (Security Council member's) principles, the principles of peace and security.

"Therefore, I call upon the Security Council that the United Kingdom the United States and Australia are about to start a real war of extermination that will kill everything."

Behind the scenes, members of the council were negotiating a new humanitarian program for the people of Iraq, by revamping the so-called oil-for-food program.

The program's problem is not that any nations are against getting humanitarian goods to Iraq's people, but that some council members fear the wording of a re-worked resolution could legitimize the U.S.-led invasion. A resolution was expected to come out of the talks later Thursday.

Also later Thursday, U.N Secretary-General Kofi Annan was to meet with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who was stopping in New York on his way back to London from talks with U.S. President George W. Bush.

"The war is very important," Aldouri continued in his closing remarks. "It is the cause that leads to this deteriorating humanitarian situation. I call upon you all to move towards taking a resolution to halt the war, to halt the aggression and to rid the Iraqi people of what they are facing."

He added promises that "The Iraqi peoples are committed to the Geneva Conventions and the provisions of international humanitarian law and they will see nothing from Iraq except self defense and defending of its people, its sovereignty and its independence."

but one w/ a ring of truth. from: http://www.theonion.com/onion3911/dead_iraqi.html

BAGHDAD, IRAQ—Baghdad resident Taha Sabri, killed Monday in a U.S. air strike on his city, would have loved the eventual liberation of Iraq and establishment of democracy, had he lived to see it, his grieving widow said.

"Taha was a wonderful man, a man of peace," his wife Sawssan said. "I just know he would have been happy to see free elections here in Iraq, had that satellite-guided Tomahawk cruise missile not strayed off course and hit our home."

A shoemaker and father of five, Sabri, 44, was listening to the radio at 3 a.m. when a missile launched from a U.S. warship in the Persian Gulf veered off course and struck just feet from his house. Sawssan was away at the time, tending to an ailing aunt in the Baghdad suburb of Mansour.

"My husband was no fan of Saddam," Sawssan said. "He felt he was a terrible despot. If the Americans do drive him from power, it will be that much more of a shame that they killed Taha."

~~~~~

i'm sorry, but when i hear on the news that there's tons of "humanitarian aid" on a british ship in the port of umm qasr and then right after, "this follows a massive bombing campaign launched last night..."

*blink*

if we'd gotten that aid in there BEFORE we started blowing them to smithereens....

vietnam.

but y'all don't hear me...

this just gets more & more surreal....

http://www.boston.com/dailynews/086/wash/Former_Pentagon_official_Richa:.shtml

http://www.ariannaonline.com/columns/files/032603.html

Former Pentagon Official Richard Perle resigns as Key Rumsfeld Adviser
By Robert Burns
Associated Press

Thursday 27 March 2003

WASHINGTON -- Richard Perle, a former Reagan administration Pentagon official, resigned Thursday as chairman of the Defense Policy Board that is a key advisory arm for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

In a brief written statement, Rumsfeld thanked Perle for his service and made no mention of why Perle resigned. He said he had asked Perle to remain as a member of the board.

''He has been an excellent chairman and has led the Defense Policy Board during an important time in our history,'' Rumsfeld said. ''I should add that I have known Richard Perle for many years and know him to be a man of integrity and honor.''

Perle was an assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan administration. He took the advisory board chairman's post early in Rumsfeld's tenure.

Perle became embroiled in a recent controversy stemming from a New Yorker magazine article that said he had lunch in January with controversial Saudi-born businessman Adnan Khashoggi and a Saudi industrialist.

The industrialist, Harb Saleh Zuhair, was interested in investing in a venture capital firm, Trireme Partners, of which Perle is a managing partner. Nothing ever came of the lunch in Marseilles; no investment was made. But the New Yorker story, written by Seymour M. Hersh, suggested that Perle, a longtime critic of the Saudi regime, was inappropriately mixing business and politics.

Perle called the report preposterous and ''monstrous.''

Perle, 61, was so strongly opposed to nuclear arms control agreements with the former Soviet Union during his days in the Reagan administration that he became known as ''the Prince of Darkness.''



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

Having Your Souffle And Eating It Too
Arianna Huffington

Wednesday 26 March 2003

For years now, political reformers have been railing against the unseemly -- and rampant -- practice of former government officials pouring through Washington's golden revolving door only to return a short time later as well-paid lobbyists, auctioning off their access and influence.

Well, compared to the latest trend, turns out those were the good old days. Today's new breed of public servants prefers to cash in while still stalking the halls of power and deeply involved in the highest levels of creating public policy.

Talk about eating your cake and having it too.

On second thought, better make that "eating your soufflé," because Richard Perle -- a close advisor to Don Rumsfeld whose side obsession has been to open a chain of souffle restaurants -- has taken this double-dipping scam to a whole new level.

As chairman of the Pentagon's influential Defense Policy Board -- a position that is unpaid but still subject to government ethics rules -- Perle has been the frothing pit bull of the Bush administration's dogs of war. At the same time, he is the managing partner of Trireme Partners, a firm that specializes in homeland security and defense, and serves on the Board of Directors of Autonomy, a software company whose clients include the Defense and Homeland Security Departments.

Perle's latest deal finds him on the payroll of Global Crossing. The bankrupt telecommunications company is struggling to win government approval for its proposed sale to Asian investors. The Defense Department and the FBI are both opposed to the $250 million deal since it would place Global's fiber optic network -- which is used by the U.S. government -- under the control of Hutchison Whampoa, a Hong Kong firm with close ties to those freedom loving folks in Beijing.

Enter Richard Perle. Global is hoping he can convince his good buddies in the Defense Department to put their national security concerns aside and let the dicey deal go through. And Perle is clearly confident that he can deliver: In a highly unusual arrangement for a Washington gun-for-hire, he's agreed to make $600,000 of his $725,000 fee contingent on his bringing home the bacon.

I guess he figures: Hey, I convinced the president to toss aside 200 years of historical precedent and launch a preemptive war despite the trepidation of the majority of the world, how hard can it be to persuade a few government bureaucrats -- including my old pal Rummy -- to look the other way while I do an end-run around the public interest and bank a quick 725 grand? After all, you know what they say about casting Perles before swine.

This sleazy state of affairs has caught the eye -- and turned the stomach -- of Rep. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, who has called on the Defense Department to investigate whether Perle's business dealings constitute a conflict of interest.

During his years in the Reagan administration, Perle was dubbed the Prince of Darkness because of his hard-line stance on national security issues. But I suppose when you toss nearly three-quarters of a million dollars into the mix, the gloomy Prince is more than happy to click on his halogen nightlight and refashion his hard-line into a squiggle.

Adding insult to injury is the fact that Perle's windfall is coming from the coffers of a disgraced company that was among the worst of the corporate crooks. He's lining his pockets at the expense of the 10,000 laid-off Global employees who saw $32 million in severance pay wiped out -- and the shareholders who lost $57 billion in equity -- when the company declared bankruptcy.

The hubris is unfathomable. In legal documents drafted in connection with the proposed Global sale, Perle couldn't have been clearer about what the telecom company would be buying with its fat fee. "As chairman of the Defense Policy Board," declared Perle in an affidavit, "I have a unique perspective on and intimate knowledge of the national defense and security issues" likely to be raised by the governmental review of the sale. Knowledge, he pointedly pointed out, "that is not and could not be available" to the other lobbyists trying to get the deal approved.

In other words: "I've got Rumsfeld's ear and access to all sorts of super-top secret information that none of these other jokers on your payroll do. I know more. I can do more. So I'm worth more." And he had the unmitigated chutzpah to put this all in writing. And sign it. I guess this is what the Bush administration means by "transparency." And, to Perle’s credit, the whole thing is pretty transparent.

But, of course, when reporters began sniffing around the deal, Perle's power plumage shriveled up faster than George in the "shrinkage" episode of Seinfeld.

First he tried the classic Bush administration Plan A -- the simple, 180 degree lie. He just told reporters that he never signed the statement. That didn’t work, so onto Plan B -- claiming ignorance, admitting that he had signed it but insisting he hadn’t read it. Finally, no doubt realizing this all sounded a bit too much like "the dog ate my affidavit," Perle declared that none of it mattered anyway, since his position on the DPB actually, now that you mention it, had "nothing to do" with the Global deal -- so how could he possibly be using his public office for private gain?

So when there's money to be had, Perle's position at the Defense Policy Board affords him "a unique perspective" on advising Global Crossing, but when ethical questions are raised, his Defense Policy Board post has "nothing to do" with his work for the telecom company.

And this is the guy our president is putting his trust in when it comes to waging war on Iraq?

Perle's abuse of the public interest is in a class by itself, but he is far from the only one in Washington shaping public policy from the inside while skirting the ethics rules designed to keep people from cashing in on their positions of power.

Among the most prominent of the double-dippers are Karen Hughes, who continues to serve as one of the president's most trusted advisers while pulling in $15,000 a month as a "consultant" to the Republican National Committee; RNC Chairman Marc Racicot, a double-dip pioneer, who famously decided to forgo tradition after being elected party chairman in 2002 and hang on to his day job as a high-powered corporate lobbyist for companies such as Enron; and Haley Barbour, the former head of the RNC, who has unabashedly decided to continue working as a lobbyist for clients such as Citigroup, DamierChrysler, Lockheed Martin, and Nestle at the same time he is running for Governor of Mississippi.

It seems that after failing in their attempts to privatize social security, Republicans have decided to privatize public service.

the news this morning.

i'm looking at a picture (i'm told) of a british ship loaded with "tons" of humanitarian aid in the port of umm qasr (sp?). and then about how this is all about the iraqi people, really & truly....

and all this is overlapped w/ pictures of

people searching thru the rubble of their homes

a beautiful, bald little girl--apparently from cancer

a child w/ a smudged face looking forward angrily as people take pictures of him

people walking down a street w/ half the buildings destroyed....

...oh & this aid is mentioned in the same breath as i'm told about another massive bombing campaign being launched last night....almost as an afterthought.

they need to decide how they want to play this.
either tell the story lopsided & consistently so

or stop trying to put a cute face on it to make people feel better.

it's making me ill.

.

Of course the US won't lose the war, because the US has nukes, and push come to shove, that could end it all. So the issue isn't winning and losing. Its odd because all of a sudden, an awkward patriotism has overcome me--NOT BECAUSE I AM FOR THE WAR, but because all of a sudden, I fear for the American troops over there--I just picture them lined up, marching toward this bloody encounter in Baghdad and I start to feel a little sympathy for them.

No?

I mean, when the US generals are starting to openly admit to the US military underestimating the opposition, I start to worry.



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

www.iraqbodycount.net

Wolfowitz has said they're not releasing the number of american casualties. Why not?

>www.iraqbodycount.net
>
>Wolfowitz has said they're not releasing the number of
>american casualties. Why not?

Could it be just maybe anti-war protesters would be joined by pro-war protesters that get too large calling for an end to the war.

Months back on the news a guest,whoever made a statement kinda like a as usual statement,"that the only way to possibly end the war is when the body bags start coming home".

I was asked to move this here...I'd feel bad copying the whole thing out in a thread (it's really long), but if anyone's interested, salon.com has compiled a group of articles from all over the world about the War on Iraq...it can be found at:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2003/03/27/world3_27/print.html

I found this powerful, from a Saudi Arabian editorial in the Arabian News:
The reality of war is always death and destruction. It always spews out dead bodies ... torn, twisted and charred bodies ... and legions of injured and maimed. It always creates prisoners of war. It always leaves in its wake homes reduced to rubble, lives blighted, families destroyed. It always brings suffering and misery, disease and hunger. It is not a computer game or a movie where, when it is over, we can get up and go and have a meal and a laugh. It is horrible and evil ... which is why it must always be the very last resort ... something that so many governments, so many people, told Washington and London, but something that they ignored ... so convinced were they that it could be played and won with computer-like efficiency.

long article, but brings up some important points & worth the read

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0304.marshall.html

http://truthout.org/docs_03/032903B.shtml

Practice to Deceive
By Joshua Micah Marshall
The Washington Monthly

Thursday 27 March 2003

Chaos in the Middle East is not the Bush hawks' nightmare scenario--it's their plan.

Imagine it's six months from now. The Iraq war is over. After an initial burst of joy and gratitude at being liberated from Saddam's rule, the people of Iraq are watching, and waiting, and beginning to chafe under American occupation. Across the border, in Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, our conquering presence has brought street protests and escalating violence. The United Nations and NATO are in disarray, so America is pretty much on its own. Hemmed in by budget deficits at home and limited financial assistance from allies, the Bush administration is talking again about tapping Iraq's oil reserves to offset some of the costs of the American presence--talk that is further inflaming the region. Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence has discovered fresh evidence that, prior to the war, Saddam moved quantities of biological and chemical weapons to Syria. When Syria denies having such weapons, the administration starts massing troops on the Syrian border. But as they begin to move, there is an explosion: Hezbollah terrorists from southern Lebanon blow themselves up in a Baghdad restaurant, killing dozens of Western aid workers and journalists. Knowing that Hezbollah has cells in America, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge puts the nation back on Orange Alert. FBI agents start sweeping through mosques, with a new round of arrests of Saudis, Pakistanis, Palestinians, and Yemenis.

