Sonic's Place

The Microeconomics and Macroeconomics of Job Loss

2008-11-28T08:59:00.001-08:00

It is true that some homeowners have purchased homes that were out of their range. Some mortgage companies in the subprime market have taken advantage of deregulations within the industry. That is not the complete story and only accounts for less than 30% of what is currently in foreclosure or default.

Jobs are necessary for people to earn money to pay for their homes. When one looses their job it affects more than just there lifestyle, it affects everyone to some degree or another.
Do not be fooled in the media hyped propaganda, that it was the mortgage industry that blew it all up.

For the last 3-4 years, there has been a steady stream of job loss in this country. Some of these losses are due to downsizing of companies and sending jobs overseas for cheaper labor. It is not just the auto industry that has sent jobs overseas, many others have followed suit.

Let me illustrate what happens when a person looses their job. The first thing is that they go to unemployment to file a claim. The next they start the tedious job of looking for work. The average time it has taken as per reports from the media is anywhere between 4.5 to 6 months or more to get another job.

Here is a person who is looking for work and the majority of employers evaluate, how long that person has been out of work and are their skills up to date. The theme of most employers if that person has been out of work too long, then they most likely will pass them up. If they are hired, usually it is for less money than there original salary that they made from there past job.

In the interim of time, unless that person has 6 months worth of money saved then they will be late on payments and may not be able to pay there mortgage in part or in full. They may be forced into bankruptcy on their credit cards. This obviously affects their credit and affects their employment, since credit in a majority of cases is also viewed as a qualification.

Now if you have one person, no longer able to make payments for basic expenses, it destroys their credit not to mention their self-esteem. Realize that this does effect their consumption on food, utilities and travel.

At these times with high cost of gas and basic utilities, it pushes the individual reduce the use of these most basic of needs. Though unemployment can assist some, it generally is insufficient to pay for all the basic bills, especially rent or mortgages.

Think about a homeowner who has to pay the homeowner insurance, mortgage, and car payments, car insurance not to mention health insurance. Investment in a 401K or Ira ceases and possible borrowing from these retirement account if one is lucky to have one, will drive them further into indebtedness.

The job loss influences the microeconomics of businesses that surround the level of earnings for this individual. Let us add to that those defaults on credit accounts of which this individual will be harassed by collectors. Now, let us add millions of Americans out of work. It is not just the blue-collar worker it also includes the white-collar worker. The combined incomes support a myriad of businesses from real estate to the mom and pop store down the block.

I recall my father who had bought a grocery store in the Bronx. About five months after the purchase 5 buildings in the neighborhood where condemned, this forced over 1000 people out of the area. The result was a $ 500.00 reduction in sales per day!

If you do the math, that is a decrease of $ 180,000.00 in business. My father then had to buy less inventory from the wholesalers, which affects their profit margins. The decrease in profit margins from the wholesaler had to adjust there wholesale purchases. Realize that this simple shift affected a chain of other businesses surrounding one action from the city.

This of course led to my father letting go of help in the store. He could no longer afford an employee; it took 3 years of working on his own with family helping out as they could, to finally hiring someone for relief.

Now when we turn into the bigger picture, that view of macroeconomics and expand to millions of people, this is quit an effect. If we take a view that the average person makes about $ 20,000 per year and we multiply that by about 14 million jobless, we arrive at $ 280 billion dollars out of circulation.

This affects all Wall Street and Main Street. Savings, Investment, Utilities, Mortgage, Apartment Owners, Retail facilities are all affected. Compound this with falling off the tax roles of the cities, states and federal government and you have a crisis.

Home values will continue to decline until this hole is filled. The notion that home values will return once the inventory of already defaulted properties decreases is faulty at best. The reason is that the inventories of defaults will not be reduced until jobs are restored once again. I have watched my home value drop from 425K to 217K and it continues to decline in value.

The only way to stop the downturn is to freeze all default properties for the next at least 6 months until people can get back on their feet. There is just no other way. If you want even more of a crisis, keep the foreclosures going and the problem becomes the homeless and major increases in crime.

In my own community, I have seen many businesses close. Furniture businesses, small video rentals, and even caf?'s have closed their doors. This is why the banking and financial institutions are in trouble. Giving them more money to loan homeowners is not a solution. Banks are now raising their standards to qualify for a mortgage. The current homeowner may not be able to meet the new requirements, which does nothing for a refinance.

Credit card companies are raising their interest rates and are lowering the credit lines for most card holders if not canceling their card altogether. The credit freeze continues while the card companies will enjoy the bail out money.

Investing in new technologies, energy and other alternatives will bring about more job stability. Working on Infrastructures from roads to fixing schools will bring about more stimulation to the economy at large then just bailing out failing companies.

I find it odd that the same companies that are being bailed out are still paying high compensation to their executives. These CEO's should at least make the gesture of cutting 20% of their executive pay to help keep personnel.

This problem was caused by the need of greed. The larger companies are always accountable to their stockholders. There ability to ship jobs overseas for cheap labor increases their bottom line. CEO's enjoy a blessed life with golden parachutes. The average American worker usually has only what they earn and that is it.

I have no problem with competitiveness. Corporations should do what they can to make their bottom line profitable. That is a responsible behavior. Yet, that is not what we are seeing. What we see is many jobs going overseas or being eliminated altogether, without retraining or assisting individuals for new gainful employment.

Greed has replaced social responsibility. The deficit has risen and government has abandoned its responsibility to the American public. The elite in government will not recognize any problem until it hits home.

Americans are much smarter than this past administration credits them. These current elections have given the new administration a mandate, to stop the bleeding and bring us back home to the America we know and love.

We are still that great experiment that was created many years ago. We are the creative and the most blessed country in resources and innovation. Let us put that to use and bring back the prosperity that we all truly deserve.

John Tebar Certified Life Coach, author and entrepreneur sign up for Ezine at http://holisticlifeplanningandresearch.com

More on the London execution

2006-08-18T04:02:00.001-07:00

The Times has a piece that begins to challange some of the recieved wisdom on the London execution.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,22989-1707480,00.html

Another family member said that he had recently been attacked and robbed in that area by a gang of young white men and thought the plain-clothes officers were muggers.

By far the most controversial claim comes from a number of witnesses who have cast doubt on police statements that they shouted a warning or identified themselves to the suspect before opening fire.

Lee Ruston, 32, who was on the platform, said that he did not hear any of the three shout “police” or anything like it. Mr Ruston, a construction company director, said that he saw two of the officers put on their blue baseball caps marked “police” but that the frightened electrician could not have seen that happen because he had his back to the officers and was running with his head down.

Mr Ruston remembers one of the Scotland Yard team screaming into a radio as they were running. Mr Ruston thought the man that they were chasing “looked Asian” as he tumbled on to a waiting Northern Line train.

Less than a minute later Mr Menezes was pinned to the floor of the carriage by two men while a third officer fired five shots into the base of his skull.

Again, Mr Ruston says that no verbal warning was given.

I'm certain there is a lot more to this story that we have been told.

On Paris

2005-11-07T10:34:00.000-08:00

Another exiled euro-lefty now resident in New Zealand, Joe, had written an excellent piece on the Paris Riots, well worth a read.

I was one of the coordinators of the Irish mobilization to the Second European Social Forum which was held in Paris two years ago, to the day. We had over a hundred people come from Ireland, and it was my job to head over early and co-ordinate accommodation with the ESF organizers there, as well as get the lie of the land and find out where everything was happening...

Imagine the shock when most people coming to the ESF discovered that a lot of the sessions were happening thirty or forty kilometers out from what most of us consider Paris, that beautiful walled medieval city of the Commune, May 68 and the Revolution. I spent the first day going from Bobigny (end of the line) to St Denis, and the hidden Paris of the ghetto-suburbs blew me away. Looking back on it now, the French ESF organizers probably opened Europe's eyes to the hidden reality of 21st century Paris. At the time we thought it was stupid to spend half the day traveling, but now I think it might have been a stroke of genius...

Mile after mile of desolate estate-high rise ghettos reaching out to the horizon. The train stations were all covered with New York style hip hop graffiti, and when I got off at the second last stop (St Denis-Porte de Paris) I got a real shock.

It was Bastille Day, when France celebrates its revolution, and in the middle of this concrete urban bunker that doubled as the town's main square, a bunch of old (white) army veterans were holding up French Tricolor banners gilded in gold with the names of their legions and the battles they had fought inscribed on it. This did not look to me like a progressive bunch of Communards or Sans Culottes. Maybe some of these guys had seen action in Algeria with Le PEn's torturing paratroopers.

Around them were clusters of African and Arab kids, shouting out the names of towns and cities these old men had probably killed people in. Bwtween the two groups were a cohort of fully tooled up CRS riot police, with body armor, Alsatian dogs, tear gas weapons that looked like sawn off shotguns, and huge paddy wagons with armor plating on them. To me it looked like some version of the Orange Order insisting on their right to march provocatively in Derry, aided by their RUC racist police cousins... I remembered the Bob Marley song at the beginning of the cinema verite intro to the film La Haine, with his words "they were dressed in uniforms of brutality" echoing over a montage of riots in Paris.

