Today, in these United States, it is Memorial Day. Today is the day we remember those fallen in all our wars, from the Revolutionary all the way to the current mess in Iraq.
Seeing as how that's the point of the day, I hope you won't mind me indulging in a bit of remembrance myself.
His name was Michael. He was the second youngest of nine boys, and he happened to come of age in the time of one of the most divisive wars in American history. I don't know whether he volunteered or was drafted; I've never really gotten up the nerve to ask. How do you ask that question to a mother who still grieves?
Needless to say, Michael served in the military, in much the same way as most of his brothers had, and because he served in the military, he was sent to Vietnam, leaving his high school sweetheart behind. He served his term, and was days from returning stateside, when there was an accident.
The way I understand it, he was riding in the back of a military truck when the driver swerved to avoid hitting a bicyclist, and it tipped the truck, killing Michael pretty much instantly.
And it was this simple accident, in a war which may or may not have been necesary that caused me never to know my Uncle Mickey, my grandfather's brother.
So...on this Memorial Day, to my Uncle Mickey, and to all our soldiers who have died doing their duty in overseas wars. I remember.
Apologies for the relative lack of substance lately, guys; a few of us Zoners are putting the finishing touches on a long-term project unrelated to this site and have had our attention taken up by that. We'll probably be a bit more prolific after the next couple of days.
Over at The Private Intellectual, I came across Benjamin Dueholm's article about the glut of terrorism warnings flitting around these days. Those claims, Dueholm notes via a CNN transcript from the 27th, are going to the point of people fairly explicitly saying that electing Kerry would be a defeat for America because of what happened in Madrid.
I don't follow the reasoning either, but the claims are being made, which is troubling. The administration's made more than one claim that the Democratic Party is alternately soft on, indifferent to, or actively supporting The Terrorists in general and Osama in particular over the past few months; however, they're starting to get more blatant with it. This could set a fairly nasty tone in the fall, if they're swinging this low already.
I'm sure most of you have heard of the case-modding scene at least in passing by now. You can see some people doing truly impressive works of artistry, such as this case, modded to carry a Half Life and/or Fallout theme. There's a lot of other common ones, like sound-sensitive lighting on the case, transparent cases, and whatnot. It's a hobby with more than one apex..
And then we stumble upon its very nadir. This is an example of a pursuit that's so unbelievably crappy and pathetic that it becomes admirable in its own right - indeed, a thing of pure beauty.
The further down the thread you read, the better this gets.
It's brilliant in its awfulness. SkReaP, we at the Nuke-Free Zone salute you.
[Found on Dave Farber's always thought provoking Interesting People list.]
Our word was as good as our gold. At the start of the Cuban Missile Crisis, former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, President Kennedy’s special envoy to brief French President de Gaulle, offered to document our case by having the actual pictures of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba brought in. "No," shrugged the usually difficult de Gaulle: "The word of the President of the United States is good enough for me."Eight months later, President Kennedy could say at American University: "The world knows that America will never start a war. This generation of Americans has had enough of war and hate...we want to build a world of peace where the weak are secure and the strong are just."
Compare and contrast with the current administration. And read the whole speech by Ted Sorenson at the New School commencement. It's a good sum up of the political situation and what's changed, and what needs to change...
Via the BBC, we've got an article about diplomatic language.
Usually, words are carefully chosen as instruments of policy. The leaders of the big powers try by constant repetition to get their terms adopted by everyone, because they carry with them value judgements and a particular view of the world.
It's a short but interesting article about the infuriating subtleties of diplospeak.
I only report this stuff, folks:
Hippos don't sweat blood, they sweat SPF 40. No, really:
The colourful secrets of hippopotamus sweat have been uncovered. Researchers have identified the chemicals responsible for the timeless myth that hippopotamus sweat blood...
Kimiko Hashimoto and his colleagues at Kyoto Pharmaceutical University, Japan, revealed that hippos' secretions are neither blood nor sweat, but a mixture of pigments that function both as sunscreen and antibiotic. This mixture keeps hippos' cool and protects them from the harmful effects of the sun.
Nanoscale batteries may be on the market soon:
Nanotechnology could help revolutionize the energy industry, producing advances such as solar power cells made of plastics to environmentally friendly batteries that detoxify themselves, experts told United Press International.
One nanotech firm, mPhase Technologies in Norwalk, Conn., is partnering with Lucent Technologies to commercialize nanotechnology by creating intelligent batteries, with the intent of bringing the devices to the marketplace within the next 12 to 18 months.
Tricorders are quickly becoming a reality:
A fairly small device is able to quickly and accurately diagnose pneumonia and may be able to diagnose a large number of other diseases including cancers.