To most Americans, this would sound like a frightening state of affairs, the kind that would lead them to wonder how and why we had got ourselves into this mess in the first place. But to the Bush administration hawks who are guiding American foreign policy, this isn't the nightmare scenario. It's everything going as anticipated.

In their view, invasion of Iraq was not merely, or even primarily, about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Nor was it really about weapons of mass destruction, though their elimination was an important benefit. Rather, the administration sees the invasion as only the first move in a wider effort to reorder the power structure of the entire Middle East. Prior to the war, the president himself never quite said this openly. But hawkish neoconservatives within his administration gave strong hints. In February, Undersecretary of State John Bolton told Israeli officials that after defeating Iraq, the United States would "deal with" Iran, Syria, and North Korea. Meanwhile, neoconservative journalists have been channeling the administration's thinking. Late last month, The Weekly Standard's Jeffrey Bell reported that the administration has in mind a "world war between the United States and a political wing of Islamic fundamentalism ... a war of such reach and magnitude the invasion of Iraq, or the capture of top al Qaeda commanders, should be seen as tactical events in a series of moves and countermoves stretching well into the future."

In short, the administration is trying to roll the table--to use U.S. military force, or the threat of it, to reform or topple virtually every regime in the region, from foes like Syria to friends like Egypt, on the theory that it is the undemocratic nature of these regimes that ultimately breeds terrorism. So events that may seem negative--Hezbollah for the first time targeting American civilians; U.S. soldiers preparing for war with Syria--while unfortunate in themselves, are actually part of the hawks' broader agenda. Each crisis will draw U.S. forces further into the region and each countermove in turn will create problems that can only be fixed by still further American involvement, until democratic governments--or, failing that, U.S. troops--rule the entire Middle East.

There is a startling amount of deception in all this--of hawks deceiving the American people, and perhaps in some cases even themselves. While it's conceivable that bold American action could democratize the Middle East, so broad and radical an initiative could also bring chaos and bloodshed on a massive scale. That all too real possibility leads most establishment foreign policy hands, including many in the State Department, to view the Bush plan with alarm. Indeed, the hawks' record so far does not inspire confidence. Prior to the invasion, for instance, they predicted that if the United States simply announced its intention to act against Saddam regardless of how the United Nations voted, most of our allies, eager to be on our good side, would support us. Almost none did. Yet despite such grave miscalculations, the hawks push on with their sweeping new agenda.

Like any group of permanent Washington revolutionaries fueled by visions of a righteous cause, the neocons long ago decided that criticism from the establishment isn't a reason for self-doubt but the surest sign that they're on the right track. But their confidence also comes from the curious fact that much of what could go awry with their plan will also serve to advance it. A full-scale confrontation between the United States and political Islam, they believe, is inevitable, so why not have it now, on our terms, rather than later, on theirs? Actually, there are plenty of good reasons not to purposely provoke a series of crises in the Middle East. But that's what the hawks are setting in motion, partly on the theory that the worse things get, the more their approach becomes the only plausible solution.

Moral Cloudiness

Ever since the neocons burst upon the public policy scene 30 years ago, their movement has been a marriage of moral idealism, military assertiveness, and deception. Back in the early 1970s, this group of then-young and still mostly Democratic political intellectuals grew alarmed by the post-Vietnam Democrats' seeming indifference to the Soviet threat. They were equally appalled, however, by the amoral worldview espoused by establishment Republicans like Henry Kissinger, who sought co-existence with the Soviet Union. As is often the case with ex-socialists, the neocons were too familiar with communist tactics to ignore or romanticize communism's evils. The fact that many neocons were Jewish, and outraged by Moscow's increasingly visible persecution of Jews, also caused them to reject both the McGovernite and Kissingerian tendencies to ignore such abuses.

In Ronald Reagan, the neocons found a politician they could embrace. Like them, Reagan spoke openly about the evils of communism and, at least on the peripheries of the Cold War, preferred rollback to coexistence. Neocons filled the Reagan administration, and men like Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Frank Gaffney, and others provided the intellectual ballast and moral fervor for the sharp turn toward confrontation that the United States adopted in 1981.

But achieving moral clarity often requires hiding certain realities. From the beginning, the neocons took a much more alarmist view of Soviet capacities and intentions than most experts. As late as 1980, the ur-neocon Norman Podhoretz warned of the imminent "Finlandization of America, the political and economic subordination of the United States to superior Soviet power," even raising the possibility that America's only options might be "surrender or war." We now know, of course, that U.S. intelligence estimates, which many neocons thought underestimated the magnitude and durability of Soviet power, in fact wildly overestimated them.

This willingness to deceive--both themselves and others--expanded as neocons grew more comfortable with power. Many spent the Reagan years orchestrating bloody wars against Soviet proxies in the Third World, portraying thugs like the Nicaraguan Contras and plain murderers like Jonas Savimbi of Angola as "freedom fighters." The nadir of this deceit was the Iran-Contra scandal, for which Podhoretz's son-in-law, Elliot Abrams, pled guilty to perjury. Abrams was later pardoned by Bush's father, and today, he runs Middle East policy in the Bush White House.

But in the end, the Soviet Union did fall. And the hawks' policy of confrontation did contribute to its collapse. So too, of course, did the economic and military rot most of the hawks didn't believe in, and the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev, whom neocons such as Richard Perle counseled Reagan not to trust. But the neocons did not dwell on what they got wrong. Rather, the experience of having played a hand in the downfall of so great an evil led them to the opposite belief: that it's okay to be spectacularly wrong, even brazenly deceptive about the details, so long as you have moral vision and a willingness to use force.
What happened in the 1990s further reinforced that mindset. Hawks like Perle and William Kristol pulled their hair out when Kissingerians like Brent Scowcroft and Colin Powell left Saddam's regime in place after the first Gulf War.

They watched with mounting fury as terrorist attacks by Muslim fundamentalists claimed more and more American and Israeli lives. They considered the Oslo accords an obvious mistake (how can you negotiate with a man like Yasir Arafat?), and as the decade progressed they became increasingly convinced that there was a nexus linking burgeoning terrorism and mounting anti-Semitism with repressive but nominally "pro-American" regimes like Saudi Arabia and Egypt. In 1996, several of the hawks--including Perle--even tried to sell Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the idea that Israel should attack Saddam on its own--advice Netanyahu wisely declined. When the Oslo process crumbled and Saudi Arabian terrorists killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11, the hawks felt, not without some justification, that they had seen this danger coming all along, while others had ignored it. The timing was propitious, because in September 2001 many already held jobs with a new conservative president willing to hear their pitch.

Prime Minister bin Laden

The pitch was this: The Middle East today is like the Soviet Union 30 years ago. Politically warped fundamentalism is the contemporary equivalent of communism or fascism. Terrorists with potential access to weapons of mass destruction are like an arsenal pointed at the United States. The primary cause of all this danger is the Arab world's endemic despotism, corruption, poverty, and economic stagnation. Repressive regimes channel dissent into the mosques, where the hopeless and disenfranchised are taught a brand of Islam that combines anti-modernism, anti-Americanism, and a worship of violence that borders on nihilism. Unable to overthrow their own authoritarian rulers, the citizenry turns its fury against the foreign power that funds and supports these corrupt regimes to maintain stability and access to oil: the United States. As Johns Hopkins University professor Fouad Ajami recently wrote in Foreign Affairs, "The great indulgence granted to the ways and phobias of Arabs has reaped a terrible harvest"--terrorism. Trying to "manage" this dysfunctional Islamic world, as Clinton attempted and Colin Powell counsels us to do, is as foolish, unproductive, and dangerous as détente was with the Soviets, the hawks believe. Nor is it necessary, given the unparalleled power of the American military. Using that power to confront Soviet communism led to the demise of that totalitarianism and the establishment of democratic (or at least non-threatening) regimes from the Black Sea to the Baltic Sea to the Bering Strait. Why not use that same power to upend the entire corrupt Middle East edifice and bring liberty, democracy, and the rule of law to the Arab world?

The hawks' grand plan differs depending on whom you speak to, but the basic outline runs like this: The United States establishes a reasonably democratic, pro-Western government in Iraq--assume it falls somewhere between Turkey and Jordan on the spectrum of democracy and the rule of law. Not perfect, representative democracy, certainly, but a system infinitely preferable to Saddam's. The example of a democratic Iraq will radically change the political dynamics of the Middle East. When Palestinians see average Iraqis beginning to enjoy real freedom and economic opportunity, they'll want the same themselves. With that happy prospect on one hand and implacable United States will on the other, they'll demand that the Palestinian Authority reform politically and negotiate with Israel. That in turn will lead to a real peace deal between the Israelis and Palestinians. A democratic Iraq will also hasten the fall of the fundamentalist Shi'a mullahs in Iran, whose citizens are gradually adopting anti-fanatic, pro-Western sympathies.

A democratized Iran would create a string of democratic, pro-Western governments (Turkey, Iraq, and Iran) stretching across the historical heartland of Islam. Without a hostile Iraq towering over it, Jordan's pro-Western Hashemite monarchy would likely come into full bloom. Syria would be no more than a pale reminder of the bad old days. (If they made trouble, a U.S. invasion would take care of them, too.) And to the tiny Gulf emirates making hesitant steps toward democratization, the corrupt regimes of Saudi Arabia and Egypt would no longer look like examples of stability and strength in a benighted region, but holdouts against the democratic tide. Once the dust settles, we could decide whether to ignore them as harmless throwbacks to the bad old days or deal with them, too. We'd be in a much stronger position to do so since we'd no longer require their friendship to help us manage ugly regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Syria.

The audacious nature of the neocons' plan makes it easy to criticize but strangely difficult to dismiss outright. Like a character in a bad made-for-TV thriller from the 1970s, you can hear yourself saying, "That plan's just crazy enough to work."

But like a TV plot, the hawks' vision rests on a willing suspension of disbelief, in particular, on the premise that every close call will break in our favor: The guard will fall asleep next to the cell so our heroes can pluck the keys from his belt. The hail of enemy bullets will plink-plink-plink over our heroes' heads. And the getaway car in the driveway will have the keys waiting in the ignition. Sure, the hawks' vision could come to pass. But there are at least half a dozen equally plausible alternative scenarios that would be disastrous for us.

To begin with, this whole endeavor is supposed to be about reducing the long-term threat of terrorism, particularly terrorism that employs weapons of mass destruction. But, to date, every time a Western or non-Muslim country has put troops into Arab lands to stamp out violence and terror, it has awakened entire new terrorist organizations and a generation of recruits. Placing U.S. troops in Riyadh after the Gulf War (to protect Saudi Arabia and its oilfields from Saddam) gave Osama bin Laden a cause around which he built al Qaeda. Israel took the West Bank in a war of self-defense, but once there its occupation helped give rise to Hamas. Israel's incursion into southern Lebanon (justified at the time, but transformed into a permanent occupation) led to the rise of Hezbollah. Why do we imagine that our invasion and occupation of Iraq, or whatever countries come next, will turn out any differently?

The Bush administration also insists that our right to act preemptively and unilaterally, with or without the international community's formal approval, rests on the need to protect American lives. But with the exception of al Qaeda, most terrorist organizations in the world, and certainly in the Middle East, do not target Americans. Hamas certainly doesn't. Hezbollah, the most fearsome of terrorist organizations beside al Qaeda, has killed American troops in the Middle East, but not for some years, and it has never targeted American civilians on American soil. Yet like Hamas, Hezbollah has an extensive fundraising cell operation in the States (as do many terrorist organizations, including the Irish Republican Army). If we target them in the Middle East, can't we reasonably assume they will respond by activating these cells and taking the war worldwide?

Next, consider the hawks' plans for those Middle East states that are authoritarian yet "friendly" to the United States--specifically Egypt and Saudi Arabia. No question these are problem countries. Their governments buy our weapons and accept our foreign aid yet allow vicious anti-Semitism to spew from the state run airwaves and tolerate clerics who preach jihad against the West. But is it really in our interests to work for their overthrow? Many hawks clearly think so. I asked Richard Perle last year about the dangers that might flow from the fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. "Mubarak is no great shakes," he quipped. "Surely we can do better than Mubarak." When I asked Perle's friend and fellow Reagan-era neocon Ken Adelman to calculate the costs of having the toppling of Saddam lead to the overthrow of the House of Saud, he shot back: "All the better if you ask me."

This cavalier call for regime change, however, runs into a rather obvious problem. When the communist regimes of Eastern and Central Europe fell after 1989, the people of those nations felt grateful to the United States because we helped liberate them from their Russian colonial masters. They went on to create pro-Western democracies. The same is unlikely to happen, however, if we help "liberate" Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The tyrannies in these countries are home grown, and the U.S. government has supported them, rightly or wrongly, for decades, even as we've ignored (in the eyes of Arabs) the plight of the Palestinians. Consequently, the citizens of these countries generally hate the United States, and show strong sympathy for Islamic radicals. If free elections were held in Saudi Arabia today, Osama bin Laden would probably win more votes than Crown Prince Abdullah. Topple the pro-Western autocracies in these countries, in other words, and you won't get pro-Western democracies but anti-Western tyrannies.

To this dilemma, the hawks offer two responses. One is that eventually the citizens of Egypt and Saudi Arabia will grow disenchanted with their anti-Western Islamic governments, just as the people of Iran have, and become our friends. To which the correct response is, well, sure, that's a nice theory, but do we really want to make the situation for ourselves hugely worse now on the strength of a theoretical future benefit?