We went on to meet a lot of the French and European left that week, with these suburbs as an ever hissing background. We crossed a bridge in one suburb where the CRS had massacred hundreds of Arabs in Paris when they attacked a solidarity march during the height of the Algerian War. We stayed with most of the North of Ireland crew in a gym in the old Jewish quarter of Villejuif, which was cleared of most of its Jewish citizens by the Nazis and the Vichy, and was now a bustling Arab section. It had been a stronghold of the French Communist Party, the PCF, and in a nice touch of Gallic solidarity, the old Communist mayor came round one morning and cooked a hundred of us an unbelievable French breakfast! (I'd date the revival of the French left from there!)

SOlidarity with their North of Irish comrades, no problem. But what struck me most about the French left was their lack of contacts with the Arab and African ghettos of Paris and beyond. A group of us North of Irelanders went out to an Arab cafe one night, and I'm nearly sure we were the first caucasian group EVER inside! IN our broken French we talked about the ESF- most of them had not heard about it. But they were amazed to learn that we were against the war, supported the resistance in Iraq and Palestine, hated the Front National and defended the right for Muslims to wear the hijab. We left that Arab cafe late that morning with a lot of new friends! Many of them will have been out fighting this week.

I am disappointed to see that the resurgent French radical left, that has been kicking neo-liberal ass with the defeat of the EU Constitution and the nearly monthly mass strikes, is nowhere to be seen defending the kids of the banluies. If there was a similar uprising here in South Auckland, I have every confidence in the radical workers movement in Aotearoa that we would defend the kids here. The problems are the same in the worlds big cities- poor working class youth, often immigrant and multicultural, lies fuming, festering, and forgotten in huge sprawling ghettos miles away from Sky or Eiffel Towers...

The French radical left needs to engage with Arab and black French youth. Supporting the government's crackdown on the hijab was disgusting, and revolutionaries should really know better.

There is now an uprising, an intifada, in urban France. le Pen's fascists have been along to some of the so called "peace marches", wearing tricolor sashes and talking about the need to clear the ghettos of "scum". In the weeks to come, the French radical left has a major part to play. Will they end up like the old CP in May 68- condemning the students whose bravery fighting the CRS led three weeks later to Western Europe's closest shot to a socialist revolution, with over 1o million on strike? Much better if they'd play the role of the students...
Ovulation Test Pregnancy Test

Picture of the day

2005-11-04T15:24:00.000-08:00

RIP Harrys Place

2005-10-31T12:57:00.000-08:00

Despite Harry dropping his pledge to ~~give us all a break~~ cease blogging, the decline and fall of Little Green Soccerballs continues.

Aaronovitch watch nails why (referring to Nick Cohen)

It seems to me that while Nick may be up for a fight, the people he’s accusing of spilling his pint aren’t. Rather than engage in a great intellectual struggle with Nick, Dave and the decents, mainstream left opinion (inasmuch as the Guardian op ed pages represent it) seems to be routing around it. On the one hand you have Seumas Milne’s usual repertory company, sticking it to the septics and sticking up for the Allah-besotted. On the other you have all these genteel Tories, preaching realism from a comfortable distance above the fray. The parameters here seem to relate to the majority consensus in Britain over the London bombings, namely that the Iraq conflict made them more likely to happen. Within that there's plenty of room for a chat about the who and the what and the why. Outside it...well, where's your audience?

Something similar seems to be going on over in Blogistan. The pro-war left went into a spasm of self-righteousness after July 7, de-linking here and there; condemning this, insisting on that, stagily revealing collaborators, sternly sorting sheep from goats. The result seems to be that they’ve now shrunk into a circular network, constantly cross linking, boosting their favourite columnists, uninterested in events that don’t immediately fit in with their preconceptions and increasingly adrift from the general bloggy conversation. The United Against Terror project seems to have gone splat and Harry’s Place is reduced to trolling for attention. Even their old antagonists at the movement antiwar sites don’t seem to bother too much with what they have to say. The only outward channel they have leads them directly to the hard right in the USA. And so a tendency hardens into a sect, which in turn boils down into something that’s starting to resemble a cult.

When this happens, you have to shout louder for attention. You have to say that you’re involved, for instance, in the greatest intellectual struggle of your time. You have to promise apocalyptic smash ups. Those who disagree with you have been driven mad by the course of history. It’s all a bit sad.

A real fighter for freedom passes away

2005-10-25T15:34:00.000-07:00

Rosa Parks is dead

Parks was working as a seamstress for the Montgomery Fair department store, and as she waited for the Cleveland Avenue bus to take her home, she let a full bus go by. The Jim Crow laws reserved the first four rows of a city bus for whites and the last 10 for blacks. The seats in the middle could be used by blacks if no whites sought them. But if a white person wanted a seat, the whole row was emptied.

Also, bus drivers in Montgomery made blacks, who were nearly 70 percent of the riders, enter the front door, pay their fare, disembark and re-enter by the back door. Many blacks were left standing, fareless, when the bus driver pulled away before they could reboard.

James F. Blake, the driver of the bus Parks boarded in 1955, had put her off a bus in 1943 when she refused to enter through the back door because the back was jammed. After that, she refused to board any bus he drove, but when the bus pulled up to the Court Square stop, Parks forgot to check who the driver was. She got on and took a seat in the middle section, next to a black man at the window and across the aisle from two women. At the next stop, some white people got on, filling up the seats reserved for them, and one white man was left standing.

"Let me have those front seats," the driver said, indicating the front seats of the middle section. No one moved. He repeated himself: "Y'all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats."

The black rider by the window rose, and Parks moved to let him pass by. The two women across the aisle also stood up. Parks slid over to the window. "I could not see how standing up was going to 'make it light' for me," she wrote in her autobiography, "My Story" (1992). "The more we gave in and complied, the worse they treated us.

"I thought back to the time when I used to sit up all night and didn't sleep, and my grandfather would have his gun right by the fireplace, or if he had his one-horse wagon going anywhere, he always had his gun in the back of the wagon," she wrote. "People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in."

The bus driver said he would have her arrested, and she replied, "You may do that." He called the police and waited. Some riders got off, but not everyone, and Parks recalled that it was very quiet. When the police arrived, she asked one, "Why do you all push us around?" She said he replied, "I don't know, but the law is the law, and you're under arrest."

She was bailed out that night, and her boss at the NAACP asked if she would be the test case for a lawsuit. She discussed it with her husband and mother and then agreed. Meanwhile, the leaders of the Women's Political Council mimeographed 35,000 handbills calling for a bus boycott. Black ministers got behind the effort. All 18 black-owned cab companies agreed to stop at all bus stops and charge 10 cents per ride, while others carpooled or walked.

..............

As Parks went into her trial, a young girl called out, "Oh, she's so sweet. They've messed with the wrong one now." The crowd took up the latter half of the cry.

The Zawahiri Letter

2005-10-13T11:12:00.000-07:00

Left-I makes two excellent points (as ever)

On the day when a new poll reveals that 59 percent of Americans think U.S. troops should withdraw from Iraq as soon as possible, the U.S. government suddenly decides to release the text of an alleged letter, allegedly captured last summer, which purports to be advice given by Ayman al-Zawahiri to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. And conveniently, the advice is all about how Zarqawi should attempt to establish Islamic authority over as much of Iraq as possible after the Americans are expelled, thereby providing a fresh justification for why the U.S. shouldn't withdraw.

Is this letter genuine? There isn't any way for the average person to know. It could have been written by Zawahiri, it could have been written by the CIA, or it could have been written by any person pretending to be Zawahiri and trying to substitute their own strategy for whatever strategy Zawahiri is (or isn't) advocating. Take a look at the recent "threat to New York City subways" hoax and you'll see how easy the American authorities can be fooled, assuming that it isn't they who are doing the fooling. I say all this despite the fact that the advice itself seems perfectly sensible (and something any Marxist could completely identify with) -- maintaining and increasing "popular support from the Muslim masses." Nevertheless, the key thing about this letter isn't whether or not it's genuine, it's to understand why the U.S. government chose to release it at this time.

Here's the strangest part of the story: "The American intelligence official would not say...whether it was believed to have been received by Mr. Zarqawi." So let's try to understand this. Zawahiri tries to send a very important communication about strategy to Zarqawi. The U.S. government intercepts it. Zarqawi may not have received it, i.e., he may not have received this advice from Zawahiri. And, in the face of that, the U.S. government decides to post the letter on the Internet, thereby assuring that Zarqawi now does have the benefit of Zawahiri's advice

And

" Remember when the U.S. government wouldn't allow tapes from bin Laden or Zawahiri to be broadcast on TV, using the excuse that there might be "hidden messages" in the broadcast that they couldn't allow to be transmitted? Now they release a 6,000-word letter from Zawahiri which could contain dozens of hidden messages for all they know. Curious, eh?

Indeed.

Synagogue Vandalised, why do they not care?