Future Hi has a lengthy piece on how to live forever or die trying:
But if revival and the aging cure are both successful, then let's say we figure our lifespan could be as long as 10,000 years, at which point we expect some random cosmic accident or war will wipe us out. Even though the civilization we are talking about probably has extensive control over all biological processes and extremely advanced technology, let's say our quality of life doesn't go much further above that which we experienced during our prime - a steady fluctuation of peak experiences and typical days. We also assume that one doesn't get bored during those ten thousand years, which shouldn't be too hard if the civilization is developing technologically and has plenty of new stuff to do. Many sci-fi, anime, and fantasy characters have lifespans on this scale, and they seem to be doing fine, so how hard could it be, right?
And for your political content today, here's the complete text of Al Gore's speech at the MoveOn rally:
Neither did the administration have any scruples about using fear of terrorists as a means to punch holes in the basic protections of the Constitution: to create a class of permanent prisoners; to make it possible to imprison Americans without due process; to totally sequester information not just from the people, but from the congress and the courts - all justified by recourse to fear.
Finsbury Park mosque leader Abu Hamza al Masri has been arrested by UK police and indicted in the US on charges of trying to build a terrorist training camp in Oregon (More). Given the quick timing of the two events, extradition is likely.
If there's any doubt that this is one of the bad guys, note what he said about the Columbia tragedy (and kept saying), his holding a pro-terrorism conference on the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, his running an organization dedicated to establishing Taliban-style Sharia in Britain, and read some of the links provided at the bottom of this post.
It's been a wonder something like this hasn't happened sooner. In any less tolerant country, he would be expelled, charged with treason, or disappeared by now. Finsbury Park has been the target of prior raids, but Britain has never gotten anything to stick. Hamza is far from the only pro-terrorist activist in Britain and he may not even be the most extreme, but his wounds make him a photogenic enemy and symbolic of Britain's pro-terrorist movement.
For more information, see also a recent Newsday article on Finsbury Park activities, a meaty report from the Muslim-American Society, a CNN biography of al Masri, a MEMRI biography of al Masri, a BBC report on the support for al-Qaeda and similar terrorist movements in Britain, and a similarly themed Guardian report.
The story about Rumsfeld banning cameras in Iraq was a hoax. I'll admit I fell for it. (via Fark)
Update: Wired has more on the Pentagon's concerns about modern communications technology. (via BoingBoing)
Well, if you've been living under a rock in Canada, or living in the States at all, you should be told that Canada's federal election campaign is underway, with the vote itself on June 28.
I figure since I've got a record to be on I'll take a shot at making my predictions.
Well, that's that. Time to see how it goes.
An update on yesterday's post:
The New York Post (yeah, it's the Post, but they have neocon access and might be right on this) claims that Jordan provided the intelligence linking Chalabi to Iran. Given that Jordan really doesn't like Chalabi, any intelligence on him from them is going to be highly questionable and must be checked out very carefully. The article doesn't mention the later allegations that Chalabi was passing false intel from Iran to US, only the earlier one that he was passing stuff from the US to Iran. However, it stands to reason that the Jordanian packet included information on this as well.
Joshua Micah Marshall brings up additional background on Chalabi intelligence chief Aras Karim, who may have been the more serious target of the raid.
Chalabi claims that the CIA is out to get him. Later in the article he denies that the INC provided any information to the United States, but only provided defectors, blaming the US for believing them.
Iran denies receiving any US intelligence from Chalabi. The Guardian also has a story.
A sidenote: According to Chalabi's lawyers, the troops raiding his house didn't bother to get a warrant (41st paragraph (6th from bottom)), though this is disputed by Iraqi officials (33rd paragraph).
The Ironic Times, of all places, scooped the story that General Taguba has been transferred to a different post. The story's legit, though who knows what it means.
While on the subject of Abu Ghraib... As reported in the Guardian, the Washington Post got their hands on a memo from General Sanchez authorizing military intelligence to conduct torture without his approval, though the Post itself doesn't seem to have a story on the matter according to Google. This contradicts Sanchez's testimony to Congress that written approval from him was necessary before any torture could be applied to prisoners. Making this more interesting, Abu Ghraib defendant Sergeant Ivan Frederick claims that Sanchez watched over some of the torture.
It raised an eyebrow when US forces raided the house of Ahmed Chalabi, the chief architect of the Iraq war.
It raised the other when the US accused Chalabi of passing sensitive information to Iran.
The holyshitometer broke when US intelligence said Chalabi's false reports came from Iran.
If these allegations by the Defense Intelligence Agency are true, the entire Iraq war and the decade-long leadup thereto -- PNAC lobbying, nonexistent WMD stockpiles, stovepipes to push aside experienced analysts, Mylroie's conspiracy theories -- were all part of a plan by Iran to remove their enemy Saddam (perhaps to expand their influence through the Iraqi Shiites?), and the neocons fell for it hard.