The hawks' other response is that if the effort to push these countries toward democracy goes south, we can always use our military might to secure our interests. "We need to be more assertive," argues Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, "and stop letting all these two-bit dictators and rogue regimes push us around and stop being a patsy for our so-called allies, especially in Saudi Arabia." Hopefully, in Boot's view, laying down the law will be enough. But he envisions a worst-case scenario that would involve the United States "occupying the Saudi's oil fields and administering them as a trust for the people of the region."

What Boot is calling for, in other words, is the creation of a de facto American empire in the Middle East. In fact, there's a subset of neocons who believe that given our unparalleled power, empire is our destiny and we might as well embrace it. The problem with this line of thinking is, of course, that it ignores the lengthy and troubling history of imperial ambitions, particularly in the Middle East. The French and the English didn't leave voluntarily; they were driven out. And they left behind a legacy of ignorance, exploitation, and corruption that's largely responsible for the region's current dysfunctional politics.

Another potential snafu for the hawks is Iran, arguably the most dangerous state in the Middle East. The good news is that the fundamentalist Shi'a mullahs who have been running the government, exporting terrorism, and trying to enrich their uranium, are increasingly unpopular. Most experts believe that the mullahs' days are numbered, and that true democracy will come to Iran. That day will arrive sooner, the hawks argue, with a democratic Iraq on Iran's border. But the opposite could happen. If the mullahs are smart, they'll cooperate just enough with the Americans not to provoke an attack, but put themselves forth to their own people as defenders of Iranian independence and Iran's brother Shi'a in southern Iraq who are living under the American jackboot. Such a strategy might keep the fundamentalists in power for years longer than they otherwise might have been.

Then there is the mother of all problems, Iraq. The hawks' whole plan rests on the assumption that we can turn it into a self-governing democracy--that the very presence of that example will transform politics in the Middle East. But what if we can't really create a democratic, self-governing Iraq, at least not very quickly? What if the experience we had after World War II in Germany and Japan, two ethnically homogeneous nations, doesn't quite work in an ethnically divided Iraq where one group, the Sunni Arabs, has spent decades repressing and slaughtering the others? As one former Army officer with long experience with the Iraq file explains it, the "physical analogy to Saddam Hussein's regime is a steel beam in compression." Give it one good hit, and you'll get a violent explosion. One hundred thousand U.S. troops may be able to keep a lid on all the pent-up hatred. But we may soon find that it's unwise to hand off power to the fractious Iraqis. To invoke the ugly but apt metaphor which Jefferson used to describe the American dilemma of slavery, we will have the wolf by the ears. You want to let go. But you dare not.

And what if we do muster the courage to allow elections, but the Iraqis choose a government we can't live with--as the Japanese did in their first post-war election, when the United States purged the man slated to become prime minister? But if we do that in Iraq, how will it look on Al Jazeera? Ultimately, the longer we stay as occupiers, the more Iraq becomes not an example for other Arabs to emulate, but one that helps Islamic fundamentalists make their case that America is just an old-fashioned imperium bent on conquering Arab lands. And that will make worse all the problems set forth above.

None of these problems are inevitable, of course. Luck, fortitude, deft management, and help from allies could bring about very different results. But we can probably only rely on the first three because we are starting this enterprise over the expressed objections of almost every other country in the world. And that's yet another reason why overthrowing the Middle East won't be the same as overthrowing communism. We did the latter, after all, within a tight formal alliance, NATO. Reagan's most effective military move against Moscow, for instance, placing Pershing II missiles in Western Europe, could never have happened, given widespread public protests, except that NATO itself voted to let the weapons in. In the Middle East, however, we're largely alone. If things go badly, what allies we might have left are liable to say to us: You broke it, you fix it.

Whacking the Hornet's Nest

If the Bush administration has thought through these various negative scenarios--and we must presume, or at least pray, that it has--it certainly has not shared them with the American people. More to the point, the president has not even leveled with the public that such a clean-sweep approach to the Middle East is, in fact, their plan. This breaks new ground in the history of pre-war presidential deception. Franklin Roosevelt said he was trying to keep the United States out of World War II even as he--in some key ways--courted a confrontation with the Axis powers that he saw as both inevitable and necessary. History has judged him well for this. Far more brazenly, Lyndon Johnson's administration greatly exaggerated the Gulf of Tonkin incident to gin up support for full-throttle engagement in Vietnam. The war proved to be Johnson's undoing. When President Clinton used American troops to quell the fighting in Bosnia he said publicly that our troops would be there no longer than a year, even though it was widely understood that they would be there far longer. But in the case of these deceptions, the public was at least told what the goals of the wars were and whom and where we would be fighting.

Today, however, the great majority of the American people have no concept of what kind of conflict the president is leading them into. The White House has presented this as a war to depose Saddam Hussein in order to keep him from acquiring weapons of mass destruction--a goal that the majority of Americans support. But the White House really has in mind an enterprise of a scale, cost, and scope that would be almost impossible to sell to the American public. The White House knows that. So it hasn't even tried. Instead, it's focused on getting us into Iraq with the hope of setting off a sequence of events that will draw us inexorably towards the agenda they have in mind.

The brazenness of this approach would be hard to believe if it weren't entirely in line with how the administration has pursued so many of its other policy goals. Its preferred method has been to use deceit to create faits accomplis, facts on the ground that then make the administration's broader agenda almost impossible not to pursue. During and after the 2000 campaign, the president called for major education and prescription drug programs plus a huge tax cut, saying America could easily afford them all because of large budget surpluses. Critics said it wasn't true, and the growing budget deficits have proven them right. But the administration now uses the existence of big budget deficits as a way to put the squeeze on social programs--part of its plan all along. Strip away the presidential seal and the fancy titles, and it's just a straight-up con.

The same strategy seemed to guide the administration's passive-aggressive attitude towards our allies. It spent the months after September 11 signaling its distaste for international agreements and entangling alliances. The president then demanded last September that the same countries he had snubbed support his agenda in Iraq. And last month, when most of those countries refused, hawks spun that refusal as evidence that they were right all along. Recently, a key neoconservative commentator with close ties to the administration told me that the question since the end of the Cold War has been which global force would create the conditions for global peace and security: the United States, NATO, or the United Nations. With NATO now wrecked, he told me, the choice is between the Unites States and the United Nations. Whether NATO is actually wrecked remains to be seen. But the strategy is clear: push the alliance to the breaking point, and when it snaps, cite it as proof that the alliance was good for nothing anyway. It's the definition of chutzpah, like the kid who kills his parents and begs the judge for sympathy because he's an orphan.

Another president may be able to rebuild NATO or get the budget back in balance. But once America begins the process of remaking the Middle East in the way the hawks have in mind, it will be extremely difficult for any president to pull back. Vietnam analogies have long been overused, and used inappropriately, but this may be one case where the comparison is apt.
Ending Saddam Hussein's regime and replacing it with something stable and democratic was always going to be a difficult task, even with the most able leadership and the broadest coalition. But doing it as the Bush administration now intends is something like going outside and giving a few good whacks to a hornets' nest because you want to get them out in the open and have it out with them once and for all. Ridding the world of Islamic terrorism by rooting out its ultimate sources--Muslim fundamentalism and the Arab world's endemic despotism, corruption, and poverty--might work. But the costs will be immense. Whether the danger is sufficient and the costs worth incurring would make for an interesting public debate. The problem is that once it's just us and the hornets, we really won't have any choice.

Whenever I hear anything about Iran's mullahs, and ending Islamic terrorism at its roots, I always think of The Last Great Revolution, about Iran's evolution from hardline theocracy to the slightly more lenient, secular society today. Highly recommended. It kinda points in the direction of something I call a future Islamic Enlightenment, because its an idea along the same lines as the Western Enlightenment.

people need to be exposed to the dynamics of the region and how all that ties in...i don't know too much about the specifics myself, but i've read enough to know it's not as simple as "liberating" the iraqi people.

america has a habit of underestimating (or appearing to underestimate) the political situation in a country it goes in to "liberate" and when things don't go their way it's, "look at those folks who were too stupid to be democratic."



_____________________________

"This is , the Americans have no right to do this," declared veiled Egyptian businesswoman Rawya Shaker. "This is colonialism, this is an aggression against innocent people. This is something even an infidel wouldn't do."

"The best way to 'our boys' is to create enough dissent that will pressure the leadership of this country to end this illegal and immoral war." ~okp HoChiGrimm

www.poetsagainstthewar.org

British Soldiers Refuse to Fight
Indo-Asian News Service



LONDON, 31 March 2003 - Two British servicemen have been sent home from the
Middle East after refusing to fight in the war against Iraq, The Sunday
Times reported. They said they would refuse to fight because of the civilian
casualties being caused by the US-British attack. They face possible court
martial and up to two years in jail for disobeying orders. The two British
soldiers are from 16 Air Assault Brigade, a frontline unit, which has been
engaged in heavy fighting in southern Iraq. Their lawyer says they were
ordered to return to the brigade's barracks in Colchester, Essex, after
raising their objections earlier this month. The cases were confirmed this
weekend by Justin Hugheston-Roberts, a solicitor advocate who chairs Forces
Law, a nationwide group of 22 law firms that acts for service personnel and
their families. "These cases are being handled by a very experienced
lawyer," he said. Gilbert Blades, a Lincoln-based lawyer, said the Ministry
of Defense was trying to hush up the cases because it feared a public
relations disaster.

i didn't read the whole article, but the opening is telling enough. makes me wonder how many people are a part of all those other approval rating polls & such. and how does a sample of just over 500 people get touted as "americans say...."


from: http://msnbc.com/news/893035.asp

March 30 — Less than two weeks into the war on Iraq, President Bush’s popularity ratings have rebounded from January’s lows, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. But while Americans back the president’s handling of the war thus far, the survey finds that they are are increasingly concerned about the prospect of a long engagement in Iraq, mindful of minimizing Iraqi civilian casualties and — by a wide margin — unsupportive of Bush’s tax cut plan.



THE POLL of 501 adults, sampled for opinions on Saturday and Sunday, showed the president’s approval numbers inching steadily higher since the start of the Iraq war March 20: 66 percent generally approve of the job Bush is doing as president, compared to the 54 percent who supported him in January. The latest indication of support, however, is a far cry from Bush’s popularity numbers in November 2001 — 88 percent, the highest approval rating of any U.S. president since Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose rating reached 84 percent after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.
While Americans support the president, the poll also found a growing unease with the progress of the war against Iraq. Nine percent of those surveyed said the war was proceeding better than expected, a drop from a poll conducted March 23, in which 25 percent expressed optimism with the war’s prosecution. Conversely, 20 percent said the war was going worse than expected, a 100 percent increase from the 10 percent who expressed misgivings in the March 23 poll.

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0303/S00277.htm

Eliminating Truth:
The Development Of War Propaganda

By David Miller
Stirling University
The attack on Iraq looks set to be the most censored conflict of modern times. Media coverage in mainstream media will be controlled as never before. The US is determined to eliminate independent reporting of and from Iraq and it will go to unprecedented lengths to ensure that its propaganda and spin will dominate media agendas in the UK and US and it will expend massive resources in minimising critical coverage across the world.

The US and UK governments have shown themselves adept at learning propaganda lessons from successive conflicts. In both Suez (1956) and most importantly Vietnam, the UK and US governments came to believe that propaganda and media control were key to winning wars. In the Suez debacle General Sir Charles Keightley concluded in an internal government report in 1957 that the 'over-riding lesson' was that 'world opinion is now the absolute principal of war' The role of the media in the Vietnam war was believed by many to have been a key factor in the defeat of the US and the victory of the Vietnamese. But in fact the US media only started to feature dissent after the US ruling elite became split on the war. Nevertheless America’s future war planners decided not to risk uncensored press coverage of their own conflicts. 'They determined - evidently beginning in the Reagan Administration - that reporters would never again have the opportunity to confuse the American public about the government’s war aims, whether deliberately or by accident' .

The lessons of Vietnam were put into effect in the Falklands conflict in 1982. There was close control of the 29 journalists who were allowed to accompany the military to the South Atlantic and no independent facilities for reporting. A dual system of censorship operated which ensured that journalists' copy was censored on naval vessels in the South Atlantic and then again at the Ministry of Defence in London before being released. The success of the news management in the Falklands was not lost on the US government as Lt Commander Arthur Humphries of the US Navy noted in 1983: 'In spite of a perception of choice in a democratic society, the Falklands War shows us how to make certain that government policy is not undermined by the way a war is reported… Control access to the fighting, invoke censorship, and rally aid in the form of patriotism at home and in the battle zone.' This policy was followed in the invasions of both Grenada (1984) and Panama (1989)

Humphries also noted that if there was one deficiency in the policy, it was in failing to fill the resulting information void with pictures. 'In the Falklands the British failed to appreciate that news management is more than just information security censorship. It also means providing pictures’.

By the time of the Gulf War in 1991 this lesson had been well learned. In the Saudi desert journalists were isolated from the fighting and newsrooms were supplied every day with new footage of ‘precision’ bombs hitting their targets. This was the new clean war in which civilians would not be harmed as ‘smart’ technology enabled ‘surgical strikes’. This was a systematic charade. Only 7% of the ordnance was ‘smart’. The other 93% being indiscriminate weapons including weapons of mass destruction. The smart technology turned out not to be so smart and missed its target in 40% of cases according to official figures.