2005-10-11T14:47:00.000-07:00

Normally a story that a UK Synagogue had been vandalised by religious extremists would make front page news in certain blogs.

~~Harry's~~ place would be wondering if George Galloway was guilty, or was it his supporters? The bitter and twisted f*ckheads for war would be screaming for an end to the trendy liberalism that excuses this sort of thing while Norm! would be trying to tie the Guardian's comment pages into the atrocity.

Yet what do we find? nothing, not a peep out of the "decent left" have they gone soft on religious violence? do they not care any more.

Or is it to do with who carried out the attack...

AN orthodox Jewish synagogue in Stamford Hill has been attacked and vandalised - not by anti-semetic thugs, but by fellow Jews who regard its leaders' outspoken condemnation of Israel as a betrayal.

Rising tensions over the forced evictions by Israeli troops last month of Jewish settlers from occupied Palestinian territory as part of the Middle East peace process has sparked a backlash among Stamford Hill's orthodox Jewish community.

Windows at the synagogue in Alkham Road were smashed after bottles were hurled at them last Thursday evening and the front of the building was covered with red spray paint.

The synagogue belongs to Neturei Karta, an ultra-orthodox sect opposed to the Zionist political movement that established the state of Israel as a national homeland for Jews.

The sect claims that the concept of a sovereign Jewish state is contrary to the teachings of the torah (Jewish law) and has led to the bloodshed in the Middle East.

Hackney Gazette

Surely this cannot be true? surely the "decent" "left" take any attack as seriously as any other...

We await their response.

Like the drummer in Spinal Tap

2005-09-30T10:25:00.000-07:00

Via Sadly No

Seems that a certain someone's supply of deputies is pretty much unlimited

February 25, 2004:
He was confirming a report in the Baghdad daily newspaper that a Zarqawi deputy it named as Nidal Arabiyat Agha Hamza was killed in an operation conducted last Thursday north of Baghdad.

January 8, 2005:
U.S. occupation forces announced the arrest of a key leader in al-Zarqawi’s network in Iraq.

January 29, 2005:
Authorities in Iraq have arrested three close associates of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, officials said Friday, claiming to be close to capturing the Al Qaeda-linked terror mastermind himself[.] [...] Friday's announcement brings to six the number of purported al-Zarqawi lieutenants arrested recently — including a deputy[.]

June 4, 2005:
Six suspected terrorists, including a suspected deputy of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi linked to al-Quida, have been captured in Iraq, officials said Saturday.

June 27, 2005:
A senior member of Iraq’s Al Qaeda branch was killed recently in a US crackdown on insurgents in the Iraqi town of Qaim near the Syrian border, a Jordanian newspaper reported yesterday. [...] Abu Alghadiya, a Syrian dentist married to a Jordanian woman, was described by Arab media as the ‘number two’ in Iraq’s Al Qaeda network and tipped to succeed its leader Abu Musab Al Zarqawi.
September 27, 2005:
U.S. Special Forces killed Al Qaeda's No. 2 terror mastermind in Iraq, Defense Department officials said.

Lenin has more here

Joke of the Day

2005-09-30T09:18:00.000-07:00

Donald Rumsfeld is giving the President his daily briefing. He concludes by
saying: "Yesterday, 3 Brazilian soldiers were killed."

"OH NO!" the President exclaims. "That's terrible!"

His staff sits stunned at this rare display of emotion, nervously watching as the President sits, head in hands.

Finally, the President looks up and asks, "How many is a brazillion?"

Bush Back on the Bottle?

2005-09-22T10:00:00.000-07:00

Via The News Blog

Faced with the biggest crisis of his political life, President Bush has hit the bottle again, The National Enquirer can reveal.

Bush, who said he quit drinking the morning after his 40th birthday, has started boozing amid the Katrina catastrophe.

Family sources have told how the 59-year-old president was caught by First Lady Laura downing a shot of booze at their family ranch in Crawford, Texas, when he learned of the hurricane disaster.

His worried wife yelled at him: "Stop, George."

Following the shocking incident, disclosed here for the first time, Laura privately warned her husband against "falling off the wagon" and vowed to travel with him more often so that she can keep an eye on Dubya, the sources add.

"When the levees broke in New Orleans, it apparently made him reach for a shot," said one insider. "He poured himself a Texas-sized shot of straight whiskey and tossed it back. The First Lady was shocked and shouted: "Stop George!"

"Laura gave him an ultimatum before, 'It's Jim Beam or me.' She doesn't want to replay that nightmare â€” especially now when it's such tough going for her husband."

Bush is under the worst pressure of his two terms in office and his popularity is near an all-time low. The handling of the Katrina crisis and troop losses in Iraq have fueled public discontent and pushed Bush back to drink.

A Washington source said: "The sad fact is that he has been sneaking drinks for weeks now. Laura may have only just caught him â€” but the word is his drinking has been going on for a while in the capital. He's been in a pressure cooker for months.

....................

The result is he's taking drinks here and there, likely in private, to cope. "And now with the worst domestic crisis in his administration over Katrina, you pray his drinking doesn't go out of control."

Another source said: "I'm only surprised to hear that he hadn't taken a shot sooner. Before Katrina, he was at his wit's end. I've known him for years. He's been a good ol' Texas boy forever. George had a drinking problem for years that most professionals would say needed therapy. He doesn't believe in it [therapy], he never got it. He drank his way through his youth, through college and well into his thirties. Everyone's drinking around him."

Another source said: "A family member told me they fear George is 'falling apart.' The First Lady has been assigned the job of gatekeeper." Bush's history of drinking dates back to his youth. Speaking of his time as a young man in the National Guard, he has said: "One thing I remember, and I'm most proud of, is my drinking and partying. Those were the days my friends. Those were the good old days!"

.......................

Dr. Justin Frank, a Washington D.C. psychiatrist and author of Bush On The Couch: Inside The Mind Of The President, told The National Enquirer: "I do think that Bush is drinking again. Alcoholics who are not in any program, like the President, have a hard time when stress gets to be great.

"I think it's a concern that Bush disappears during times of stress. He spends so much time on his ranch. It's very frightening."

Basra Questions

2005-09-21T11:17:00.000-07:00

The events in Basra have led to a whole raft of questions, and have turned into a boon for conspiracy theorists everywhere. For example

As usual we will have to wait a couple of days while everyone gets their stories straight, but if any reader can help me with the below that might help to clarify.

This is a screen capture of the kit taken by the Iraqi police from the British soldiers when they arrested them. Looking at it they have, a couple of rifles (undertandable ) Radios, large wire cutters (?) One bag of assorted cables (?) Large toolkit (could be for car) a single shot anti-tank missile (WTF is that for) Another toolkit and a mysterious box.

If any readers are more eagle eyed than me, or have inside knowledge of what is usually carried on ops of this kind please feel free to try and enlighten us all in the comments.

Cartoon of the day

2005-09-16T10:12:00.000-07:00

Picture of the day

2005-09-15T09:52:00.000-07:00

The Nature of the Iraqi resistance

2005-09-12T14:25:00.000-07:00

Nature of the Iraqi Resistance
Interview with a Member of the Iraqi National Foundation Congress

by Imad Khadduri

September 11, 2005
abutamam.blogspot.com

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The following is from an interview with Saad Naji Jawad who is a professor of political science at the University of Baghdad. He is a member of the Iraqi National Foundation Congress.

Iraqi National Resistance

Whenever there is occupation there is resistance. All nations have experienced this. Resistance to occupation is legal, legitimate and acceptable. On top of this are some people who hate the US and found Iraq a suitable place to fight their war. They came to the country after the occupation, and the Americans are now paying the price.

Al Qaida and Musab al-Zarqawi are separate from the rest of the resistance. There is no coordination between the resistance and these groups, whom we consider to be terrorists.

There are also groups dedicated to political and peaceful resistance, civilians who try to resist in a positive way. Demonstrations, writing, objecting and criticising are also part of the resistance.

Inside the armed resistance there are different groups and trends. You have Baathists, Islamists, Sunnis, Shias, sometimes you also have Kurds. The main characteristic is Arab nationalist.

Even from the beginning you had many people inside the resistance who were happy to see the end of Saddam Hussein because they felt he had driven the country to disaster. Some had some faith in US promises, and felt that the Americans were going to make Iraq an example of democracy in the region, but then became disillusioned.

The Iraqi National Foundation Congress was founded in May 2004. It was originally established by two different bodies—the Arab nationalists, who are a mix of Sunnis and Shias, and the al?Khalisi school, headed by Sheikh Jawad Khalisi from the Shia Khadamiya mosque in Baghdad.

Then other organisations joined, including the Association of Muslim Scholars, some personalities, smaller parties and groups. There are differences on certain issues—some are Islamists others are secular—but all agree on national liberation and the need for real democracy.

The Congress has support among a wide layer of people, but because we boycotted the elections we are unable to measure exactly the depth of this support. We called for a boycott of last January’s US sponsored elections, and more than half of Iraq joined the boycott. Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shia leader, also called for boycott. We said we would participate in the elections on the following conditions—an end to military attacks, all people must have a vote (the election body could strike your name from the register) and an international body must supervise the elections.Our demands were rejected, so we called for a boycott.