If this report is right, Bush's #1 policy for the past two years has been to be a tool of one of the Axis of Evil nations. It also puts the lie to Bush's Axis of Evil rhetoric, though as it came from someone who didn't know there were Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq until two months before he bombed the place (link doesn't work, grep "Packer" and look up), nobody with a clue about world affairs and a working brain cell believed that line anyway.
I wonder if there are connections to any Reagan holdovers who had friendly relations with Iran stemming as far back as the 1980 campaign's interference with hostage release negotiations. While we're waiting on more information to come out, I think I'll go around my favourite webforums and call all the warhawks "traitors" and "Khamenei-lovers".
Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you The Bush Game.
What in hell is the Bush Game, you ask?
Well.
This is a side-scroller Flash game that pits the classic heroes that any American kid growing up in the '80s would admire (Hulk Hogan, Mr. T, He-Man) and a motley collection of leftist icons from more recent years (Howard Dean, Michael Moore, Chirstopher Reeve, and more!) up against the Bush Administration and its evil spawn, especially the corrupted menace known as Voltron.
Pure gratuitious mayhem, intercut with actual facts about how the Dubya has been screwing America. I give it 5 stars for pure cool factor.
That, and the end sequence is an unabashed promo for John Kerry. The thing even autoredirects you to johnkerry.com. That gets bonus points.
Go check it out, but be warned, it's not even remotely work-safe.
Bit o'this and that again for the evening.
First, something I picked up via Reuters. I haven't been following the situation in Israel nearly as well as I should, although it's to the point where I could probably summarize any particular day's events sight unseen. What got me with this story wasn't its contents, but its headline. "Allows?" I could say a number of things, but I'm gonna save 'em either for someone else to cover or for when I find a forum in which the kind of language that comes to mind is more acceptable.
This story from CNN wins the week's award for Best Acronym For A Technical Project. I'm not sure how this compares to other methods of deflect in terms of cost, feasibility, and so on, but I must admit I love the concept. With something like this implemented, we could even send a gaggle of madmen to deflect a killer asteroid in a way that didn't involve bad scriptwriting. I'd love to see just one NIAC concept actually hit the implementation phase.
Just because your day doesn't have enough controversy, Collective Sigh has pointed to an article in Nature about the world's first stem cell bank opening in the United Kingdom, which will "grow and store stem cells for use in medical research." The controversy is coming partly from the fact that it's using stem cells at all - some people still believe that every single one of them is a human being - and partly from the fact that it's trying to store all kinds of the cells, including embryonic and fetal ones, to determine which form and age of them is most useful for medical purposes. I wonder what we'll see coming out of the research at this place; considering my own leanings and the state of modern medicine anyway, I must admit to varied and high hopes.
Anyway, that's that for now. The Zone requires topics; feel free to suggest something, by which I mean you are, of course, required to do so. I'm gonna try to get back on to the development tack in the next couple of days, but it never hurts to have some fallbacks. It's been about three months with us giving you guys something to read every single day, and I'd like to keep that level of output coming.
The US military is calling up its inactive reserves starting today.
That scrabbling sound you hear is coming from the bottom of the manpower barrel.
With the backing-down of paranoid religious authorities in the Nigerian state of Kano, the program to eradicate polio is getting back on track. Islamic authorities in Kano had caused enough fear of the vaccine to create a boycott late last year, after having claimed that the imminization program was "part of a U.S.-led plot to cause cancer, AIDS and infertility." This claim, made near the final elimination of the disease, allowed polio to begin spreading again, shifting it from a few small enclaves to several African nations. With a resurgence in the immunization program, much of the new spread was caught, but it still lost people time.
Now, things are getting back on track. According to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, there are fewer than two hundred cases of polio on the planet right now. If Kano continues to stay out of the way of the final leg of the program, a plague which paralyzed 350,000 children in 1988 will be extinct in the first days of 2005. This will be the second time a major human disease has been eradicated.
There are many different levels of accomplishment which humanity as a whole has managed in its history. Building cities and nations, working to spread freedom to more and more of the planet, creating great works of art and literature, even gazing up at the Earth from the surface of the Moon. In my opinion, this kind of accomplishment - taking an ancient plague responsible for uncountable millions of deaths and cripplings throughout history, and wiping it from the face of the Earth - tops them all.
If this goes as planned, and we see polio gone by the new year, the WHO will have not once but twice justified its existence in a way that will ring through time for centuries.
For all two of our readers who only read the NFZ and don't read my personal journal elsewhere:
I graduated today. I now have a master's degree in information management. w00t! I'm rather proud of this accomplishment, as it's taken two rather difficult years to get it. For the moment, I'm going to join the workforce, but I might go back to school in a few years. (I know my fellow NFZ writers and a few other friends have a pool going on what that degree will be in, if you want to join in, talk to them. The joke here is that my bachelor's is in history, and my master's is in information management -- thus they're not sure what I'll try next.)