Needless to say we didn’t see any of the footage of either the ‘dumb’ bombs or the smart bombs which missed. But even when the smart weapons hit their targets, civilians died, as in the case of the al-Amariyah bunker in Baghdad which was not a military installation but an air raid shelter. This time the US and UK are claiming that most bombs will be of the smart variety and that the technology has been improved. According to the British Ministry of Defence, ‘greater attention to precision-guided weapons means we could have a war with zero civilian casualties’. This statement was falsified on the first night of bombing when between three and five Iraqi civilians were hit by shrapnel.

The emphasis on the clean war again is an attempt to divert attention from the fact that weapons of mass destruction such as depleted uranium tipped shells and ‘bunker buster’ and ‘daisy cutter’ bombs will be used. Conjuring up the smell of freshly mowed grass, the daisy cutter is actually a bomb the size of a small car which destroys everything in an area the size of a football pitch. It is said to resemble a small nuclear bomb.


************
The Pool

In past wars including the 1991 gulf war, the pool system has been the main means of control of journalists ‘in theatre’ – a propaganda term adopted by many journalists. The pool allows the military to control the movement of journalists as well as almost everything they see. In 1991 the Pentagon tried to bully journalists not to operate outside the pool and some adopted the value system so fully that they turned in any journalists who tried to report independently.

This time the Pentagon has got more sophisticated and more determined to eliminate the possibility of independent reporting. They have pressured journalists to leave Baghdad and by 18 march about half of the 300 there had left, including many of the key UK and US journalists (from US networks such as NBC and ABC and UK press such as the Times and Telegraph) who would likely have more credibility in their own countries.

The rules issued by the Pentagon were themselves part of a process of spin. They are presented as voluntary and appeared to some to offer ‘unprecedented freedom to report the facts’. But on closer inspection, a number of clauses buried in the text indicate the iron fist in the velvet glove. While the rules state that there is ‘no general review process’ of reports by the Pentagon, a later section notes that ‘if media are inadvertently exposed to sensitive information they should be briefed after exposure on what information they should avoid covering’. A security review also becomes compulsory if any sensitive information is released deliberately. In a classic passage attempting to present strict censorship rules as voluntary, the Pentagon notes that ‘agreement to security review is in exchange for this type of access must be strictly voluntary and if the reporter does not agree, the access may not be granted’.

The pool this time has a further new feature known as ‘embedding’ which entails that reporters operate in close proximity to military units. They will not be allowed to travel independently and some suggest that control of the technology of communication will be controlled by the military too. These new rules mean that journalists will don military uniform and protective clothing and, the Pentagon hopes, start to identify with the military.

According to reports there are 903 journalists embedded with US and UK forces, six times the number of journalists in Baghdad. At US military headquarters in Qatar the daily briefings will be delivered from a huge press centre complete with a mocked up studio with five large TV screens to show accurate bombing runs. Topped of by tastefully deployed camouflage netting installed by a specially flown in Hollywood designer, the centre cost in the region of $250,000.

In a little noticed interview on Irish radio, veteran BBC war correspondent Kate Adie has argued that the Pentagon is ‘entirely hostile to the free spread of information’. ‘I am enormously pessimistic of the chance for decent on the spot reporting’, she said. But the threat to independent journalism is potentially more severe. Adie reported being told by a ‘senior officer’ in the Pentagon that if broadcasters’ satellite uplink signals were detected by the military they would be ‘targeted down’ even if there were journalists there. ‘Who cares…they’ve been warned’ said the officer.

War does strange things to both military and media. The Director of Corporate Communications for the British Army Brigadier Matthes Sykes has a reported enthusiasm for conflict. He ‘is most animated when talking of his spells in the field, indeed he admits that is where his heart belongs.’

Journalists too suffer from the malaise of getting too involved. According to widely respected Middle East reporter Robert Fisk many are back to ‘their old trick of playing toy soldiers’.

The former Daily Telegraph editor Max Hastings admits he got too close in the Falklands war: ‘I was accused of getting too involved with the troops – I have to plead guilty to that.’ In Iraq now he worries for younger colleagues: ‘TV stations and newspapers tend to get overexcited in wars… It’s a case of boys with toys, but the hardest thing to remember is that this is ultimately all about lives’.

On the first day of the attack, Iraqi missiles fired into Kuwait were unequivocally reported on the main BBC bulletins as consisting of Scud missiles, even though this had not been confirmed and doubt was cast on the hypothesis by minority audience BBC programmes.

BBC News 24, the globally available service continually repeated the propaganda. Just after midnight (GMT) on the morning of the 21st March BBC reporter Ben Brown repeatedly used the word ‘scud’ without any qualification.

As many news outlets pointed out the use of Scuds would be a material breach of UN resolution 1441. But in fact the missiles were not Scuds as was confirmed the next day. But by then the damage was done and the correction did not gain the prominence of the original reports.

This is all a familiar pattern from previous wars where the BBC bulletins seen by the mass UK audience follow a distinctly propagandist pro-war agenda. As war approached in the UK the government attempted to eliminate dissent by arguing that past differences must be put aside to support ‘our’ troops.

Dissent had already been under pressure from at least the beginning of February when the Director of News at the BBC Richard Sambrook issued a confidential memo to senior BBC management. Quickly leaked by angry BBC staff, the memo showed that even before the biggest ever demonstrations in British history the BBC was attempting to marginalise the broadcasting of anti-war voices.

Too much dissent was being broadcast, it claimed, which 'forces our presenters to put the Bush/Blair position to callers -- sometimes making us appear to be siding with govt. Not true in all cases.' A tacit admission, if ever there was one, that much BBC output is shaped to support war. As war started the first signs of patriotic censorship appeared. The owner of more than 100 weekly newspapers Sir Ray Tindle wrote to the editors of all his papers asking them ‘to ensure that nothing appears… which attacks the decision to conduct the war’. Drawing immediate protests from free media campaigners, this example is sure to be the first of many infringements of independent reporting.

The hackneyed phrase maintains that truth is the first casualty of war, but this does not suggest nearly clearly enough that it is a casualty because the US and UK governments are making a concerted attempt to destroy it.


************
ENDNOTES
Cited in T. Shaw (1996) Eden, Suez and the Mass Media, London: I. B. Tauris: 196.
John McArthur, (1992) Second Front, Berkeley: University of California Press: 138.
Lt Commander Arthur Humphries, Naval War College Review, May-June 1983, cited in McArthur, 1992: 138.
cited in McArthur, ibid: 140.
Kellner, D. (1992) The Persian Gulf TV War, Boulder CO: Westview: 163.
'Fury at no dead "lie"', Daily Mirror, 21 March 2003: 9.
Ciar Byrne 'Media mull Iraq evacuation' The Guardian, Tuesday March 18, 2003 http://media.guardian.co.uk/broadcast/story/0,7493,916727,00.html
Patrick Barrett, 'US reporters condemn Pentagon press controls' The Guardian, Thursday February 27, 2003 http://media.guardian.co.uk/presspublishing/story/0,7495,903552,00.html
The Sunday Show, RTE1 Radio, 9.3.03. http://www.GuluFuture.com/news/kate_adie030310.htm
Ian Hall 'BRIGADIER MATTHEW SYKES, THE ARMY - ARMY COMMS CHIEF FIT FOR PR CHALLENGES' PR Week December 6, 2002, Pg. 24
Robert Fisk, 'The war of misinformation has begun' Independent, 16 March 2003.
Ciar Byrne 'Media mull Iraq evacuation' The Guardian, Tuesday March 18, 2003 http://media.guardian.co.uk/presspublishing/story/0,7495,916728,00.html
BBC2's Newsnight cast doubt on the story, the BBC1 main evening bulletin did not (20 March 2003).
For example: 'The priority of the day was to shoot the incoming scuds out of the sky… we’ve come running down to this shelter which the British Army calls their ‘scud bunker.’… One Scud missile landed within yards of an American military camp… British and American commanders are hoping tonight is that as their ground forces push forward they will drive Iraqi troops further back so that they won’t be able to launch any more of these scud attacks but I have to tell you in the last few minutes there has been another scud alert. We’ve had to go down to the shelter yet again so it doesn’t seem that for the moment the scud attacks are over.' BBC News 24 00.12 hours 21 March 2003.
Gina Coles, 'It's too late for debate - Now we must all support our Local heroes at war', Ivybridge and South Brent Gazette, 21 March 2003: 1.


******* ENDS *******

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/media/story.jsp?story=391830

The uprising that wasn't, mythical chemical weapons and other items of 'breaking news'
By Paul Peachey
29 March 2003


The real war pauses occasionally. The information war goes on 24 hours a day. Every opportunity, every scrap of information, has been deployed to reassure British and American public opinion that the war is being won – and won painlessly.

Rumours and half-truths have been seized on and presented as facts with enormous propaganda power. As the tide of war, and of information, moves on, to recall what was true and what was not has often been difficult.

THE DEFECTION OF TARIQ AZIZ 19 March

In the House of Commons on 19 March, rumours began to circulate that the Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister had fled to Bulgaria. If true, the suggestion, put about by American officials, would have been a huge coup for the Allies.

Intelligence sources were united in their disbelief. And they were soon vindicated by the appearance the same day of Tariq Aziz on television in Baghdad, quashing the latest rumour that he had been killed while trying to flee the country.

BATTLE FOR UMM QASR 20 March, 7.33pm

Rarely can a military target have been captured as often as Umm Qasr. Nine days ago, a Kuwaiti news agency set the ball rolling when it claimed that the port had been overrun. From then it seemed to be captured day after day.

On Friday, US Marines raised the Stars and Stripes – only for it to be removed hastily for public relations reasons – and Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, decreed the area "secure". An hour after the BBC had announced that Umm Qasr and Basra had fallen in the early days, an Iraqi opposition leader said: "It is quite untrue. There is still heavy fighting in both places."

On Saturday, "pockets of resistance" remained, the British said. The next day in the "taken" area US Marines encountered snipers, then machine-gun fire and grenades. By Tuesday, and the arrival of British Royal Marines, the port was declared "open and secure". Baghdad continues to deny having lost control of the strategic port.

DISAPPEARING IRAQI TROOPS 21 March, 3am

Intelligence reports had predicted the capitulation of Iraq's 51st Division before war had even started. With thousands of propaganda leaflets having been dropped on to the troops and dark hints of American contacts with Iraqi generals, large-scale desertions were a given. "In the southern area, where there are six Iraqi divisions, 50 per cent of their officers are planning to surrender once the campaign opens," one intelligence officer claimed.

As the war started, Pentagon sources said the Iraqi military was "breaking from within". No surprise then, when Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, chief of the UK defence staff, said last Saturday that the 51st Division, one of those defending Basra, had surrendered and "that we have many thousands of prisoners of war". Geoff Hoon did not take long to assert that the 51st had "stopped" fighting. The commander and his deputy had given themselves up with 8,000 soldiers surrendering or deserting, said reports. The New York Times reported that the division had "melted away".

Within days, elements of the 51st were back at war. It soon became clear that the man who surrendered was a junior officer masquerading as his commander. Maj-Gen Wall confirmed that elements of the 51st had returned to the city, taking up arms again. Predict-ions of the scale of the desertions have proved wildly over-optimistic: yesterday US officials said they had only 4,000 prisoners of war.

CHEMICAL WEAPONS 24 March, 1.33am

On the day of the first significant Allied combat casualties, the discovery of a "chemical weapons complex" was a welcome propaganda coup for US-led forces.

If the reports were true, it would have been the first find by the invasion force validating allegations that Iraq still had weapons of mass destruction.

The discovery came after a weekend of minor setbacks and tough fighting in the early days of the war. Doubts arose almost as quickly as the reports that appeared overnight on Sunday in the Jerusalem Post, which had a reporter with the troops as they entered the complex, and the US news channel Fox, quoting unnamed Pentagon officials. By then the other networks had already got in on the act. ABC News cited one unidentified official who said an Iraqi general captured at the site "was a potential gold mine of evidence about the weapons Saddam Hussein said he does not have".

Former weapons inspectors said the discovery of the site near Najaf by the 1st Brigade of the US 3rd Infantry division was probably insignificant.

US defence officials soon began to row back, saying the factory "may turn out to be a chemical weapons site, or it may be a site that was producing something else". They remained non-committal. Two Iraqi generals in custody were providing useful information, they said. Tests were being carried out at the area, which remained a "site of interest".

Asked about the claims, General Tommy Franks, the coalition commander, told reporters: "It would not surprise me if there were chemicals in the plant and it would not surprise me if there weren't ... It's a bit early for us to have any expectation ... we'll wait for the days ahead." And we still are.

BASRA UPRISING 25 March, first reports 5.15pm

The desire of the Iraqi people to use the Allied invasion as an opportunity to rise up against their hated dictator was seen as the key to a rapid victory. Hence the excitement when reports began to come in on Tuesday that Shias in Basra, Iraq's second city, were engaged in another attempt to settle their scores with President Saddam. Tony Blair told the Commons that there had been "some limited form of uprising". Geoff Hoon, the Secretary of State for Defence, went further, saying the regime had "lost control of southern Iraq".

Military sources were more cautious at US Central Command in Qatar. Major-General Peter Wall, a British officer, said the rebellion was in its "infancy" and it was wrong to predict a "rapid outcome". Tales of people on the streets came from "intelligence sources", but they were leapt onby British newspapers. Al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based broadcaster that actually had a correspondent in the city, said the streets were calm.

More definitive was the verdict of an Iraqi Shia group based in Iran with every reason to encourage insurgency. "Some disturbances took place ... but it was not widespread and it was not an intifada. The people chanted slogans against Saddam Hussein."