Liberation

The Iraqi National Foundation Congress is similar to organisations such as the African National Congress and the PLO. It is an alliance of forces united around one main demand—national liberation.

In our opinion Iraq’s draft constitution does not solve any problems. The political situation is so complicated that the only way forward is through dialogue, a lot of forgiveness and openness.

The new constitution could lead to the division of the country.

We do not necessarily object to federalism, but what sort of federalism is on offer? If we listen to the main Kurdish parties we find they are talking about independence, not federalism. Similarly there are those who would like a federal state in the south, who claim the south suffered more than the rest of the country, that the south creates most of the wealth through oil.
We reject the draft because it deepens sectarianism and does not reflect the Arab nature of the Iraq. The Arabs are more than 80 percent of the population.

The US would rather have one state that they control, rather than a divided Iraq. But colonialism always keeps its options open. The Americans use the threat of federalism. They say, “If you do not support us and follow our policies, you could end up destroying your country”.

Iraq will have to spend many years repairing the damage done by the Americans. We have to clear out the corrupt exile politicians who have grown rich from the occupation. We have to build a national army—and above all we have to convince people that without unity we have no future."

The Bush family vacation

2005-09-12T10:11:00.000-07:00

Religious crazies you will not see on Memri

2005-09-08T10:52:00.000-07:00

Did God send Katrina as revenge over Gaza?

JERUSALEM – While most religious authorities seem to agree one cannot discern the intentions of God, there has been talk in some circles here and on the Internet the storm that turned parts of the Gulf Coast into a disaster zone, prompting hundreds of thousands to evacuate their homes and possibly causing upwards of 10,000 deaths, was thrust upon the U.S. for its support of the Gaza evacuation.

"Katrina is a consequence of the destruction of [Gaza's] Gush Katif [slate of Jewish communities] with America's urging and encouragement," Rabbi Avraham Shmuel Lewin, executive director of the Rabbinic Congress for Peace, told WND. "The U.S. should have discouraged Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon from implementing the Gaza evacuation rather than pushing for it and pressuring Israel into concessions."

Lewin is one of many rabbis in Israel and abroad who have been making similar statements both in private and in speeches to their congregations.

Rabbi Joseph Garlitzky, head of the international Chabad Lubavitch movement's Tel Aviv synagogue, recounted for WND a pulpit speech he gave this past Sabbath:

"We don't have prophets who can tell us exactly what are God's ways, but when we see something so enormous as Katrina, I would say [President] Bush and [Secretary of State Condoleezza] Rice need to make an accounting of their actions, because something was done wrong by America in a big way. And here there are many obvious connections between the storm and the Gaza evacuation, which came right on top of each other. No one has permission to take away one inch of the land of Israel from the Jewish people."

.....

Now, Garlitzky and many others here and on the Internet are pointing to what they call eerie similarities between Katrina and the evacuation of Gush Katif, including parallels in events, names and numbers:

Close to 10,000 Jews were expelled from their homes in the Gaza Strip and parts of northern Samaria. Katrina's death toll is now expected to reach at least 10,000.

America's population ratio to Israel is about 50:1. Ten thousand Jews who lost their Gaza homes is the equivalent of about 500,000 Americans who are now reported to be displaced as result of Katrina.
Gaza's Jewish communities were located in Israel's southern coastal region; America's southern coastal region now lies in ruins.

The U.S. government called on Louisiana residents to evacuate their homes ahead of the storm. The Israeli government, backed by statements from U.S. officials, demanded Gaza residents evacuate their homes.

Katrina, written in Hebrew, has a numerical equivalent of 374, according to a biblical numbering system upheld by all traditional Jewish authorities. Two relevant passages in the Torah share the exact numerical equivalent: "They have done you evil" (Gen. 50:17) and "The sea upon land" (Exodus 14:15).

Bush, from Texas, and Rice, from Alabama, were the most vocal U.S. backers of the Gaza evacuation. Hurricane Katrina hit the states in between Texas and Alabama – Louisiana and Mississippi.

Similarity in scenes: Many residents of Jewish Gaza climbed to their rooftops to escape the threat of expulsion, while residents of the Gulf Coast climbed on their own rooftops to protect themselves from the rising waters. Jewish Gaza homes described as beautiful and charming were demolished this week by Israel's military. Once beautiful homes in New Orleans now lie in ruins.

The day Katrina hit, Israel began carrying out what was termed the most controversial aspect of the Gaza withdrawal – the uprooting of bodies from the area's Jewish cemetery. There have been media reports of corpses floating around in flooded New Orleans regions.

Citizens of Israel were barred from entering Gush Katif; people were only allowed to leave Jewish Gaza. As Katrina was making landfall U.S. authorities barred citizens from entering the affected areas. People were only allowed out.

Gush Katif was an important agricultural area for Israel, providing the Jewish state with 70 percent of its produce. A New Orleans port that exported much of the Midwest's agricultural production was destroyed by Katrina.
The connections have caused a firestorm of speculation on Internet blogs and in chat rooms.

In a Jerusalem Newswire op-ed discussing the similarities just before Katrina made landfall, writer Stan Goodenough commented, "Is this some sort of bizarre coincidence? Not for those who believe in the God of the Bible and the immutability of His Word. What America is about to experience is the lifting of God's hand of protection, the implementation of His judgment on the nation most responsible for endangering the land and people of Israel.

.......

A blog on TheRaphi.com by Mideast pundits Paul Eidelberg and Israel Hanukoglu linking Katrina to the Gaza evacuation warned, "We urge the American people to remind their president that the evil the nations do to Israel always strikes them. Pharaoh, Haman, Hitler and all the leaders of nations that have opposed the will of God for His people have perished or ended on the ash heaps of history."

Billye Brim, a Christian prayer leader and founder of Billye Brim Ministries who had visited Gush Katif weeks before its evacuation, noted on her website: "Is there a connection between [Katrina and Gush Katif]? I believe so. Is this judgment? I believe so. And I must say it. Outright! Many wont like to hear it. Many wont agree. But I believe America is in danger and something has to be done. ... America needs to repent. From Bush, Rice and the State Department on down. America must repent for actively opposing God's plan for Israel as revealed in His Word."

WorldNetDaily the past week has received numerous letters from readers urging a Katrina-Gaza connection.

One letter stated, " I think you all are dancing around the real cause of the hurricane. Let me suggest to you that it is the wrath of God on our nation because President Bush pressured Sharon to take the homes from the Jews. ... I knew we would be punished on a large scale. I faxed letters and contacted Bush every way I could begging him not to go forward with that plan to evacuate Gaza but he did so anyway, and as a result we were hit in a week with a hurricane that will make history."

Perhaps the first to publicly connect Katrina to the Gaza evacuation was famed Israeli conspiracy theorist Barry Chamish, who sent a mass e-mail noting, "GUsh is like GUlf, and KATif is like KATrina. If you take 'KAT' from KATif and KATrina, you are left with 'IF' and 'RAIN.' If you support Gush Katif evacuation, it will rain."

Chamish told WND yesterday: "Simple human beings cannot fully understand what is going on, but the events certainly must be connected. It's statistically impossible to have two such great natural disastrous like the recent tsunami in Asia and Katrina right after each other. This is the hand of God. He is saying something."

Jerusalem Kabbalist Rabbi David Batzri drew the parallel: "Divine retribution is meted out according to the principle of 'measure for measure,' just as the Jews were forced out of their homes as a result of U.S. pressure on Israel, so too are Americans being forced out of their homes."

http://www.raptureme.com/cgi-bin/rrnews_list.cgi?cmd=one&file=rrnews/N.20050907.042529.Did_God_send_Ka

A survivors story

2005-09-08T09:02:00.000-07:00

Long, but an important tale.

bribri's diary :: ::

Hurricane Katrina-Our Experiences

Larry Bradshaw, Lorrie Beth Slonsky

Two days after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, the Walgreen's store at the corner of Royal and Iberville streets remained locked. The dairy display case was clearly visible through the widows. It was now 48 hours without electricity, running water, plumbing. The milk, yogurt, and cheeses were beginning to spoil in the 90-degree heat. The owners and managers had locked up the food, water, pampers, and prescriptions and fled the City. Outside Walgreen's windows, residents and tourists grew increasingly thirsty and hungry.

The much-promised federal, state and local aid never materialized and the windows at Walgreen's gave way to the looters. There was an alternative. The cops could have broken one small window and distributed the nuts, fruit juices, and bottle water in an organized and systematic manner. But they did not. Instead they spent hours playing cat and mouse, temporarily chasing away the looters.

We were finally airlifted out of New Orleans two days ago and arrived home yesterday (Saturday). We have yet to see any of the TV coverage or look at a newspaper. We are willing to guess that there were no video images or front-page pictures of European or affluent white tourists looting the Walgreen's in the French Quarter.