Now comes the tricky part, though. Anybody know anybody who has a job in my field in the SF Bay Area?
The other thing I plan to do is get pages on the individual authors here on the NFZ together. We'll see how well that works out as I get to it.
Over at Collective Sigh we find a mention of Syrian President Assad's views of reform. The Baltimore Sun article itself describes what Assad, who inherited his country from his father just under four years ago, has planned for the country. In describing how it'll happen, Assad hits on a point that a lot of people have missed.
"We are going to change," he said. "The first thing I proposed as president was change. But our political life is based on certain tribal and political customs.
"They don't go back just tens of years; they go back thousands of years. It's not so easy to change. ... We are still at the beginning of this process. We have a long road ahead of us."
I discussed this sort of thing back in October, committing the vague heresy of saying some things cannot and will not happen overnight. Expecting an ancient culture to format-and-reinstall its society and government on demand is both foolish and dangerous; reform is the work of decades, not months, especially when it's as sweeping and fundamental as the kind being planned for Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries in this day and age.
Are we within our rights to expect, demand, and finally militarily force these changes because they aren't about to happen in a fiscal year or presidential term? Sometimes, yes; often, no; when the country is already attempting to reform itself, never.
It's a pity that the appointed dictator of one of these countries grasps the point more fully and eloquently than the elected leader of the Earth's democratic hyperpower can.
And now for some news that doesn't involve Iraq, Ruin and Death of Hope.
First of all, from northwest of the Zone we have this story about dairy power:
After 25 years of persistent work, Marin County rancher Albert Straus has figured out a way to run his dairy farm, organic creamery and electric car from the manure generated by his herd of 270 cows.
Cheered on by a small gathering of engineers, environmentalists and fellow farmers, Straus stepped into a utility shed Thursday, switched on a 75- kilowatt generator, then stepped outside to snip the ribbon spanning a spanking-new electrical panel.
On the panel, an electricity meter began running backward, indicating that power originating from a nearby poop-filled lagoon near the town of Marshall was feeding into PG&E's electric power grid.
The idea of locally-produced biofuel power, while it doesn't exactly stir my jaded techo-fetishist soul the same way as fusion or orbital solar power, still is a really neat concept and one worth the effort of investing in.
Meanwhile, brother Zibblsnrt has discovered a new plot to bring direct democracy to the planet. This group is extremely new, and it's going to need a good deal of work before it reaches any level of actual relevence, but as an idea I approve of the concept.
Yonder on TODAYonline Francis Chin takes a look at how the omnipresence of information technology keeps the plans of dictators and Republicans going angly:
Global outrage over digital photographs published in newspapers of American soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners is the latest example of how technology, in the hands of ordinary folk, creates a kind of information tsunami that shakes up the powerful and the mighty.
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The sheer convenience and speed of taking photos with an idiot-proof digital camera or a camera phone, and then sharing them via the Internet with the rest of the world, has given a new meaning to the word "transparency".
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With a press of a button and the click of a computer mouse, dark corners are now brightly illuminated.
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There is, literally, no place to hide.
Shades of the Transparent Society? Maybe so. If so, then David Brin was right, and we'd best get up off our asses and figure out to keep the flow of information going in both directions.
Speaking of information, I'd like to point out that 10-year-olds are smarter than Senator Inhofe and Rush Limbaugh put together. I know, it's blatantly obvious, but I figured, why not? (via Making Light)
And of course, there's always time to be an octopus in love.
South Korea's impeachment crisis is over, with Roh emerging victorious. Actually, the Supreme Court found Roh guilty of the concrete charge against him, violating election regulations, but declared that it wasn't serious enough to warrant an impeachment trial or a charge of gross incompetence.
In an act of censorship frightening for its symbolism, Ashcroft has forbidden the ACLU from telling you what's in the PATRIOT Act. According to Don Eggen of the Washington Post,
... the ACLU was forced to remove two paragraphs from the release posted on its Web site, after the Justice Department complained that the group had violated court secrecy rules. One paragraph described the type of information that FBI agents could request under the law, while another merely listed the briefing schedule in the case, according to court documents and the original news release ... The first aid out the court's schedule for receiving legal briefs and noted the name of the New York-based judge in the case, U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero. The second paragraph read: "The provision under challenge allows an FBI agent to write a letter demanding the disclosure of the name, screen names, addresses, e-mail header information, and other sensitive information held by 'electronic communication service providers.'
This next bit was in the deadtree news so I don't have a link, but on the Iraq torture scandal: all of the soldiers being tried have said, under oath, that nobody else was involved in the torture and they did it all on their own, for fun. Needless to say, this conflicts with the previously reported claims that the actions, including the photographs, were done under orders from the intelligence officers commanding them. Atrios notes that Bush's people earlier promised that there would be no torture or mistreatment of Al-Qaeda suspects and that MSNBC claims to have evidence suggesting such a wider scandal. Heard on TV moments ago that the source for the MSNBC report has just been courtmartialed for his part in the torture, and he claims that the abuses were ordered from above, unlike the six other bottom-rungers being investigated.