Yesterday, ColChris Vernon, a British military spokesman, said: "Basra is clearly nowhere near yet in our hands and we have no way at the moment of getting humanitarian aid into Basra." Funny then that the GMTV reporter, Richard Gaisford, pictured top left, who broke the story, was still insisting yesterday that the military had sanctioned his report.

THE EXECUTIONS 27 March, 4.20pm

After al-Jazeera broadcast pictures of the bodies of two British prisoners-of-war, Tony Blair was quick to express his outrage. At a joint news conference with George Bush on Thursday, Mr Blair condemned the "execution" of the men.

Unfortunately, the family of Luke Allsopp, 24, said a senior Army officer had told them that the soldier had died in action. "It makes a big difference to us knowing that he died quickly," she said. "We can't understand why people are lying about what happened."

By yesterday the Government's tone had changed. The Prime Minister's spokesman was claiming that the two men "may well have been" executed and said that further inquiries would be made. The Ministry of Defence defended itself, saying the execution charge was based on the fact that Sapper Luke Allsopp and Staff Sergeant Simon Cullingworth were lying some distance from their vehicle and had been stripped of their helmets and body armour after being caught in an ambush last weekend.

Later, Adam Ingram, the Armed Forces minister, expressed "regret" for any distress caused to the families, a statement interpreted as an admission that the Prime Minister got it wrong.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,927055,00.html

US draws up secret plan to impose regime on Iraq

Brian Whitaker and Luke Harding in Sulaimaniya
Tuesday April 1, 2003
The Guardian

A disagreement has broken out at a senior level within the Bush administration over a new government that the US is secretly planning in Kuwait to rule Iraq in the immediate aftermath of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
Under the plan, the government will consist of 23 ministries, each headed by an American. Every ministry will also have four Iraqi advisers appointed by the Americans, the Guardian has learned.

The government will take over Iraq city by city. Areas declared "liberated" by General Tommy Franks will be transferred to the temporary government under the overall control of Jay Garner, the former US general appointed to head a military occupation of Iraq.

In anticipation of the Baghdad regime's fall, members of this interim government have begun arriving in Kuwait.

Decisions on the government's composition appear to be entirely in US hands, particularly those of Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence. This has annoyed Gen Garner, who is officially in charge but who, according to sources close to the planning of the government has had to accept a number of controversial Iraqis in advisory roles.

The most controversial of Mr Wolfowitz's proposed appointees is Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the opposition Iraqi National Congress, together with his close associates, including his nephew. During his years in exile, Mr Chalabi has cultivated links with Congress to raise funds, and has become the Pentagon's darling among the Iraqi opposition. The defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, is one of his strongest supporters. The state department and the CIA, on the other hand, regard him with deep suspicion.

He has not lived in Iraq since 1956, apart from a short period organising resistance in the Kurdish north in the 1990s, and is thought to have little support in the country.

Mr Chalabi had envisaged becoming prime minister in an interim government, and is disappointed that no such post is included in the US plan. Instead, the former banker will be offered an advisory job at the finance ministry.

A senior INC official said last night that Mr Chalabi would not countenance a purely advisory position. The official added: "It is certainly not the INC's intention to advise any US ministers in Iraq. Our position is that no Americans should run Iraqi ministries. The US is talking about an interim Iraqi authority taking over, but we are calling for a provisional government."

The revelation about direct rule is likely to cause intense political discomfort for Tony Blair, who has been pressing for UN and international involvement in Iraq's reconstruction to overcome opposition in Britain as well as heal divisions across Europe.

The Foreign Office said last night that a "relatively fluid" number of British officials had been seconded to the planning team.

Last week Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, told Congress that immediately after the fall of President Saddam's regime, the US military would take control of the Iraqi government.

His only concession was that this would be done with the "full understanding" of the international community and with "the UN presence in the form of a special coordinator".

If this isn't colonialism then what is?

http://www.sacbee.com/state_wire/story/6373806p-7326629c.html

Warner Bros. eliminates peace image from 'What a Girl Wants' ads
The Associated Press
Last Updated 7:32 a.m. PST Tuesday, April 1, 2003
LOS ANGELES (AP) - "What a Girl Wants" is to avoid making a political statement.
Print advertisements for the teen comedy originally featured a photograph of star Amanda Bynes wearing an American flag T-shirt and flashing the peace sign with her fingers as she stands between two British royal guards.

With the war in Iraq sparking anti-war protests in the United States and abroad, however, Warner Bros. quickly changed the ad. The studio said Monday it feared the peace sign would be viewed as a political message.

New versions of the image feature Bynes with her right hand at her side, although many of the original posters had already been placed on billboards and buses before the change was made.

In the film, Bynes plays an American girl who discovers her estranged father is a British politician. "What a Girl Wants" is set for release on Friday.

US draws up secret plan to impose regime on Iraq

Brian Whitaker and Luke Harding in Sulaimaniya
Tuesday April 1, 2003
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,927055,00.html

A disagreement has broken out at a senior level within the Bush administration over a new government that the US is secretly planning in Kuwait to rule Iraq in the immediate aftermath of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

Under the plan, the government will consist of 23 ministries, each headed by an American. Every ministry will also have four Iraqi advisers appointed by the Americans, the Guardian has learned.

The government will take over Iraq city by city. Areas declared "liberated" by General Tommy Franks will be transferred to the temporary government under the overall control of Jay Garner, the former US general appointed to head a military occupation of Iraq.

In anticipation of the Baghdad regime's fall, members of this interim government have begun arriving in Kuwait.

Decisions on the government's composition appear to be entirely in US hands, particularly those of Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence. This has annoyed Gen Garner, who is officially in charge but who, according to sources close to the planning of the government has had to accept a number of controversial Iraqis in advisory roles.

The most controversial of Mr Wolfowitz's proposed appointees is Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the opposition Iraqi National Congress, together with his close associates, including his nephew. During his years in exile, Mr Chalabi has cultivated links with Congress to raise funds, and has become the Pentagon's darling among the Iraqi opposition. The defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, is one of his strongest supporters. The state department and the CIA, on the other hand, regard him with deep suspicion.

He has not lived in Iraq since 1956, apart from a short period organising resistance in the Kurdish north in the 1990s, and is thought to have little support in the country.

Mr Chalabi had envisaged becoming prime minister in an interim government, and is disappointed that no such post is included in the US plan. Instead, the former banker will be offered an advisory job at the finance ministry.

A senior INC official said last night that Mr Chalabi would not countenance a purely advisory position. The official added: "It is certainly not the INC's intention to advise any US ministers in Iraq. Our position is that no Americans should run Iraqi ministries. The US is talking about an interim Iraqi authority taking over, but we are calling for a provisional government."

The revelation about direct rule is likely to cause intense political discomfort for Tony Blair, who has been pressing for UN and international involvement in Iraq's reconstruction to overcome opposition in Britain as well as heal divisions across Europe.

The Foreign Office said last night that a "relatively fluid" number of British officials had been seconded to the planning team.

Last week Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, told Congress that immediately after the fall of President Saddam's regime, the US military would take control of the Iraqi government.

His only concession was that this would be done with the "full understanding" of the international community and with "the UN presence in the form of a special coordinator".

Manufacturing News and Promoting War -- Texas Style

by Josh Frank

Dissident Voice
April 1, 2003

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Articles3/Frank_ClearChannel.htm

“Here in America we have three most precious God-given gifts: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to use either one.”

-- Mark Twain



Surfing the waves of syndicated talk radio, you are likely to come across numerous conservative hosts railing progressives for their seemingly callow out look on life. Most likely it is the Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh or the Michael Savage type-- spinning their inflexible doctrines with habitual ease. It shouldn’t be surprising then that the pulpit from which these reactionaries spiel have deep ties to President Bush, and hail from the Lone Star state of Texas.



Clear Channel Worldwide Incorporated, head-quartered in San Antonio, is the single largest radio station owner in the United States, running over 1,200 stations. Their monopoly accounts for 9% of the total market-share, and over half of the talk show radio industry-share. Clear Channel’s CEO Lowry Mays delighted Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign by contributing thousands in soft-cash, with over $100,000 in corporate PACs. Ex-CEO of AMFM Communications, Tom Hicks, who purchased the Texas Rangers from Bush in 1998, is now the acting vice chair of Clear Channel. He too donated thousands to the Republican Party, in particular Mr. George W. Bush.



As Paul Krugman in a recent NY Times article states that this debacle could be the “next stage in the evolution of a new American oligarchy.” He may be right. Clear Channel stations around the nation have orchestrated the banning of Dixie Chick tunes from their play-lists due to their anti-Bush sentiments. Last week Clear Channel, who owns the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, forbade music artist Ani Defranco from making any anti-war remarks, while destroying thousands of leaflets Ani intended to be distribute during her performance.



This certainly isn’t the first time the strong-armed Clear Channel stifled any opposing views. In November of 2001, Clear Channel down sized David Cook, a progressive rap DJ popular among young hip-hoppers in the Bay Area. His outspoken criticisms of the Bush administration following the attack on NYC, were too much for ol’ CC to handle. They also pulled on-air ads in Ohio and elsewhere that criticized key Republican congressman for not pressing Cheney on his energy plan.



Surprisingly Clear Channel has managed to take their bourgeoisie mind-set even further. In response to the huge turnouts around the world opposing Bush’s onslaught in Iraq, CC has organized a couple hundred “patriotic rallies” around the country. They bill them as “Rallies for America.” These shindigs are far from simply flag waving get-togethers; they are clearly pro-war events. CC donates the money to make signs such as, “Lefties be happy, we have 200,000 inspectors in Iraq now,” or “Pack it up and go to France where you belong.” Along with donating the proceeds for signs and organizing such events, Clear Channel and their marketing firm have been using their radio power to promote these rallies. They not only advertise for the gatherings, but their news correspondents cover them ridiculously well, often with 2 or 3 reporters per 100 supporters. It is simply manufacturing news.



This shouldn’t be of great surprise, our media conglomerates are always under fire for favoritism and biased news reporting. But what’s the pay off for CC? Do they just do it because they love their Republican brethren? It isn't that simple.



After Congress enacted the Telecommunications Act of ’96, Clear Channel tripled their annual revenue and increased their station holdings by two thirds, nearly overnight. You can imagine Hicks and Lowry are quite interested in expanding their broadcast empire further by de-regulating the industry even more.



Last February the FCC, and Chairman Michael Powell, began meeting to discuss changing the regulations that limit the number of media outlets any given corporation can own. At those hearings, Lowry May said he didn’t believe it would be harmful or monopolistic if only “4 or 5” corporations owned all the radio stations in the US. He went on to promote the idea that “big media is better.” Perhaps he means more revenue is better.



The FCC Chairman’s father, Secretary of State Colin Powell, has been an influential voice in driving the United States into the bloody conflict in Iraq. Perhaps by manufacturing pro-war rallies, drowning the airwaves with conservative spinsters, and flooding Bush with hundreds of thousands of dollars -- they are attempting to buy policy -- hoping that the FCC relaxes certain barriers of media ownership, allowing Clear Channel to gobble up even more stations.



Past actions of Clear Channel indicate this certainly may not be a fabrication. If so, they’ll have expanded their news making business further, shredding our democracy along the way. If CC’s little game plays out as planned, their record of suffocating dissent and bashing liberals will reach unprecedented new levels.



If you, like me, disagree with any media conglomerate promoting war through a “Rally for America” front -- or infuriated by the idea that deregulating the radio market more, is a good thing-- or angry at Clear Channel’s threats to pull the plug on Ani DeFranco -- or banning the Dixie Chicks from their stations because they oppose Bush -- then drop their VP of Communications an email. Let her know how you feel.



DianeDWarren@clearchannel.com



Josh Frank is a journalist living in Portland Oregon, his work appears frequently in Impact Press and online at Counterpunch. He can be reached at frank_joshua@hotmail.com

Sister Cleo Where R U!

Broadcast on April 1, 2003 by the New York Daily News
Deal to Sell Water All Wet, Critics Charge
by Richard Sisk

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0401-14.htm#

UMM QASR, Iraq - The U.S. military came up with a solution yesterday for the penniless people of this port town begging for water: Sell it.

Despite general mayhem at distribution points - including knife fights - the Army has struck a hasty agreement with local Iraqis to expedite distribution of water to the roughly 40,000 living here.

Under the deal, the military will provide water free to locals with access to tanker trucks, who then will be allowed to sell the water for a "reasonable" fee.

"We're permitting them to charge a small fee for water," said Army Col. David Bassert.

"This provides them with an incentive to hustle and to work," said Bassert, an assistant commander with the 354th Civil Affairs Brigade.

He said he could not suggest what constitutes a reasonable fee and did not know what the truckers were charging. He said the tradition here of haggling at markets would help the system work.

"People know when they're being gouged - we'll deal with it," Bassert said.

But with the population badly in need of water, food and medical supplies, the arrangement drew its share of critics.

'This is crazy'

Several Iraqi-Americans originally from this region, who are working as interpreters and guides with the U.S. military, were incensed at what they consider an attempt to jump-start a free-market economy during a crisis.

"This is bull----," said an Iraqi-American who asked to be identified only as Ahmed. "They are selling water and this is crazy. Nobody has any money, nobody knows what is money - Iraqi money, American money, nobody knows."