We also suspect the media will have been inundated with "hero" images of the National Guard, the troops and the police struggling to help the "victims" of the Hurricane. What you will not see, but what we witnessed,were the real heroes and sheroes of the hurricane relief effort: the working class of New Orleans. The maintenance workers who used a fork lift to carry the sick and disabled. The engineers, who rigged, nurtured and kept the generators running. The electricians who improvised thick extension cords stretching over blocks to share the little electricity we had in order to free cars stuck on rooftop parking lots. Nurses who took over for mechanical ventilators and spent many hours on end manually forcing air into the lungs of unconscious patients to keep them alive. Doormen who rescued folks stuck in elevators. Refinery workers who broke into boat yards, "stealing" boats to rescue their neighbors clinging to their roofs in flood waters. Mechanics who helped hot-wire any car that could be found to ferry people out of the City. And the food service workers who scoured the commercial kitchens improvising communal meals for hundreds of those stranded.

Most of these workers had lost their homes, and had not heard from members of their families, yet they stayed and provided the only infrastructure for the 20% of New Orleans that was not under water.

On Day 2, there were approximately 500 of us left in the hotels in the French Quarter. We were a mix of foreign tourists, conference attendees like ourselves, and locals who had checked into hotels for safety and shelter from Katrina. Some of us had cell phone contact with family and friends outside of New Orleans. We were repeatedly told that all sorts of resources including the National Guard and scores of buses were pouring in to the City. The buses and the other resources must have been invisible because none of us had seen them.

We decided we had to save ourselves. So we pooled our money and came up with $25,000 to have ten buses come and take us out of the City. Those who did not have the requisite $45.00 for a ticket were subsidized by those who did have extra money. We waited for 48 hours for the buses, spending the last 12 hours standing outside, sharing the limited water, food, and clothes we had. We created a priority boarding area for the sick, elderly and new born babies. We waited late into the night for the "imminent" arrival of the buses. The buses never arrived. We later learned that the minute the arrived to the City limits, they were commandeered by the military.

By day 4 our hotels had run out of fuel and water. Sanitation was dangerously abysmal. As the desperation and despair increased, street crime as well as water levels began to rise. The hotels turned us out and locked their doors, telling us that the "officials" told us to report to the convention center to wait for more buses. As we entered the center of the City, we finally encountered the National Guard. The Guards told us we would not be allowed into the Superdome as the City's primary shelter had descended into a humanitarian and health hellhole. The guards further told us that the City's only other shelter, the Convention Center, was also descending into chaos and squalor and that the police were not allowing anyone else in. Quite naturally, we asked, "If we can't go to the only 2 shelters in the City, what was our alternative?" The guards told us that that was our problem, and no they did not have extra water to give to us. This would be the start of our numerous encounters with callous and hostile "law enforcement".

We walked to the police command center at Harrah's on Canal Street and were told the same thing, that we were on our own, and no they did not have water to give us. We now numbered several hundred. We held a mass meeting to decide a course of action. We agreed to camp outside the police command post. We would be plainly visible to the media and would constitute a highly visible embarrassment to the City officials. The police told us that we could not stay. Regardless, we began to settle in and set up camp. In short order, the police commander came across the street to address our group. He told us he had a solution: we should walk to the Pontchartrain Expressway and cross the greater New Orleans Bridge where the police had buses lined up to take us out of the City. The crowed cheered and began to move. We called everyone back and explained to the commander that there had been lots of misinformation and wrong information and was he sure that there were buses waiting for us. The commander turned to the crowd and stated emphatically, "I swear to you that the buses are there."

We organized ourselves and the 200 of us set off for the bridge with great excitement and hope. As we marched pasted the convention center, many locals saw our determined and optimistic group and asked where we were headed. We told them about the great news. Families immediately grabbed their few belongings and quickly our numbers doubled and then doubled again. Babies in strollers now joined us, people using crutches, elderly clasping walkers and others people in wheelchairs. We marched the 2-3 miles to the freeway and up the steep incline to the Bridge. It now began to pour down rain, but it did not dampen our enthusiasm.

As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began
firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions. As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us inched forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation. We told them of our conversation with the police commander and of the commander's assurances. The sheriffs informed us there were no buses waiting. The commander had lied to us to get us to move.

We questioned why we couldn't cross the bridge anyway, especially as there was little traffic on the 6-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their City. These were code words for if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not getting out of New Orleans.

Our small group retreated back down Highway 90 to seek shelter from the rain under an overpass. We debated our options and in the end decided to build an encampment in the middle of the Ponchartrain Expressway on the center divide, between the O'Keefe and Tchoupitoulas exits. We reasoned we would be visible to everyone, we would have some security being on an elevated freeway and we could wait and watch for the arrival of the yet to be seen buses.

All day long, we saw other families, individuals and groups make the same trip up the incline in an attempt to cross the bridge, only to be turned away. Some chased away with gunfire, others simply told no, others to be verbally berated and humiliated. Thousands of New Orleaners were prevented and prohibited from self-evacuating the City on foot. Meanwhile, the only two City shelters sank further into squalor and disrepair. The only way across the bridge was by vehicle. We saw workers stealing trucks, buses, moving vans, semi-trucks and any car that could be hotwired. All were packed with people trying to escape the misery New Orleans had become.

Our little encampment began to blossom. Someone stole a water delivery truck and brought it up to us. Let's hear it for looting! A mile or so down the freeway, an army truck lost a couple of pallets of C-rations on a tight turn. We ferried the food back to our camp in shopping carts. Now secure with the two necessities, food and water; cooperation, community, and creativity flowered. We organized a clean up and hung garbage bags from the rebar poles. We made beds from wood pallets and cardboard. We designated a storm drain as the bathroom and the kids built an elaborate enclosure for privacy out of plastic, broken umbrellas, and other scraps. We even organized a food recycling system where individuals could swap out parts of C-rations (applesauce for babies and candies for kids!).

This was a process we saw repeatedly in the aftermath of Katrina. When individuals had to fight to find food or water, it meant looking out for yourself only. You had to do whatever it took to find water for your kids or food for your parents. When these basic needs were met, people began to look out for each other, working together and constructing a community.

If the relief organizations had saturated the City with food and water in the first 2 or 3 days, the desperation, the frustration and the ugliness would not have set in.

Flush with the necessities, we offered food and water to passing families and individuals. Many decided to stay and join us. Our encampment grew to 80 or 90 people.

From a woman with a battery powered radio we learned that the media was talking about us. Up in full view on the freeway, every relief and news organizations saw us on their way into the City. Officials were being asked what they were going to do about all those families living up on the freeway? The officials responded they were going to take care of us. Some of us got a sinking feeling. "Taking care of us" had an ominous tone to it.

Unfortunately, our sinking feeling (along with the sinking City) was correct. Just as dusk set in, a Gretna Sheriff showed up, jumped out of his patrol vehicle, aimed his gun at our faces, screaming, "Get off the fucking freeway". A helicopter arrived and used the wind from its blades to blow away our flimsy structures. As we retreated, the sheriff loaded up his truck with our food and water.

Once again, at gunpoint, we were forced off the freeway. All the law enforcement agencies appeared threatened when we congregated or congealed into groups of 20 or more. In every congregation of "victims" they saw "mob" or "riot". We felt safety in numbers. Our "we must stay together" was impossible because the agencies would force us into small atomized groups.

In the pandemonium of having our camp raided and destroyed, we scattered once again. Reduced to a small group of 8 people, in the dark, we sought refuge in an abandoned school bus, under the freeway on Cilo Street. We were hiding from possible criminal elements but equally and definitely, we were hiding from the police and sheriffs with their martial law, curfew and shoot-to-kill policies.

The next days, our group of 8 walked most of the day, made contact with New Orleans Fire Department and were eventually airlifted out by an urban search and rescue team. We were dropped off near the airport and managed to catch a ride with the National Guard. The two young guardsmen apologized for the limited response of the Louisiana guards. They explained that a large section of their unit was in Iraq and that meant they were shorthanded and were unable to complete all the tasks they were assigned.

We arrived at the airport on the day a massive airlift had begun. The airport had become another Superdome. We 8 were caught in a press of humanity as flights were delayed for several hours while George Bush landed briefly at the airport for a photo op. After being evacuated on a coast guard cargo plane, we arrived in San Antonio, Texas.

There the humiliation and dehumanization of the official relief effort continued. We were placed on buses and driven to a large field where we were forced to sit for hours and hours. Some of the buses did not have air-conditioners. In the dark, hundreds if us were forced to share two filthy overflowing porta-potties. Those who managed to make it out with any possessions (often a few belongings in tattered plastic bags) we were subjected to two different dog-sniffing searches.

Most of us had not eaten all day because our C-rations had been confiscated at the airport because the rations set off the metal detectors. Yet, no food had been provided to the men, women, children, elderly, disabled as they sat for hours waiting to be "medically screened" to make sure we were not carrying any communicable diseases.