Speaking of the Iraq torture scandal, the Mirror admits that its pictures of Brits doing the same were faked and sacked its editor. Now it's a matter of finding out who made the pics and how they were able to pass themselves of as Brits stationed in Iraq.
There's a half-$trillion goof in NASA's budget.
Congressman Jose Serrano accuses the FCC of targeting only anti-Bush radio hosts for indecency fines. See also, Serrano's interview with Howard Stern.
Scientists are looking closely at a 125-mile crater northwest of Australia from a meteor that they think might have done in the trilobites. Bedout crater has been considered before. As the BBC points out, some are skeptical.
Zib brought to my attention Darrell Issa opponent Mike Byron's anti-Issa site which ties Issa into the Iraq cell-phone contract scandal.
Rumsfeld's Proactive Preemptive Operations Group expected to encourage terrorists to attack the US, to expose themselves by overcommitting too early.
The Reform Party has endorsed Ralph Nader to get him on the ballot in states where he didn't qualify, probably for him to split the anti-Bush vote.
A New York Post(!) guest columnist is demanding Rumsfeld retire
I'm in a linkspamming mood, therefore you shall be too!
I've been poking around the TTLB Ecosystem for a little while to see what there is to see out there. Everyone knows about the blogs higher up in the rankings, those behemoths such as Instapundit, Drudge, Daily Kos, Eschaton, and others. However, there's more than ten thousand of these critters hovering around, and a lot of them are surprisingly good despite their obscurity. A lot of them are oh, ah, somewhat lower quality, but a little bit of searching can find you some interesting reading.
One of the first interesting blogs I stumbled over last night is The Inland Anti-Empire. IAE focuses mainly on news based around the blogger's own neck of the woods, though it also hits topics of global significance, such as Bartlett's pointing out Congressman Issa's ties to the Qualcomm fiasco in Iraq. The blog's divided into readable sections and a decent archive of posts is visible from the front page at any given time. Topics include highlighting the bounds of civil debate and the crossing thereof (including watching the instigator getting creamed in comments!), the required commentaries on the Iraq situation, and a bit of jealousy at recieving outrage from boring sources for the site's commentaries (which amused me enough to pique my interest in the first place). The site is fairly California-specific for the most part, so people in that neck of the woods would get more use out of it, but it isn't too hard to catch something worth reading here.
Another site I came across is The Private Intellectual, run by a small group of posters with one Benjamin Dueholm taking up the lion's share of the screen space. This isn't a linkblog as much as a more commentary-based one, such as Dueholm's essay about the idea of American hegemony and the odd commentary about some of George Will's articles.
A few other things as well. Via C|Net, we have an article in which Researchers demonstrated an ability to identify blacked-out parts of confidential documents at a security conference in Switzerland. This isn't simpler stuff like the PDF blackouts that some idiots got involved in; this is taking photocopies of markered-over documents and going from there to decipher what's underneath all that ink. This is a very impressive piece of work, though it has some shortcomings - it couldn't begin to guess at, say, a full line which was blacked out, and it will probably make it harder to get access to even heavily censored documents like this in the future. On the other hand, this leaves a whole lotta stuff open to be fair game. The techniques used in this will definately stir up some hornet's nests, however, as a whole lot of things are potentially going to be compromised - either intelligence sources or information governments would rather keep quiet about. What the long-term impacts are gonna be is less clear.
On a less down-to-earth note, Scaled Composites, the leading competitor for the X Prize competition, has started making a truly astonishing pace over the past few weeks and may be expected to actually take a shot at winning the prize as early as next month. I don't think I can stress how much I want to see this come off, especially with the collapse of manned spaceflight across much of the world in the past two years, China's own progress of course notwithstanding. I expected the FAA to end up not exactly permitting this to happen, and I'll admit to being pleasantly surprised when they granted Rutan a launch license. I'm certain that at least one of the other Zoners will have something to say on this.
That'll be it for the evening. For the next little while I want to step away from western affairs to take a look at the rest of the world; situations like the election upset in India and a look at the Millenium Challenge nations and what they've been up to. As always, if there's anything you lurkers want to see covered, feel free to drop a comment or two.
The Chavez government captured nearly 100 people identified either as Colombian army reservists or AUC members, wearing Venezuelan army uniforms but without weapons, who were supposedly in training for attacks on Venezuelan army outposts friendly to Chavez (the claim is that they would received their weapons later in the training). Chavez's opposition claims this is a manufactured crisis created by Chavez to harass his opposition. Chavez claims the US is behind it.