A British military spokesman angrily objected to the water deal. The British control the city of Umm Qasr while the Americans are in charge of the port.

"We're not going to have any charging for water. What kind of an aid plan would that be? These people don't even have shoes," the spokesman said.

Ahmed and the others said they had seen fights with fists and knives among desperate locals trying to get water from the truckers.

Ill at ease

The reports could not be independently confirmed because a promised military escort for reporters into town never took place.

Officers said the trip was canceled because of widespread clashes between remnants of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's supporters and British troops, although no firing could be heard and the Iraqi-Americans who spent the afternoon in town said no clashes had taken place.

But the general situation was far from secure. A heavy mortar or artillery round launched toward the port shook buildings and rattled windows but exploded beyond the fence and caused no casualties.

Editor's Note: The military has confiscated the satellite phones of a certain make used by journalists traveling with U.S. troops in Iraq, including those used by reporter Richard Sisk and photographer Todd Maisel of the Daily News, for fear that Iraqi forces could intercept the signal and target U.S. positions. This dispatch has been sent by other means approved by the military, but military officials did not review or restrict its contents.

© 2003 Daily News, L.P.

I am curious as to if this is the same town I saw on the news when a hose looking line was run,punctured with holes as the townspeople awaited to fill their containers.

On that day,I saw people handing money,but they were told the water was free.

I forget if it was the reporter,or a soldier,but one or the other said that the American troops said the water was free,BUT,that the British troops wanted to charge for the water.

HMMMM,this story says different and the administration is angry about alll the questions.

http://www.prweek.com/news/news_story.cfm?ID=175623&site=3

Pentagon PA staff helping out embedded reporters
Written by Douglas Quenqua
Published on March 31 2003
WASHINGTON: They may not get as much attention as their media counterparts, but dozens of Pentagon public affairs officers are "embedded" right alongside the reporters in Iraq.

Each military division in the region has approximately 40 to 60 journalists in tow, and between five and six public affairs officers behind the scenes, according to a Pentagon official. It's their job to get the reporters to their assigned units safely, keep tabs on them, and provide them with backup equipment or help filing their stories should there be any complications.

"They are a backup," explained PA officer Major Timothy Blair. "We told journalists that were coming to the embedded program that they needed to bring whatever tools or assets they needed to transmit their products, and that we would assist them if their primary needs failed, i.e., help charge their batteries or run their tapes back to a distribution point."

The Pentagon also maintains the Coalition Press Information Center (CPIC) in Kuwait, a base of operations for public affairs officers not traveling with troops.

A 24-hour operation designed to keep up with news cycles in every time zone, the CPIC maintains contact with the bureau chiefs of embedded journalists and disperses information to other journalists in the region. Indeed, one of the CPIC's most vital roles is to discourage "rogue" journalists from venturing into dangerous areas by providing the information they might otherwise attempt to get on their own.

"These are service members. They are used to doing this full time with their units," Blair said. "But the size and breadth of what we are doing right now is larger than anything anyone has done before."

http://www.spiked-online.com/articles/00000006DD1A.htm

Propaganda defensive

by Brendan O'Neill

'PROOF' says the front page of today's UK Sun, claiming that 'an Iraqi terror camp making ricin poison has been smashed by a huge Allied blitz' (1). Apparently, the discovery of the 'poisons HQ' is 'final proof that Saddam is targeting Britain' - and that he may have supplied London-based terrorists with the means and know-how for turning innocent castor beans into deadly ricin (2).


Then you turn to page two of the Sun and realise that the alleged poison factory is in northern Iraq, territory that was taken out of Saddam's control after the first Gulf War of 1991; that it apparently belongs to Ansar al-Islam, a radical Kurdish Islamic group whose talked-up links to Saddam's regime remain unproven; and that US forces have yet to search 'the factory', where, according to US General Richard Myers, we are 'unaware that any weapons of mass destruction have been found so far' (3)


It isn't only the pro-war Sun that is desperately seeking 'PROOF' of Saddam's wrongdoing in order to justify the war. The coalition's campaign has become a war in search of a war aim. From questionable claims of chemical weapons finds to anecdotal evidence of Saddam's barbarity, US and UK officials are trying to justify the offensive as they go along. At times, it seems that the only coherent war aim is to find something that might justify the war.


Having talked up Saddam's weapons of mass destruction as the driving force for war, coalition forces are now under intense (and self-induced) pressure to find such weapons. British and American officials openly talk about needing to find weapons in order to 'vindicate the invasion' (4). One British commander told Reuters: 'It's very important for a number of reasons…that we produce the "smoking gun". It's at the heart of the strategic aim of what we're doing.' (5)


Coalition forces haven't found any banned weapons - so instead they have flagged up everything and anything that points to the possible existence of such weapons somewhere in Iraq. America's Department of Defence website has published photos of chemical suits apparently found near Umm Qasr; British troops found Geiger counters and gas masks in an abandoned Iraqi base in southern Iraq, which were cited as evidence that Saddam 'is pursuing weapons of mass destruction'. Coalition forces have shown us just about everything but the alleged weapons.


But the weapons remain the main focus. According to one report, US and British officials are 'keenly aware that a confirmed discovery would be a propaganda coup' (6). Other reports claim that coalition forces have got journalists waiting in Kuwait and Qatar specifically on a promise that they will be flown by helicopter to Iraq as soon as weapons of mass destruction are uncovered (7). 'Those flights would happen as soon as possible', says one official.


The coalition is creating problems for itself on the propaganda front

By banging on about banned weapons, coalition forces are creating potential problems for themselves on the propaganda front. By showing photos of every gas mask they discover; by reminding us of the need to find weapons in order to 'vindicate' the war; by keeping selected journalists on tenterhooks for that final moment when chemical weapons are found….the war-planners and war-spinners are ensuring that the weapons issue remains centre stage, and that further questions are asked every time a search turns up a dud.


Consider the events in western Iraq over the weekend. Early last week, Pentagon officials said they were certain that at least 10 sites in western Iraq housed weapons of mass destruction. But on Sunday, an American military official in western Iraq told the Washington Post that 'll the searches have turned up negative. The munitions that have been found have all been conventional'. Donald Rumsfeld's reponse? He simply shifted the geography of the weapons claims, telling ABC News that, in fact, the weapons are further inside Iraq, 'in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad' (8). US officials are setting themselves up for a further fall.


Other officials have gone one better than Rumsfeld - shifting the expectations of a weapons find, not just further into Iraq, but further into the future. Some reports claim that US officials might settle for 'justifying the war retrospectively', by 'discovering the conclusive evidence afterwards'. According to the UK Guardian, in an article published in Arab newspapers yesterday, UK prime minister Tony Blair 'cited Iraq's banned weapons…declaring that "history will judge" him to be right' (9). This must be the first war where officials hope that future finds will justify their current campaign.


Of course, Saddam has a grim record in the lethal weapons stakes, and coalition forces may yet find some nasty-sounding 'weapons'. But the coalition's current rummaging around for weapons in Iraq looks more like a desperate attempt to find something, anything, to vindicate the war effort, rather than a concerted search for dodgy things that they know for a fact exist.


Perhaps as a result of the coalition's difficulty in finding banned weapons, some have noted a subtle shift in the coalition's PR campaign - away from focusing on 'disarming Saddam' towards focusing on the 'barbarity of Saddam's regime'. In his radio address to the nation over the weekend, President Bush didn't mention Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, instead claiming that 'the world has now seen firsthand the cruel nature of a dying regime. In areas still under its control, the regime continues its rule by terror' (10).


Even on the question of Saddam's terror, however, the coalition's PR campaign sounds less than convincing. In his address, Bush claimed that 'an Iraqi woman was hanged for waving at coalition troops' - a claim that has since done the rounds in the international media. But the case of the hanged Iraqi woman seems to raise more questions than answers.


US officials look for evidence of Saddam's barbarity in the past

In some reports, American troops saw the Basra woman 'waving a white flag to warn them of danger, and that woman was later found hanged'. In other reports, the woman had simply 'waved hello' to US troops in order to 'greet them' into Basra. Some reports claim that the woman had waved a white flag in order to get out of Basra. Others claim that it was British troops, not American troops, who saw the woman waving at them, and that the British later found her hanging from a light post. A British Lieutenant claims that a teenage girl waved at his troops, and was found hanged, not the following day, but 'within the hour'.


Whatever happened to the Iraqi woman in Basra, where no doubt civilians are suffering, her fate now seems to have become part of the coalition camp's PR campaign. In an attempt to convince us of the barbarity of Saddam's regime, and thus justify the ongoing war, some in the coalition appear to be latching on to every individual example of terror, however uncertain the facts may be.


Where some coalition officials are putting off a potential weapons find into the future, others are busy looking for evidence of Saddam's barbarity in the past. On 29 March 2003, the Pentagon launched, according to one report, a 'graphic public relations offensive aimed at illustrating the brutality of the Iraqi regime' (11). How? By showing video images of Iraq's use of chemical weapons against Kurdish villagers 15 years ago. When Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke was asked if the video showing was an attempt to counteract TV images shown around the world of civilian war fatalities in Iraq, she said: 'That was my decision to use those clips.' (12)


So having failed to find weapons in the here and now, and increasingly concerned about losing the propaganda war to Saddam and co, the Pentagon has been reduced to digging up images of Iraqi atrocities that took place in 1988 - three years before the first Gulf War.


Another problem for the coalition is that their claims about the war seem to be less readily believed today. Instead of being greeted as evidence of Saddam's barbarity, Bush and Blair's arguments for war are often treated with suspicion and cynicism, as yet more examples of 'spinning the war' to suit their own ends. The broader ambivalence about the war - which sometimes seems to stretch from the war planners themselves down to the rest of us - seems to find expression in an increasing cynicism about the aims and conduct of the war.


So Blair's claims at Camp David that two British soldiers were executed in cold blood by Iraqi troops were ridiculed by the soldiers' families, who had been told that their loved ones died in combat. The day after Blair made the execution claims, the UK Daily Mirror ran a frontpage story denouncing him as a liar. Likewise, when Blair's war cabinet leaked the suggestion that the two recent marketplace bombings in Baghdad may have been a result of Iraqi missiles falling back into the city, rather than the result of American bombing, very few bought it.


Today, suspicion about coalition claims makes the front pages within 24 hours

This cynicism towards government propaganda is not an unambiguously good thing. It is often driven, less by a positive desire to challenge the coalition's campaign in Iraq, than by a broader sense of mistrust about politics and politicians. Individuals' unwillingness to believe the PR campaign over Iraq seems to express the 'politicians always lie!' sentiment, rather than a 'hands off Iraq!' sentiment. This reflects a deeper sense of mistrust in Western societies that has little to do with Iraq itself, and which cannot be solved by a clever spin story or, indeed, the discovery of some 'PROOF' inside Iraq.


After the first Gulf War of 1991, it took five years for some journalists in the West to admit that they had bought into the war propaganda and told 'American lies'. It wasn't until 1995 that Guardian journalist Maggie O'Kane admitted that during the Gulf War 'we, the media, were harnessed like beach donkeys and led through the sand to see what the British and US military wanted us to see' (13). Today, suspicion about American and British claims makes the front pages within 24 hours.


In times of war, there has always been PR campaigns and wild claims - and such stories always have to be taken with a cellar of salt. But what is striking about the current PR campaign is its defensiveness. American and British officials, uncertain about what the war is for and of their mission on the international stage, seem to be lashing around desperately for something, anything, to justify the war. This constant shifting around in search of some purpose to the war only makes the whole affair look more, well, shifty.


Contrary to widespread claims, it is not so much that Saddam is winning the propaganda war, but that coalition forces are losing it by themselves.


Read on:

spiked-issue: War on Iraq

(1) 'PROOF', Sun, 31 March 2003

(2) 'PROOF', Sun, 31 March 2003

(3) US searches Iraq 'ricin base', BBC News, 31 March 2003

(4) Iraq's 'Smoking Gun' Will Be Found, Military Say, Washington Post, 25 March 2003

(5) Iraq's 'Smoking Gun' Will Be Found, Military Say, Washington Post, 25 March 2003

(6) Iraq's 'Smoking Gun' Will Be Found, Military Say, Washington Post, 25 March 2003

(7) Iraq's 'Smoking Gun' Will Be Found, Military Say, Washington Post, 25 March 2003

(8) Search for smoking gun draws a blank, Guardian, 31 March 2003

(9) Search for smoking gun draws a blank, Guardian, 31 March 2003

(10) Radio Address by the President to the Nation, White House, 29 March 2003

(11) Pentagon, in PR assault, uses graphic video images, Reuters, 29 March 2003

(12) Pentagon, in PR assault, uses graphic video images, Reuters, 29 March 2003

(13) Guardian, 16 December 1995

Anti-war slogan coined, repurposed and Googlewashed... in 42 days

By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Posted: 03/04/2003 at 12:12 GMT

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/30087.html

This year marks the 100th anniversary of George Orwell's birth, and the writer who best explained the power of language on politics would be amazed what can be done with the Internet.

On February 17 a front page news analysis in the New York Times bylined by Patrick Tyler described the global anti-war protests as the emergence of "the second superpower".

Tyler wrote: "...the huge anti-war demonstrations around the world this weekend are reminders that there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion."

This potent phrase spread rapidly.