This official treatment was in sharp contrast to the warm, heart-felt reception given to us by the ordinary Texans. We saw one airline worker give her shoes to someone who was barefoot. Strangers on the street offered us money and toiletries with words of welcome. Throughout, the official relief effort was callous, inept, and racist. There was more suffering than need be. Lives were lost that did not need to be lost.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/9/6/132725/8931

What if Katrina was a Terrorist

2005-09-07T16:32:00.000-07:00

Seriously funny post via Billmon

If you think about it, it's probably just as well that Katrina wasn't a terrorist like Osama Bin Ladin. Because if she was, she'd probably still be hiding out in the North Atlantic, periodically smuggling out bombastic videotapes ("Death to puny mammals and their infidel cave hives!") and occasionally sending violent thunderstorms to blow down train stations and beach resorts outside the United States.

And then the Cheney administration would have to go find some other tropical storm -- somewhere in the Indian Ocean, probably -- to declare war on. And that would trigger a long, tedious debate about whether the Indian Ocean had anything to do with the flooding of New Orleans, or whether Cyclone Saddam (or whatever) was secretly storing up lighting bolts in the Bay of Bengal for a sneak attack that would electrocute millions of Americans in their sleep.

Then the neocons would have to cook up some phony intelligence reports showing that tornados spawned by Saddam and Katrina met secretly over the Prague Airport and plotted to blow away Biloxi. And Condi Rice would have to go before the UN Security Council and recite a CIA fantasy script about the Indian Ocean's secret thunderbolts of death, and the chemical weapons trailers hidden in the eye of Cyclone Saddam.

Then Dick Cheney would have to go on Meet the Press and promise Tim Russert that Operation Cyclone Liberation would be a piece of cake, because the waves in the Indian Ocean would greet us as liberators, allowing our troops to walk on water. And then we'd have to have another big argument about how many meterologists it would take to occupy a cyclone, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would say 500,000 and the neocons would say 5 -- until Bush fired the head of NOAA and give his job to an intern from the American Enterprise Institute.

Then the boys at the National Security Council would have to draft a whole new national security strategy, claiming an exclusive U.S. right to preemptively invade any ocean that might conceivably produce a Category 3 or above hurricane, and convert into a peaceful, ripple-free lake of democratic capitalism.

Then Joe Biden, Joe Lieberman and Hillary Clinton would have to line up and explain that they, too, are in favor of invading every ocean in the world -- but only if Bush agrees to quadruple the size of the U.S. Navy and equip every Marine with an armored aqualung. And Tom Friedman would write a column for the New York Times arguing that it is both possible and desirable to create peaceful, pro-Western cyclones that will accept Israel's right to exist, because the oceans are flat.

But worst of all, we'd have to listen to Shrub strut and shout about how he's going to "smoke Katrina out of her seahole," and "bring the evildoer to justice" -- only to turn around a few months later and explain that he isn't really concerned about hurricanes any more, now that the entire U.S. miitary is at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. Then John Kerry would make a big stink about how the administration is ignoring the real weather war, and Bush would get all pissy and defensive the way he does, and deny he ever said any such a thing.

Then Kerry would get pissy and demand that Bush dump even more troops into the Indian Ocean, and Bush would get even more defensive, and babble some feeble lie about how he relies on his generals to tell him how many troops they need to dump into the Indian Ocean in order to make sure we fight the cyclones there instead of in New Orleans. And then media would bend itself over backwards pretending that Shrub actually has a freaking clue about what's going on outside his own head.

We've already been through all that insanity once, and I don't think anyone -- least of all Bush -- wants to go through it again. So I guess we should be relieved that Katrina was just a storm. Hurricanes we can deal with, sort of. But a Global War Against Hurricanes (or, alternatively, a Struggle Against Weather Extremism) could easily be our national undoing.

It's not all bad news

2005-09-07T10:31:00.000-07:00

Tom Tommorow gets it

2005-09-06T13:24:00.000-07:00

Think this is satire?

How to sell a lie

2005-09-05T10:08:00.000-07:00

On July 21, 2003, the Post published a front-page gut-wrencher penned by Finn about an Iraqi woman, Jumana Hanna, detailing the tortures and rapes she endured at the hands of Saddam Hussein's evil security forces. The powerful 2,800 word feature, "A Lone Woman Testifies to Iraq's Order of Terror," detailed her ordeal with a mix of heavy pathos and steamy S&M. According to Finn's article, Hanna was arrested for marrying her outside-of-the-tribe lover without state permission, a supposedly serious violation in the evil world of Saddamite misogyny. One torture led to another, and soon, our damsel in distress, a Christian virgin no less, was presented as a gift to none other than Uday Hussein for a violent defloweringt.

This harlequin cliche should have raised doubts, but Finn seemed to relish it, Indeed Finn even describes Uday as "a psychopath and serial rapist" - just in case you didn't catch how neatly his story was coming togther. Uday raped Hanna; her husband eventually arrested, tortured and shot; and Hanna suffered an array of medieval tortures from a variety of instruments in a variety of orifices.

The point was obvious: America had liberated women from misogynist tyranny. As Finn wrote, "Hanna, who agreed to the use of her full name, is just one of hundreds and possibly thousands of women who were tortured and sexually assaulted by the agents of the last government." In response, Townhall.com, proclaimed it "justification alone for Bush's Operation Iraqi Freedom." Who the hell in their right mind ... conservative or liberal, man or woman ... could argue against the morality of the war now?

There was only one problem. Jumana Hanna made the whole thing up.

Read it all here

I cannot even bring myself to comment

2005-09-05T09:11:00.000-07:00

Jefferson Parish President.

Sir, they were told like me. Every single day. The cavalry is coming. On the federal level. The cavalry is coming. The cavalry is coming. The cavalry is coming. I have just begun to hear the hooves of the cavalry. The cavalry is still not here yet, but I have begun to hear the hooves and were almost a week out.

Three quick examples. We had Wal-mart deliver three trucks of water. Trailer trucks of water. Fema turned them back, said we didn't need them. This was a week go. We had 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel on a coast guard vessel docked in my parish. The coast guard said come get the fuel right way. When we got there with our trucks, they got a word, FEMA says don't give you the fuel. Yesterday, yesterday, fema comes in and cuts all our emergency communications lines. They cut them without notice. Our sheriff, Harry Lee, goes back in. he reconnects the line. He posts armed guards said no one is getting near these lines.

...

The guy who runs this building I'm in. Emergency management. He's responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home and every day she called him and said. Are you coming. Son? Is somebody coming? And he said yeah. Mama. Somebody's coming to get you.. Somebody's coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody's coming to get you on Thursday. Somebody's coming to get you on Friday. And she drowned Friday night. And she drowned Friday night. Nobody's coming to get us. Nobody's coming to get us. The Secretary has promised. Everybody's promised. They've had press conferences. I'm sick of the press conferences. For god's sakes, just shut up and send us somebody.

A note to our conservative friends by Steve Gilliard

2005-09-03T16:26:00.000-07:00

WE TOLD YOU SO

Ever wonder why New Yorkers detest George Bush?

Because we experienced his incompetence up close and person. We knew this guy was full of shit, absolutely full of fucking shit, after they started to play games with the funding and gave Wyoming terrorism money. We knew he was an assclown then.

We thought DC 9/11 was a comedy, because the Bush we saw hid in AF One like the scared bitch that he is.

But did you listen?

Fuck no. Until last week, Ann Coulter was calling New Yorkers cowards for not endorsing Bush's folly in Iraq.

We have been screaming for two years that Bush and his team sucked. That they had no clue. They sent soldiers to be wounded in Iraq without armored anything. And you idiots cheered him on from the safety of your keyboards. We told you he was fucking up Iraq. But no, we supported Saddam, we were racist, we blamed America.

You say this isn't about politics? Fuck you, this IS politics, real time, real life politics, where the insanity of all your ideas are exposed to the world for the fraud that they are. Tax cuts kill. Ask the relatives of the dead of the Gulf Coast.

Well, motherfuckers, the alligators are feasting on the dead and there isn't an Iraqi in sight. And Bush is trying to gladhand his way through a mess which has stunned FOX reporters. I mean, Shepard Smith is calling Fox's talking heads liars ON THE AIR.

CNN rips Bush in print and online after nearly five years of sleep.

Instead of hearing what we had to say about Bush, you called John Kerry a coward, mocked Max Cleland, blamed everything but herpes on Bill Clinton. You enabled Bush into this mess and now you're shocked?

Now, Fox can be outraged, now, Wash Times and Union Leader call Bush weak? Well, his coward ass disappeared in 2001. But you rather blame Michael Moore for that.

He can't even explain the Iraq war to a grieving mother.

So what did you do?

Write the most vile things about her and her dead son. Attacked her patriotism and her honesty.

Well, motherfuckers, and that means you, fat ass Goldberg and your master, Rich Lowry, PNAC Bitch Beinart, the racist wannabe white Malkin and the little fucktards at LGF, Bareback Andy and "Diversity" Instacracker, all you backstabbing, fag hating uncle tom ministers, you can see Dear Leader in action. America's largest port is gone, maybe forever, gas is $5+ a gallon and FEMA is coming. Whores come faster with old men than FEMA is getting to NOLA.