Linkage for AFP, Reuters, VoA, Bloomberg, Reuters again, or Google up on it
"The problem is increasingly failed states ... the fact that now we know well that there is proliferation of nuclear weapons and that many of the weapons that Saddam Hussein had, for example, we do not know where they are, so that means the terrorists have access to all that."
Is Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin claiming Iraq had nuclear weapons that are now in the hands of terrorists, or was he referring to Iraq's conventional weapons along with the Pakistani nuclear proliferation scandal?
It's too early to tell, and there are no full transcripts as of yet, but the first interpretation has already made its way to one of the various webfora I inhabit.
The Appleton, Wisconsin Post-Crescent is not getting enough pro-Bush letters, so they're asking the readership to send more. Insert pithy comment here (actually, there V).
It's definately been One Of Those Days news-wise. I'm certain that everyone has heard the news out of Chechnya this afternoon, which is filling me with just a little bit of foreboding. Putin has reimposed direct rule on Chechnya, which is about what one would expect from the assassination, and a lot of ugliness is going to go down there. I wonder if this is a prelude to another largescale uprising like the previous two wars in Chechnya; it's not likely, considering the Russians have become increasingly effective at, aheh, dealing with the opposition, but the bombing was a moderately sophisticated piece of work. There's obviously quite a bit of organization remaining in the Chechen resistance.
Meanwhile, if I'm reading things right, Chad is threatening Sudan with armed force if they don't clamp down on the cross-border raiding by militias in Sudan's Jafur region. With the militias already engaging in genocide activities, the situation could get a lot uglier a lot more quickly if someone doesn't settle things here. A declared war in that part of Africa can hardly provide stability, especially when regions like Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea are in the process of clawing back towards functioning, stable governments and economies. I want to do some more research into the Sudanese situation; I might get some more written on that over the next few days.
This is one of the most vile acts of partisan politics I've seen come out of Congress.
House Republicans pitched a bill to condemn the torture at Abu Gharaib, agree to support the occupation, and declare that these atrocities are an isolated incident and nothing else bad is going on. People who have read the news or who just oppose the invasion in the first place are going to vote against it, and they did. News gets out fast. I've already seen one webforum right-winger bring this up as proof that the Democrats and Ron Paul support the torture.
Atrios points towards Approximately Perfect, which points out the delusional partisanship of the world's most influential blogger, always ignoring everything Bush does wrong and scrabbling to find anything to condemn Kerry about.
Scroll down, and see Rumsfeld telling Congress that Iraq will forgive us for the torture because Saddam was worse and that all the other claims of torture that didn't make it to 60 Minutes were all terrorist propaganda, and within days of the 60 Minutes show, Bush proudly proclaiming that Saddam's "torture cells are closed".
Also, reports that there are terrorists in Iraq working for the CPA and mass round-ups of innocent Iraqis, and an interrogator describing how interrogation is supposed to work.
Underwhelm notes that Bush was informed of the torture in January and has been "well aware of the situation" according to Joint Chiefs of Staff Vice Chairman Peter Pace.
On top of that, the Defense Department is supposed to give Congress a summary of major events in Iraq every sixty days. It's more than two months between January and the 60 Minutes report, and Congress was apparently given no mention of the torture investigation which may the most strategically significant event since actually capturing the country. On top of that, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Richard Meyers tried to prevent 60 Minutes from running the story, according to Myers's testimony before Congress where he is in the same breath both admitting and denying that he tried to censor the news.
Now we're supposed to accept belated half-hearted apologies and a demand we stop peeking behind the curtain. The Bush cult isn't sorry the torture happened. They're sorry they got caught. The line is that it's evil, immoral, and un-American, and they're going to keep doing it, and anyone who complains is evil, immoral, and un-American. Is it any wonder people dislike the US?
They also claim that complaining about the torture will hurt the war effort. Bullshit. The ones who hurt the war effort were the torturers. Either the tortured captees will be released and tell their friends and family that they were tortured just like under Saddam, or they won't be released and people will note that their friends and family have disappeared just like under Saddam. Either is an atrocity which cannot be hidden from the Iraqi public forever. What is harmed by complaining about the torture, besides Bush's chances of being elected, is the reputation of the military, but for the military to hide this information from the people is a far greater harm to the foundation of a nation supposedly deriving its rule from the people. Are we supposed to be honoring the soldiers who did this?
Even more disgusting than Bush and company are those like Rush Limbaugh who say we should wholeheartedly support the torture. The fact that Limbaugh still has listeners after these past few days of vicious outbursts and lying about basic matters of international laws that were designed to protect our soldiers just goes to show the depraved, immoral nature of Limbaugh's braindead fan base. Limbaugh even tries to whitewash the Iran/Contra affair, which was Reagan selling the army's weapons to an enemy of the United States, one who had recently sent suicide bombers against the United States, to pay for our own set of terrorists in Central America after Congress found out what these so-called "freedom fighters" were really doing and explicitly forbid any money from going to them.