Anti-war campaigners, peace groups and NGOs took to describing the global popular protest as "the second superpower" . And in less than a month, the phrase was being used by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. .

And a week ago, a Google search for the phrase would have shown the vigorous propagation of this 'meme'.

Rub out the word
Then came this. Entitled The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head, by James F Moore, it was accompanied by a brand new blog.

The details need not detain us for very long, because the consequences of this piece are much more important than its anodyne contents.

It's a plea for net users to organize themselves as a "superpower", and represents a class of techno-utopian literature that John Perry Barlow has been promoting - the same sappy stuff, but not as well written - for the past ten years.

Only note how this example is sprinkled with trigger words for progressives, liberals and NPR listeners. It concludes - if you can find your way through this mound of feel-good styrofoam peanuts - "we do not have to create a world where differences are resolved by war. It is not our destiny to live in a world of destruction, tedium, and tragedy. We will create a world of peace".

In common with the genre, there's no social or political context, although the author offers a single specific instruction that is very jarring in the surrounding blandness: we must co-operate with The World Bank. Huh?

It's politics with the politics taken out: in short, it's "revolution lite".

Now here's the important bit. Look what the phrase "Second Superpower" produces on Google now. Try it!. Moore's essay is right there at the top. And not just first, but it already occupies all but three of the first thirty spots.

The bashful Moore writes: "It was nice of Dave Winer and Doc Searls to pick up on it, even if it's not really ready for much exposure." No matter, Moore is an overnight A-list blogging superstar, at his very first attempt.

Although it took millions of people around the world to compel the Gray Lady to describe the anti-war movement as a "Second Superpower", it took only a handful of webloggers to spin the alternative meaning to manufacture sufficient PageRank™ to flood Google with Moore's alternative, neutered definition.

Indeed, if you were wearing your Google-goggles, and the search engine was your primary view of the world, you would have a hard time believing that the phrase "Second Superpower" ever meant anything else.

To all intents and purposes, the original meaning has been erased. Obliterated, in just seven weeks.

You're especially susceptible to this if you subscribe to the view that Google's PageRank™ is "inherently democratic," which is how Google, Inc. describes it.

And this Googlewash took just 42 days.

You are in a twisty maze of weblogs, all alike
All a strange coincidence, no doubt, but the picture darkens when you look at a parallel conversation taking place elsewhere, whose hyperlinks contributed to the redefinition, and help explain how this semantic ethnic-cleansing took place so quickly.

Moore's subversion of the meaning of "Secondary Superpower" - his high PageRank™ from derives from followers of 'A-list' tech bloggers linking from an eerily similar "Emergent Democracy" discussion list, which in turn takes its name from a similarly essay posted by Joi Ito who is a colossus of authority in these circles, hence lots of PageRank™-boosting hyperlinks, and who like Moore, appeared from nowhere as a figure of authority.

Lunchin' Ito's essay is uncannily similar to Moore's - both are vague and elusive and fail to describe how the "emergent" democracy might form a legal framework, a currency, a definition of property or - most important this, when you're being hit with a stick by a bastard - an armed resistance (which in polite circles today, we call a "military").

As with Moore, academic and historical research in this field is vapored away, as if by magic.

However, we have an idea of how this utopian "democracy" might look, if we follow the participants of Lunchbox's mailing list. These participants are quite clear about how they define democracy:

"Democracy can function perfectly well without people painting their faces and blocking streets," writes one contributor.

42 Days
Orwell would be amused, indeed.

"Words define action," sums up Alan Black. Black helps organise San Francisco's annual LitQuake event and is holding a festival to commemorate Orwell's centenary in the city in June.

"Newspeak was one of the planks of the totalitarian regime. Big Brother was constantly redefining history and redefining words - he knew people respond to key words," he says. "It's interesting that they've identified that the only way to oppose the one superpower comes from the people, and sought to redefine that."

But the real marvel is that they did it with so few people. Pew Research Center's latest research says the number of Internet users who look at blogs is " so small that it is not possible to draw statistically meaningful conclusions about who uses blogs." They peg it at about four per cent. But we're looking at a small sub-genre of blogdom, the tech blogs, and specifically, we're looking at an 'A list' of that sub- sub-genre.

Which means that Google is being "gamed" - and the language perverted - by what in statistical terms in an extremely small fraction indeed.

That was enough to make a "meaning" disappear.

Googlewash
Writing about Google's collusion with the People's Republic of China to block access to mainland users, censorship researcher Seth Finkelsetein observed:

"Contrary to earlier utopian theories of the Internet, it takes very little effort for governments to cause certain information simply to vanish for a huge number of people."

Rub out the word 'government', and replace it with 'weblog A-list'. In this case a commons resource, this very potent and quite viral phrase, was created by millions of people. But it was poisoned by a very select number of 'bloggers'. Possibly a dozen, but no more than 30, we'd guess.

Who is poisoning the well?

The phrase "greenwash" will be familiar to many of you: it's where a spot of judicious marketing paint is applied to something decidedly rotten, transforming it into something that looks as if it's wholesome and radical new, but which is essentially unchanged.

This is the first Googlewash we've encountered. 42 days, too.

What else is coming down the pipe? ®

http://truthout.org/docs_03/040503C.shtml


White House Is Revising Its War Message
By Mike Allen and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post

Thursday 3 April 2003

Setbacks Providing Lessons

White House officials struggled this week to retool a war communications blueprint that did not allow for strong Iraqi resistance and overestimated the welcome allied troops would receive.

The administration countered setbacks on the global airwaves by using classic campaign techniques such as dogged repetition of scripted messages and flat denials of dissent. When the war plan itself was under attack, officials tried to regain their footing by saying that the plan was flexible enough to accommodate any eventuality.

"We should have made that part clearer early on," one official said.

President Bush's aides pride themselves on the iron message-discipline they maintained through his candidacy and early years in office, but their techniques have not immediately succeeded when applied to war. Now, Bush's messengers must compete with other sources of information that include reporters embedded with military units, commanders in the field who bluntly speak their minds and a vocal community of retired military officers receiving intelligence from the Pentagon.

Besieged on so many fronts, administration officials all but shut down communication outside formal briefings, with the White House referring many questions to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon referring some of those questions back to the White House.

Historians and political scientists said the administration's approach has the makings of a credibility gap if the Bush team's assertions from their podiums and on Sunday talk shows become too far divorced from the impression the public is getting from the battlefields in Iraq.

"They have been guilty of trying to put a positive interpretation on everything and ignoring the bad news," said Alex S. Jones, director of Harvard University's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. "That's not the same thing as lying. But I think they misunderstand that acknowledging bad news strengthens your hand because it makes you believable."

Some administration officials said they realized they need to be more forthcoming about U.S. mistakes and civilian casualties than they were during the Afghan war. "It's a lesson we learned from Afghanistan," when the Pentagon's first response to such reports was usually denial, one official said.

Another administration official said Bush's aides know they need to get information out faster. "I don't think anybody overtly sought to obscure reality," the official said. "They just thought the plan was really good."

Officials said they still must improve their outreach to Arab audiences, a primary goal of their war messaging, by offering more Arab-speaking officials to networks serving the Persian Gulf area this week, and the White House sent a communications official to London to try to reach Arab audiences there.

Officials planned an intricate Iraq information strategy and created the White House Office of Global Communications to improve the U.S. image overseas after the nasty months of diplomacy that led up to the war.

That office has focused on the ways language influences attitudes. Several days after military briefers began using "Fedayeen" to describe Iraqi militias loyal to President Saddam Hussein, the office stepped in to remind them that the word "has almost heroic implications" in Arabic that might undercut their propaganda efforts in the Arab world, an administration official said.

Word went out last week to refer to Iraqi fighters in urban guerrilla battles against U.S. forces as "terrorists," "death squads" and "thugs." The new language has sought to reinforce the connection between Hussein and international terrorism by emphasizing reports that the Iraqis were using women and children as shields, fighting out of civilian hospitals and schools, and using suicide bombers.

Much of this new language is directed at overseas audiences. An administration official said Americans, by and large, "don't even need to be told" about a car bombing more than a few times. "You mention it a couple of times and the light bulb goes off," the official said. "In other parts of the world, labeling helps to put it in perspective."

The administration's campaign-style approach was on display Tuesday morning when the Pentagon sent its daily update to Capitol Hill with no mention of the seven civilians who had been shot to death by American soldiers at a checkpoint in Iraq. The incident was dominating news coverage. Instead, the talking points said coalition forces "continue to make good progress toward our objectives," and asserted that local populations "are becoming increasingly willing to assist coalition forces."

At the White House, press secretary Ari Fleischer was telling reporters that Bush's conclusion from his briefings was that "slowly but surely the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people are being won over as they see security increase in their area." That afternoon, Fleischer described a sharp administration dispute over how to distribute aid and run postwar Iraq as "discussions that are routine around here, that involve the various agencies."

Part of the media strategy has been to focus attention on the Pentagon and limit the public appearances of other senior officials, including national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

Leaving messages to the Pentagon has not been without its problems. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld appeared to grow more and more testy as criticism of the war plan increased. And when Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith, in charge of the Iraqi reconstruction effort for the Pentagon, appeared to get out in front of his bosses in scheduling appearances last week, the White House moved to rein him in, officials said. Reporters' calls to Feith's office are now referred to the National Security Council staff, where rules against unmonitored conversations with reporters have been reinforced. At the State Department, officials at all levels are given daily guidance on what subjects to emphasize and what to avoid, and are generally told to limit their comments to the media.

After nearly two weeks of discouraging news from Iraq, the White House viewed yesterday as an excellent message day. There were new details on the rescue of prisoner of war Jessica Lynch by U.S. Special Operations forces. For the first time, video footage showed substantial numbers of Iraqi civilians, in the city of Najaf, welcoming U.S. troops.

American military units, described in news reports over the past week as bogged down outside Baghdad, closed in on the Iraqi capital. A military briefer crowed that a division of Hussein's Republican Guard had been "destroyed." Previously scheduled briefings on U.S. humanitarian aid were held in Washington, at Central Command headquarters in Qatar and at a London office of the State Department that is charged with serving Arab news outlets.

"We are going to win militarily," an administration official said. "But you can't separate the political track from that."

fuck saddam. it is becasue of him that innocent people are dying. fuck him up his stupid ass.
support the troops they are fighting for all of you.

"..in days of frustration,
spark the education..." -bt

looks like the government and media is lyin once again.

http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=focusIraqNews&storyID=2513937

Saddam Loyalists Man Baghdad Defenses
Sat April 5, 2003 11:52 AM ET

By Khaled Yacoub Oweis
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Paramilitary forces, dressed in black and carrying AK-47 assault rifles and grenades, headed toward the outskirts of the Iraqi capital on Saturday or joined soldiers in full combat gear digging in around the city.

But I and other correspondents traveling around Baghdad saw no sign of U.S. troops or armor inside the city.

With U.S. military spokesmen saying American forces had entered Baghdad, forces loyal to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein moved into position across the city or headed south toward the battle front.

Trailers and buses full of Saddam's Fedayeen, the black-clad paramilitary forces under the command of Saddam's eldest son Uday, drove south on one thoroughfare.

"Move out of the way," they shouted as they sped away from a military compound, touting AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenade launchers and clutching Chinese-made hand grenades.

Armored personnel carriers were also driving south.

Driving freely around the southern outskirts, the south east, the south west and near the presidential palaces and the main security buildings of the Iraqi capital, I saw Iraqi forces preparing for battle and boarded-up shops.

The sound of heavy artillery fire could be heard from the fringes of the city, but there was no sign of U.S. forces.

Soldiers in full combat gear and members of Saddam's Fedayeen crouched on the corners of highways leading to the south and east.

Iraqi forces appeared to be repositioning themselves constantly.

CONFLICTING VERSION OF EVENTS

A U.S. spokesman said early on Saturday that American forces had pushed into the heart of the battered Iraqi capital for a first time in the 17-day-old war. The push, the spokesman added, was "more than a patrol that goes in and comes back out."

But Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf said U.S. forces had not entered the city and had been expelled from the city's international airport to the west.

"The film they broadcast to you is a lie," he said of television footage showing U.S. troops and armor on a highway with signs indicating the City Center and Baghdad airport.

"They're trying to deceive everyone. They're in the outskirts of Abu Ghreib," he told the Arabic satellite network al-Jazeera, adding that they were 20-25 miles from Baghdad. "This is a ploy," he added.

The Fox News Channel in the United States showed a line of tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles which it said were from the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division and were rolling into Baghdad.

The column, moving in broad daylight and firing intermittently, passed several burning and destroyed vehicles.

The Fox News Channel footage showed few buildings on either side of the road, a large sand-colored mosque with twin minarets and a line of larger-than-life statues but no footage of any built-up area.

An Iraqi in civilian clothes and with his hands up emerged from a grove beside the highway and lay down on the asphalt.

Fox had a correspondent with the column riding atop a Bradley. The vehicles passed under several highway bridges. One road sign pointed to Bayaa and City Center. Another shown later in the sequence pointed to Baghdad Airport.

The Arabic satellite network al-Jazeera later carried footage of jubilant Iraqis on a highway next to the burned-out wreckage of what looked like U.S. armored fighting vehicles. Roads signs there also pointed to the airport and City Center.

U.S. military spokesmen said rocket-propelled grenades had damaged one U.S. tank. A second had to be abandoned in Baghdad because of mechanical failure, they added.