How did your wartime President react? Like Chiang Kai-Shek when the Yellow River flooded in 1944, with corrupt indifference.

Bush, the man your fever dreams built into the next Winston Churchill when he is really the live action Chauncey Gardiner, has failed to everyone, in plain sight, without question. Rick Perry is trying to save his ass, but it ain't working. NOLA looks like ANGOLA and that ain't flying.

Say 9/11 changed everything now, motherfuckers. Ooops, 9/11, 9/11. 9/11. Doesn't work anymore? Gee, maybe the sea of alligator MRE's once known as the citizens of New Orleans has something to do with that. Now you can shut the fuck up about 9/11. Bush just proved what would happen with another 9/11. Dead Americans as far as the nose can smell.

Drunken Chris Hitchens muttered some nonsense about blacks having it so good here. The poor man needs to stay in his bottle or go to Betty Ford before someone beats his treasonous ass stupid. Islamofascism means what, now motherfucker? Shove Islamofascism up your well travelled ass. The most dangerous thing to average Americans is not some mullah in Iraq, not even Osama Bin Laden, but George Bush. If he doesn't get you killed in Iraq, he'll fuck up saving your city so it turns into Escape from New Orleans. Armed junkies roaming the streets, looking for a fix, robbing and looting like Serb paramilitaries and about as sober.

George Bush's ineptitude has killed far more Americans than Osama could have dreamed of.

Some of you still try to see the clothes on the Dauphin, but he's as naked as Peter North around Jenna Jameson. Bush fucked up so bad, FOX turned on him like a rabid dog.

You can't hide behind racism forever. Bush fucked up, Bush is a weak, callous leader and the world knows this like it knows few other things. And all the stolen TV's in the world cannot hide that.

Katrina

2005-09-02T10:28:00.000-07:00

Evelyn Turner cries alongside the body of her common-law husband, Xavier Bowie, after he died in New Orleans, Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005. Bowie and Turner had decided to ride out Hurricane Katrina when they could not find a way to leave the city. Bowie, who had lung cancer, died when he ran out of oxygen Tuesday afternoon. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

Two articles on the disaster unfolding in New Orleans.

Why the Levee Broke

"No One Can Say they Didn't See it Coming"

Also link for donations Red Cross

Update

It appears that Canada, France, Russia have all offered immediate assistance, planes, food, water purification, medical teams. This could have been there today.

IT WAS REFUSED

The view from one Iraqi

2005-08-11T12:31:00.000-07:00

The gates of hell

By Jamal Mudhafar

Azzaman, August 7, 2005

The headline of this article is not a title of a science fiction film. It truthfully translates what is currently taking place in Iraq.

The gates of hell are now wide open – thanks to U.S. invasion – and their fires have enveloped almost everything in our country.

There is no electricity, no water, no fuel, no food rations, no security, no sewage …

There is terror everywhere and there is fear of everything – fear of the present and of what lies ahead in the future.

All indications tell that our future is bleak as there is nothing left in this country that makes you feel secure about your own future and that of your children.

What is happening is not a war, rebellion or insurgency. It is mass killing and annihilation coupled with torture and brutal and barbaric dismembering of innocent people.

Bombing and shelling of towns goes ahead and no one gives a damn for the lives lost and property damaged.

Politicians have not honored any of the promises they made during elections. There is a dangerous decline in the public services and government performance.

The shock we have received since U.S. troops landed in our midst and the new is beyond description.

Fear and terror have gripped the nation. Wherever you are at any time of the day you are liable to be killed by a stray bullet.

Stray bullets are no longer the prerogative of U.S. troops and their tormentors – the insurgents.

Almost everyone in Iraq now use their guns to shoot in order to scare, wound or kill.

If the bodyguards of a senior official want to reach a destination on time and are delayed by traffic jam, they fire in the air to scare other drivers to give way.

If someone is injured or killed as a result it is his or her problem.

Killing by mistake is now perhaps one of the main causes of death in Iraq.

Trust between the people and the government has collapsed. And now we are at the mercy of the stars because neither U.S. troops nor the government have the slightest idea of who is blowing up whom and why?

Ah What the hell...

2005-08-09T11:01:00.000-07:00

The face of Evil?

I thought twice about posting this article, I'm doing so because I think it's interesting and because I am sick of hearing about how how Gilad Atzmon is supposed ly an evil anti-semite, as he is Jewish himself I find that laughable.

I don't agree with every word the man says (I think that arguing that Blair is a fascist is a little over the top) but it is an interesting perspective that I believe is worth airing.

If you don't like it, don't read it.

The Tyranny of Pronouns on the Road to Fascism

“If people want to come here, either fleeing persecution or seeking better life, they play by our rules and our way of life….. We’re angry about what they‘re doing to our country. We’re angry about abusing our good nature and toleration.” (Tony Blair 5/8/05)

By Gilad Atzmon

08/08/05 "ICH" -- -- I immigrated to Britain eleven years ago. Originally I came here with the intention of finishing my post-graduate studies in Philosophy. I didn’t nurture any plans of staying, but I fell in love: first with London and later with Britain. When I came here just over a decade ago, I met a society that was trying to reconcile itself with the twilight of its long, disastrous history as a colonial power with the morally orientated liberal view it adopted in the aftermath of the Second World War. When I decided to settle here I had the impression that the days of the empire were really over. This was obviously a few years before Blair took over. At the time Britain was searching for different ways to transform its expansionist heritage into one that could survive just as well as a tolerant, peace seeking nation. Small, but without the shackles of needing to dominate and impose its will upon others. British society presented itself as a multi-ethnic society with a multi-cultural horizon. Any visitor to London would admit that this image of openness is more than apparent in almost every aspect of the life of the capital; the very many languages, the extreme wide range of foreign cuisines and restaurants, the music, the people and their varied dressing code, etc. London is no doubt an amazingly colourful international cultural hybrid. It is the most welcoming city on this planet, it doesn’t matter who you are and where you come from, you can always turn it into your home.

Saying that, I have never been convinced by the general idea of multi-culturalism. I would ideally prefer to live in a society that tolerantly celebrates its differences rather than a society that identifies itself with an ideology, be it the most open and tolerant ideology. I would prefer to think of a society in which collective tolerance is an authentic and genuine tendency rather than a legally imposed political agenda. The idea of authoritarian multi-cultural ideology always appeared to me as a shaky cover up. It is there to hide clear latent chauvinist and even racist tendencies. But I learned to live with it. I learned to accept the fact that in Britain, art centres are receiving public funding only when they present a ‘multi-cultural program’ with a discernible number of marginal artists, be it Indians, Blacks, Pakistani, Jews, Women, etc. Although I could never support such an instrumental approach, I learned to respect it. I thought to myself; if this is what it takes for so many people to live together in peace, who am I to raise any criticism?

Seemingly, Mr Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, exposed the essential deceptive character entangled with the idea of multi-culturalism. “The rules are changing” Blair says these days. From now on ‘we’, the British, will decide what really fits into our ‘way of life’. ‘They’, on the other hand, will be deported or even stripped of their citizenship. I tend to believe that Blair knows very well who the ‘we’ and who are the ‘they’ must be. Blair surely believes that he knows what the British ‘way of life’ is all about as well.

Without really knowing whether I fall into Blair’s ‘we’ category or rather into the ‘they’ one, I would confess that my personal interpretation of the British ‘way of life’ is very different from Blair’s. This is not very unusual considering the fact that I am a ‘Johnny foreigner’. But then, surprisingly enough, I realised lately that my personal account on the subject isn’t that remote from Ken Livingstone’s vision of the British capital. In a press conference following the 7/7 bombing, the Mayor said it all: “London is the town of the people who want to be themselves”. Ken had tears in his eyes that cloudy afternoon, and I found myself sobbing with him. It was Ken Livingstone who managed to explain to me in a one single sentence why I fell in love with London and why I settled in Britain a decade ago. Ken’s philosophy is simple: Let yourself and others be.

I feel at home in Britain and especially in London because it was here where I could initiate a search for myself. It was here where I managed to stop identifying myself as a Jew, it was here in London where I ceased being an Israeli. It was here where I started to write. It is here in Britain where I stopped being an Americanised bebop clone and became Gilad Atzmon (what ever that means). I love London and Britain because I am allowed to be myself or even just to be. But it goes further, it is here in London where I could spend an evening in a Lebanese restaurant, it is here in London where I meet, talk and make friends with Palestinians without having them become intimidated by my ‘Israeliness’. It is here in London where I realised that I am a Hebrew speaking Palestinian. I owe a lot to this town and to people who made this town into what it is, be they British or not.

I might be completely wrong here, but I tend to believe that as far as the subject of ‘British way of life’ is concerned, we better listen to Ken rather than to Tony. Unlike Blair who was re-elected indirectly in spite of himself, Livingstone was directly elected by Londoners, by people who believe in their Mayor and his universal humanist outlook.