In closing, I cannot find sufficient words to thank the military investigators and the whistleblowers who recognize that these actions are not what the United States should stand for and who are trying to correct it instead of covering it up. It is good to be reassured that there is such honor in an organization whose public faces these past few days have been seen committing or condoning the torture of prisoners.
Also in the news:
Via CNN:
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush on Thursday said he told visiting King Abdullah II of Jordan that he is "sorry for the humiliation suffered" by Iraqi prisoners at the hands of U.S. troops in Iraq.
So let me get this straight. The American president is apologizing to the Jordanian king for something which happened in Iraq?
This boy really needs to learn how to start taking responsibility for his administration's actions, rather than going through the effort he's been making not to do so.
Or maybe he just needs to take a geography quiz and realize who he's supposed to be speaking to.
[Swiped from Dave Farber and his always wonderful "Interesting People" list]
WASHINGTON, May 4 — The Walt Disney Company is blocking its Miramax division from distributing a new documentary by Michael Moore that harshly criticizes President Bush, executives at both Disney and Miramax said Tuesday.The film, "Fahrenheit 911," links Mr. Bush and prominent Saudis — including the family of Osama bin Laden — and criticizes Mr. Bush's actions before and after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Disney, which bought Miramax more than a decade ago, has a contractual agreement with the Miramax principals, Bob and Harvey Weinstein, allowing it to prevent the company from distributing films under certain circumstances, like an excessive budget or an NC-17 rating.
Executives at Miramax, who became principal investors in Mr. Moore's project last spring, do not believe that this is one of those cases, people involved in the production of the film said. If a compromise is not reached, these people said, the matter could go to mediation, though neither side is said to want to travel that route.
The relationship between Disney and Miramax has always been interesting, since Disney tries to keep its rep as a relatively family-friendly company, and Miramax has put out some of the more crude and violent films out there. (I'm not as on top of this as I'd like, maybe some of my fellow Zoners might be able to shade in some of this.) Nevertheless, I'm not sure why Disney's blocking this project. It's not NC-17, and probably not excessively over budget. Disney claims it's because they don't want to be drug into a partisan argument, but then there's this interesting bit from that article:
Mr. Moore's agent, Ari Emanuel, said Michael D. Eisner, Disney's chief executive, asked him last spring to pull out of the deal with Miramax. Mr. Emanuel said Mr. Eisner expressed particular concern that it would endanger tax breaks Disney receives for its theme park, hotels and other ventures in Florida, where Mr. Bush's brother, Jeb, is governor."Michael Eisner asked me not to sell this movie to Harvey Weinstein; that doesn't mean I listened to him," Mr. Emanuel said. "He definitely indicated there were tax incentives he was getting for the Disney corporation and that's why he didn't want me to sell it to Miramax. He didn't want a Disney company involved."
Tax breaks. With Shrub's brother. Hmmm, what's in that movie that Shrub and Co are so scared of?
This media consolidation thing was supposed to be a good thing, right?
(This one is a subject with which I have become, to a degree, personally involved in. So I ask you to please bear with me if the discussion gets too obscure.)
Once upon a time, there was a man who lived in LA named Micah Wright. Micah was a veteran of the US Army Rangers, a writer of animated television shows and a freelance comic book writer. He happened to chance upon a (now-defunct) forum where comic writers and fans gathered, and he stayed there. When bad times came to the USA, Micah was right in the middle of the maelstrom. As a fairly liberal guy possessed with a sense of humor, he put up modified WPA posters festooned with funny, punchy anti-war and anti-Bush slogans. When he was called on this - like just about everybody who didn't fall at the president's feet was - Micah justified his actions by saying as he was A Veteran and had Been In The Shit, anybody who hadn't was unworthy of criticising him.
Time passed. The forum where Micah got his thing started closed and Micah started his own forum. He continued to post new and better remixed posters, eventually even getting a book of them published. He gathered fans and press attention.
Then, just about 48 hours ago as I write this, it all came crashing down when Micah admitted to his forum that he really wasn't a Ranger. Never had been, in fact. Pandemonium naturally ensued. Fans and enemies have descended on his forum demanding an explanation. It's widely expected that any career Micah Wright had in the field of comic books will likely be over before Memorial Day, if that. His second book of anti-war posters has been cancelled, and the forward where Micah talks about his "experiences" in the invasion of Panama will be removed from future printings of his first book.
Now, I was one of Micah Wright's fans; I inhabited his forum, posted occasionally and bought his books. At one point in the not-that-distant past I met him and went out for drinks when he stopped in Denver as part of his book tour. Until Saturday afternoon, it never occured to me that he had been feeding me, and everybody else, a line. First, I was stunned. Then, I was pissed.