FEWER CARS ON ROADS

The southern outskirts of Baghdad looked like a war front, with scores of Iraqi soldiers and paramilitary forces heading out to confront an approaching U.S. enemy.

Overnight raids left more government complexes in ruin.

Shops in normally busy districts, such as New Baghdad, were almost all shut, and far fewer cars were on the roads. Long queues formed at those petrol stations still open.

What cars there were sped faster than usual. Drivers, who rarely give Baghdad traffic lights much respect, ignored them completely.

Heavy artillery and rocket launchers were positioned in the Dawra area, home to the main oil refinery feeding Baghdad and an area where a U.S. spokesman said American tanks drove early on Saturday on a reconnaissance mission.

Palm trees and farms provided cover. Iraqi artillery occasionally fired to the south and southeast.

Inside the city, checkpoints were installed on the road to the airport and the paramilitary directed traffic. Heavy military gear could be seen moving on roads around the center.

Republican Guards were seen around one presidential compound in the city. Soldiers spilled out of pick-up trucks and took up positions near main highways. U.S. fighter jets flew overhead.

A convoy of police cars with sirens wailing drove around the center of Baghdad. The officers inside fired AK-47s in the air and raised pictures of Saddam and Iraqi flags to celebrate what Iraqi officials said was the recapture of the airport.

No sign of U.S. in Baghdad
http://www.news24.com/News24/World/Iraq/0,6119,2-10-1460_1343684,00.html

Iraq Denies Reports of Coalition Entering Baghdad
http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200304/05/eng20030405_114631.shtml

Guardian Unlimited | World Latest | Accounts Vary on U.S. Move Into Baghdad
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-2535593,00.html

Everything is OK
http://www.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30000-12280996,00.html


"The biggest difference between the Russians and Americans was that Russians recognized that 'the Party Line' was propaganda from the ruling elite, and Americans who receive 'the Mainstream Press' fail to recognize it as propaganda from the ruling elite and mistake it for reality." - Johan Galtung -

"Why of course the people don't want war ... But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship ...Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger."--Hermann Goering, Nazi leader, at the Nuremberg Trials after World War II

"Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar." (Julius Caesar)

"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." - George Orwell

The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth becomes the greatest enemy of the State.--Joseph M. Goebbels

"Truth is not what is; truth is what people perceive it to be." Adolf Hitler, Propaganda Maxim


"The greatest threat to our world and its peace comes from those who want war, who prepare for it, and who, by holding out vague promises of future peace or by instilling fear of foreign aggression, try to make us accomplices to their plans." -- Hermann Hesse - Author (1877-1962)

"Terrorism is the best political weapon for nothing drives people harder than a fear of sudden death." - Adolf Hitler

"I know two types of law because I know two types of men, those who are with us and those who are against us." - Hermann Goering, 1936

"You are either with us or against us."- George W. Bush, November 2001

"Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." - George W. Bush, September 2001

"If our nation is ever taken over, it will be taken over from within."- President James Madison

Why they want Basra--

Basra is the second largest city of Iraq with an estimated population of about 1,377,000 in 2003.

The area surrounding Basra has substantial petroleum resources with many oil wells. The city also has an international airport. Basra is in a fertile agricultural region, with major products including rice, maize corn, barley, millet, wheat, and livestock. The city's oil refinery has a production capacity of about 140,000 barrels a day (22,300 m³).

Rapid Dominance--

Rapid Dominance is a military doctrine that calls for attempting to directly influence your adversary's will, perception, and understanding of events by inducing a state of Shock and Awe It is not intended to replace the traditional military aim of destroying the adversary's military capability, but instead to integrate that destruction into a larger suite of actions intended to produce a psychological effect. There are indications that it was first applied systemically as a war doctrine by the United States in its 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The Doctrine Of Rapid Dominance (shock and awe)--

The first detailed description of this doctrine was in Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance, a book written by Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade, and published by the National Defense University in 1996.

In the closing days of the twentieth century American military planners believed that US had virtual military supremacy over any potential adversary. Looking ahead, however, it was believed that the military would be required to maintain the same level of supremacy with fewer resources, greater constraints, and increased tempo of operations. The concept of Rapid Dominance was proposed as one way to achieve these goals.

The aim of Rapid Dominance is to reduce an adversary's understanding, ability, and will to respond to an attack; to create sufficient "shock and awe" to render the enemy impotent. Methods of inducing "shock and awe" can include direct force applied to command and control centers, selective denial of information and dissemination of disinformation, overwhelming combat force, and rapidity of action. The development of precision guided munitions is one enabling technology for the doctrine of Rapid Dominance.

a bit to long to effectively post but a good read.

http://www.indyweek.com/durham/2003-04-02/war.html

http://images.ucomics.com/comics/tr/2003/tr030331.gif

http://www.msnbc.com/news/895392.asp

Excerpt:

April 8 — Conclusive testing is still under way, but the latest tests indicate that barrels found in central Iraq do not contain chemical weapons agents as first suspected, U.S. military sources said on Tuesday. Other suspicious finds — especially rockets potentially packed with sarin and mustard gas — were also still being investigated.

SAMPLES FROM the sites investigated Monday were being sent to the United States for more definitive tests. If any of the discoveries were confirmed, it would be the first find of chemical weapons during the war.
The barrels discovered Monday by troops of the Army’s 101st Airborne Division had been buried at a pesticide plant in Hindiya, 20 miles southeast of Karbala. The barrels initially tested positive for the nerve agents sarin and Tabun, as well as mustard agent, a blistering chemical first used in World War I.
NBC’s Dana Lewis said the 15 barrels appeared to have been recently buried in a pit and indicated that troops also found weapons in the pesticide plant, suggesting that it might have been a disguised military facility. He said the troops were led to the site by an Iraqi.
Subsequent, more sensitive, tests turned out to be negative, U.S. military sources officers said Tuesday.
“The latest tests turned out negative,” one source said.
In a separate find, soldiers with the 1st Brigade of the 101st Airborne on Tuesday discovered an unknown number of barrels near Najaf, south of Karbala, NBC News reported.
Soldiers who opened one barrel experienced nausea, vomiting and a rash. Preliminary testing of the substances was under way.

article on the 7th saying that they had found a medium-range missile cache complete with chemical warheads -- sarin, mustard gas. Then, on the 8th they print an article saying that there has been no official finding of any chemical weapons. I can't find the link to the articles, it was in another forum.

America taught me how to kidnap and torture cats...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2930913.stm

check this out...
http://www.ubo.com/view_news.cfm?content_id=126

It talks about how the war with Iraq has alot of countries on the defensive. What the Bush administration thought would be a scare tactic or hint to other countries has back fired.

carry on

peace

http://www.nwarktimes.com/times/story_searchresults.php?storyid=105645

UA student arrested during anti-war demonstration
BY WIL SHANE Northwest Arkansas

Monday, April 7, 2003

A Fayetteville man was arrested for criminal trespass Saturday at the Northwest Arkansas Mall when he and other members of a University of Arkansas student group attempted to enter the facility wearing T-shirts emblazoned with antiwar slogans.

Daniel Vaught, 22, a member of the university’s Progressive Student Association, said he tried to enter the mall’s north entrance after he and his fellow PSA members had been demonstrating around Fayetteville. "Some of us had been demonstrating down on College and Dickson," Vaught said. "We just went to the mall for some lunch, but security wouldn’t let us in."

The group members ’ shirts bore the slogans "Support the troops, not war or Bu $ h." "They met us at the curb and said we weren’t welcome," he said. "They told us our shirts were the reason."

Vaught said mall security officers quickly called the Fayetteville Police Department at about 2 p.m.

A spokesperson for mall security said Sunday his office could not comment on the matter.

When officers arrived, Vaught stepped forward as the group’s spokesperson, said PSA member Nik Robbins, 24. "They wanted to arrest someone and they picked out Vaught because they perceived him as the ringleader," Robbins said.

Vaught said the group was inspired by the recent case of a New York lawyer who was arrested at Crossgates Mall in Albany after refusing to remove a T-shirt bearing the slogan "Peace on earth" on the front and "Give peace a chance" on the back. He had purchased the shirt at the mall. The charges were later dropped.

Vaught said he it’s the war he opposes, not those fighting it. "We support the troops," he said. "We just want them to come home."

http://tv.zap2it.com/news/tvnewsdaily.html?30964

LOS ANGELES (Zap2it.com) - The executive producer of a CBS miniseries about Adolf Hitler's rise to power has been fired after giving an interview in which he compared the current mood of Americans to that of the Germans who helped Hitler rise to power.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Gernon was fired Sunday (April 6) from Alliance Atlantis, the production company making "Hitler: The Rise of Evil" for CBS. He had worked there 11 years and was head of the firm's long-form programming division.

Neither Gernon nor Alliance Atlantis is commenting on the matter.

"Hitler" has caused controversy ever since CBS announced its intentions last summer. In an interview with TV Guide about the four-hour film, scheduled for May, Gernon compares many Americans' acceptance of a war in Iraq to the fearful climate in post-World War I Germany, of which Hitler took advantage to become its ruler.

"It basically boils down to an entire nation gripped by fear, who ultimately chose to give up their civil rights and plunged the whole nation into war," Gernon said in the interview. "I can't think of a better time to examine this history than now."

Gernon's remarks reportedly didn't go over well at CBS, which has tried very hard to frame "Hitler" as a historical piece that in no way sensationalizes or offers excuses for Hitler's actions.

Alliance Atlantis has become one of the leading producers of TV movies in recent years. The company has made "The Matthew Shepard Story," "Joan of Arc," and "Me and My Shadows: Life with Judy Garland." Gernon was an executive producer of all three. He also directed "Hell on Heels: The Battle of Mary Kay," which aired on CBS earlier this season.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2842.htm

*you guys think this is true? if so does what does it mean for zionism?*

http://www.albawaba.com/news/index.php3?sid=238435&lang=e&dir=news

The unofficial but rapidly growing British and European embargo on supply of military equipment to Israel is causing grave concern to Israeli military planners. Following the refusal of Germany to provide critical parts for the local production of the Israeli Army's Merkava battle tanks, a British embargo on ejector seat parts is threatening to seriously damage Israel's much feared nuclear capability.

Britain has been holding back on delivery of many military-related supplies to Israel since the outbreak of the Al Aqsa Intifadah over two years ago. Among the items that are being denied to Israel are key parts for the Martin-Baker ejection seats that equip Israel's American made F-4 Phantom jets. Ejector seats allow pilots of the jets to escape their aircraft in case of emergency, and without them Israel will have to ground its Phantom jet fleet. Rachel Niedak-Ashkenazi, a spokeswoman for the Israeli Ministry of Defense, told Israel's Haaretz daily that she didn't know how soon the planes would have to be grounded, but indicated it was a matter of weeks or months. "We are desperately searching for other sources but haven't located any yet," she said.

The ejection seat parts are now at the center of a major diplomatic row between Israel and Britain. The British Daily Times has recently reported that Victor Harel, a senior Israeli Foreign Ministry official, called the embargo “a major cloud in our bilateral relations with Britain”. The strong Israeli reaction included several accusations against Britain, not least of which was the charge that Britain was hurting Israel on the eve of potential war with Iraq.

The harsh Israeli reaction may seem puzzling in view of the seeming unimportance of the Phantom jets. These are old airplanes, designed in the 1950s, and the Israeli Air Force has hundreds of much newer combat aircraft its inventory. However, despite the introduction of much newer and more advanced aircraft, such as the F-16 and F-15 fighters Israel used to attack Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981, the Israel Air Force continues to operate the aging Phantom fleet. The Israeli army has even invested large sums of money in upgrading the Phantoms into a new and improved version, the Phantom 2000.



Some experts explain that the reason the Phantom is still in service with Israel is its apparent nuclear capability. As early as the 1973 October War, Israeli Phantoms were armed with nuclear bombs and prepared to deliver an Atomic attack as Syrian and Egyptian forces defeated Israeli troops on the frontline. In September 2002, former senior U.S. officials told The Washington Times how eight Israeli Phantoms were set to attack the military headquarters near Damascus and Cairo with nuclear weapons.

It must also be realized that despite its age, the Phantom is still a highly capable bomber, with the extremely long range needed to attack countries such as Iraq and Iran. According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Israel's improved Phantoms have a range of 2,575 kilometers, which means they can fly over 643 Kilometers further than the Israeli Air Force's newer but smaller F-16 fighter-bombers.

The Phantom also has another advantage in that it carries a navigator as well as a pilot, giving it an important advantage when attacking targets far off from Israel. Last, but far from least, the large Phantom can carry the Israeli "Popeye" missile, a large and heavy weapon that in the United States Air Force is carried by the gigantic B-52 bombers. The "Popeye" is a precision guided missile that allows the Phantom to deliver its attack through strong defenses, and that also carries a much larger warhead then the smaller precision guided missiles that most modern aircraft carry.



In view of the atomic role of the Israeli Phantom fleet, the connection Israeli spokespersons have made between the British embargo and a confrontation with Iraq takes on a much stronger meaning. However, it must be remembered that in addition to the Phantom jets, Israel still has several other means to deliver nuclear weapons throughout the Middle East, including the F-16 and F-15 jets that have already attacked Arab targets as far away as Iraq and Tunisia. – (albawaba.com)

it means the zionists can all go fist themselves.