Listen: If you're like me (and you probably are if you're reading this), a proud smart liberal, so very sure of your skills as a skeptical thinker, smugly complacent about the muppets you meet every day who swallowed Bush's bullshit while you stand above it... when somebody like that realized that not only have they been had, but they went for the okeydoke with a smile and a nod just like the muppets they scorn, it's not unlike getting kicked in the balls by Bruce Lee.
Not a fun experience.
The big problem I have, though, isn't with my personal difficulties with Micah's lying. It's with what might happen because of it. If he'd just fucked himself, then it's just another tragic story of Tinseltown or whatever. But he used his Ranger stories to sell and promote his books, one of which at least has become something of a minor hit with the anti-war left. That this hasn't been spreading through the blogosphere like wildfire (supposedly it hit Insty, but I haven't seen it there) is something of a minor miracle.
But if it hits, it will hit big. And it won't be limited to just this one guy. They'll point out that Micah Wright is a lying bastard. Fine. Then it'll be pointed out that Howard Zinn and Kurt Vonnegut wrote prefaces for his book, which means that they're either stupid or liars too. It's guilt by association, it's got holes you could drive a semi through, but it'll be used against people who don't deserve it, and it'll become the "facts" of the case in the hearts and minds of all the people who don't read NFZ.
Will I forgive Micah Wright for his trangressions? I think so. Probably. Eventually. After all, the damage done to me personally was negligable. In the long run, I want to see what kind of damage he's managed to do before I extend a hand of forgiveness. If I see Bill O'Reilly's splotchy face smugly hurr-hurring over this lying liberal and using him to slam whoever the day's target of opportunity is, the it'll be a long time before I extend that hand.
On May 1st, while the rest of the world celebrates the Socialist workers' holiday, the United States celebrates Shut Up And Do What You're Told Day.
You can't blame this on Bush. Clinton did it too, and it goes back to Eisenhower.
Bremer is now Bush's man in charge of Iraq. This could have repercussions.
I like a good conspiracy theory, and the blogosphere fringe just coughed up a doozy. How does "Shrub Smuggled Drugs for the CIA!" sound? Sounds like something that needs some proof behind it. Of course, if there was overwhelming evidence for it, it wouldn't be a conspiracy theory (unless you're Sean Hannity). Let's see what we've got...
Earlier this year, Bush was taking a beating for his lack of service in the National Guard, so he released his records to show that he was merely temporarily AWOL and didn't desert. A person named Marty Heldt had already gotten the same records from a Freedom of Information Act request in 2000, and here's where it starts to get interesting.
Comparing the two copies, in the 2004 edition, the White House had blacked out the name of another National Guard member who had also been suspended for skipping his medical examination. This other Guardsman was Major James R. Bath.
Who is James R. Bath? Besides respecting his privacy, what ulterior motive could the White House possibly have to hide his name? Way back in the 1970s, Bath was Salem bin Laden's investment agent in the United States (see also Texas Observer, Online Journal, American Free Press, Williamsburg Quarterly, Turtle Bay@kos) -- and of course, if you've seen one bin Laden, you've seen 'em all, right? Bath also helped finance Bush's business enterprise Arbusto and was a close friend of Bush, although Bath and Salem (while he was alive) deny that any bin Laden money ever went to Bush. So how does this connect to drug smuggling?
It doesn't. However, the same people paying attention to the Bush-Bath connection were reminded of a Washington Post article from 1999 which mentions in passing how Bush had been a purchasing agent for a botanical firm called Stratford during his Guard service. The Post article was appropriately mentioned in passing on Change for America along with Mother Jones's comparison of Bush's and Kerry's Vietnam years. It was linked to by the popular blog Eschaton, and the comment threads sprouted links to some very interesting articles by Dan Hopsicker of Mad Cow Productions, detailing:
Some more Googling brings up Robert Parry noting that Zapata/Stratford executive Peter Knudtzon had gone with Bush to Guatemala for Stratford, according to Bill Minutaglio's book "First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty".
Finally, we have Codename Monkey summarizing the information in a series of posts about Bush's Guard service:
So let's look at the scorecard:
There are lots of holes in this history. If we fill them in with what we want to hear -- having seen Bush flying his National Guard jet to Central America for a CIA-backed tropical plants company and then working for a CIA-backed company that later was caught smuggling drugs from Central America -- it suddenly becomes "OMG! Bush smuggled drugs in his National Guard jet!"
I wouldn't go that far just yet, but the information we have does seem to suggest Bush has an interesting background that we've never heard about. I'd like to hear more. Hopsicker promised another installment, but seeing as how he's being sued for defamation for his book Barry and the Boys (which has already had a chapter excised after another defamation suit), he's a bit busy right now. I doubt the mainstream press will make an issue of this, but I've been wrong on my assumptions before. We'll wait and see if this leads to anything.