Indeed, Livingstone and Blair represent two different and opposing worldviews. While Ken describes a liberal society comprised of many different people searching for their own authentic voice, Tony is articulating some radical nationalist thoughts. For Blair, the whole is far greater than its parts. For Blair, society is by far more vital than its members. The state is more important than its citizens. Blair articulates his worldview by cluttering it up with pronouns and assigning them intrinsic value. For Blair, the ‘we’ is obviously far more valuable than the ‘they’.

One may raise an eyebrow and state that there is nothing innovative about the worldview Blair has adopted. In polite company, it is called nationalism, at times even patriotism, but on the face of it, it is nothing less than fascism. Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, we may as well take this opportunity to admit that our PM is introducing us to fascist ideology and practices. We may as well acknowledge the horrifying possibility that our society is heading towards fascism through the byways of nationalism and patriotism. But then, even fascism is a matter of degree. Some fascists are better than others. Fascists do believe that the state is greater than its citizens. And yet, exclusion isn’t essential to fascism. Apparently, it is essential to Blair who is politically engaged in mobilising the darkest xenophobic forces within British society.

For those who still fail to see it, based on his recent declarations and intentions, Blair’s political tendencies, mirroring some of the principles of fascism, are of the Zionist type. The man truly believes in the Zionist notion of cultural clash in which ‘we’ stands for Judeo-Christian goodness and ‘they’ stands for Muslim fundamentalist evil.

One may correctly argue, that the most racist form of fascism should be better described as a form of Nazism rather than Zionism. Admittedly, I could see the logic behind such a claim and yet, I insist upon not equating Blair’s policies with Nazism for two important reasons:

1. Zionism predates Nazism. If this is not enough, while Nazism has been defeated over sixty years ago, Zionism is still an active successful political practice that inflicts pain on millions of people, and shows little sign of being in decline. Moreover, Blair’s illegal war in Iraq is in practice a Zionist war against the Arab pockets of resistance. The ‘War Against Terror’ is just another example of a major Zionist battleground. As sad and mad as it may sound, Britain and America are operating currently as a Zionist mission force.

2. Nazism is traditionally associated with the industrialised murder of innocent civilians. Thank God, Blair isn’t there yet. Anyhow, we better remind ourselves that it took the Nazis a while before they even considered the possibility of industrialised murderous solutions.

But then, not only does Blair flirt with fascism in his stance as an all-knowing, all-powerful leader of his nation, even as a watered down tyrant, he appears to be a complete failure. To start with, he is far from being popular amongst his people which is something that disqualifies him from becoming the British Fuhrer. Take my advice Tony, you can’t become a Fuhrer in a society that lacks the notion of a balcony.

Fascists are occasionally good at making wars, but Blair is anything but a military genius. So far he has managed to fail in every possible front. Blair was very quick to surrender to terror. His endorsement of the ‘we’ and ‘they’ philosophy, is exactly where his enemies want him to go. The Muslim fundamentalists want to challenge our so-called ‘Western liberal ideology’. Evidently, Bush and Blair were very quick to lacerate the notion of liberty and civil rights. Furthermore, militant Islamic fundamentalists may aim to prevent Muslims from assimilating within their host Western nations. The terrorists want British Muslims to feel rejected, humiliated and segregated. Blair provides the fundamentalists with the goods. His newly proposed legal measures alienate the British Muslim communities. I better say it loudly, with Tony Blair in No 10 Downing Street, the British people do not need an enemy from beyond.

Unlike recent British PMs at war, unlike Churchill who led the nation through the gloomy days of Dunkirk and the horrendous nights of the Blitz, unlike the Iron Lady who at least showed some backbone by standing firmly in spite of repetitive IRA raids, Blair has managed to raise a white flag just after a single successful terror attack on the capital.

On the face of it, only divine intervention can save Britain right now. In my despair I went back and checked the lyrics of the British national anthem. I vaguely remembered that there was some kind of an appeal to God right in the very front. Of course there is: it says ‘God save our gracious Queen”. Ok, I think to myself, our Queen may be saved but what about the rest of us?

The Dumbest Story ever written?

2005-08-03T13:59:00.000-07:00

Here at Sonic's place we all love a good take-down of the Right, and John Chuckman does an outstanding job of knocking over New York Times correspondent Thomas Friedman

Here>

But as well as having a good laugh it's uncanny how much of Friedman's reasoning has infected the "decent left" in the UK.

The idea of the LIST was first raised a couple of months ago Here

And of course this paragraph could be taken straight out of a critique of Little Green Soccerballs

Friedman asks, "If the primary terrorism problem we face today can effectively be addressed only by a war of ideas within Islam - a war between life-affirming Muslims against those who want to turn one of the world's great religions into a death cult - what can the rest of us do?"

Note the cheap trick here of identifying Islam in general with the world's terrorism problem even while ostensibly distinguishing between life-affirming and death-cult Muslims. Islam in general bears the burden of correction for its minority of extremists. These are the words of someone with murky and undeclared motives.

Terrorism, like any other criminal behavior, is the sole responsibility of those committing the acts, not of the religion or the people with which they happen to be associated. The number of people involved in events in New York was about twenty. The number in London maybe a dozen. The world has about a billion Muslims. Friedman simply has no shame.

He glosses over, another favorite technique of Friedman's, the death-cult wing of every religion, letting it apply only to Islam. What about lunatics in America who turn Christianity into death cults like those of Jim Jones (900 deaths) or Waco (about 100 deaths)? There are dozens of these, not to mention the weird Aryan-nation people who live in the woods and mountains armed to the teeth. American fundamentalists have gathered innumerable times on hillsides awaiting the end of the world. Many of them stocked their basements with guns, ammo, and freeze-dried provisions awaiting the calamity that was supposed to occur when the calendar turned to the year 2000. What about the pictures of Marines earnestly kneeling at some make-shift alter in Iraq before they head out to kill people? What about America's Eric Rudolphs? its Timothy McVeighs?

And how can you apply the adjective life-affirming to thousands of ferociously angry settlers in Gaza determined to rip down every brick in place, cut down every tree, root up every vine, people who have been widely reported to be poisoning the land they will have to surrender? It seems to me that Israel itself represents the focus of just such a struggle going on in Judaism, the only difference between it and what we see in Islam being one of numbers.

One thing is certain, if you tried smearing Judaism in general with the bloody excesses of Israeli settlers or charming figures like the late bloodthirsty Rabbi Kahane and his followers, you'd call down a firestorm of anti-Semitism accusations on your head. Yet this is precisely what Friedman feels perfectly free to do with Islam

......

The most frightening thing Friedman is saying is that people who discuss terror and its causes in terms other than his own are "despicable." Yes, words matter, and despicable is a very strong word, a hate-word if there ever was one.

So here is Friedman saying he hates people who disagree with his way of thinking on a subject, blithely managing to identify the people he hates with haters

All in all well worth a read.

"No one wants to talk about Falluja,"

2005-07-29T11:36:00.000-07:00

It seems so long ago that the destruction of Falluja was hailed as the turning point that would lead to peace in Iraq.

Of course that was about three turning points ago.

But it is important that we on the anti-war left remember what was done to the city, and now, at last an independent journalist has managed to gain entry into the cirt and report what it is like now.

"We Regard Falluja As a Large Prison"

Eight months after the second invasion of Falluja, there is hardly a street that does not still feature a building pulverized during the assault. I had not been in the city since last July, when I was escorted out by three cars of mujahedeen — that's when things were still relatively nice — and though I had expected it, the destruction was still shocking.

The dome of one mosque I had previously used as a landmark was completely missing, large holes had been blown in others. Houses have been pancaked, it is hard to find a façade without the mark of at least small arms fire. As many as 80 percent of the city's 300,000-plus residents have returned, but the city has by no means returned to normal. On Sunday, the police were hard at work adding razor wire and new concrete blast barriers to the already sprawling fortifications around their main station in the center of town while US and Iraqi army patrols traversed the main street, the Iraqis firing their rifles in the air to clear traffic. Small arms chattered in the distance, followed by a response from a larger gun. The tension is palpable. Curfew begins at 10 p.m. but low-level fighting continues.

"They are killing one or two of us everyday," says an Iraqi soldier at one of the checkpoints into the city, a claim confirmed by local doctors.

.......

Back at the hospital, Ahmed says he expects the fighting to continue. "Even civilian people will change to be fighters," he says. "We regard Falluja as a large prison." (People in Falluja will not talk directly about fighting, though all indications are that the new attacks are homegrown.)

The Iraqi army in Falluja, who don't mind telling a journalist that they are all from cities in the south, don't seem particularly thrilled to be here. (When the US tried recruiting Fallujis to fight in Falluja, they turned their guns on the US or turned them over to the guerillas.)

"Falluja — death," says one of them, drawing a finger across his throat, a motion that I would like to go one day in Iraq without seeing someone make.

.......

I approach some of the Marines on a base inside the city, to try and find out what life is like for them. They say there is no one at the base who can speak on the record, but I pause for a minute and chat, not terribly excited about walking back outside into the thick dust and, potentially, a line of fire. They ask why I have come, I am the first journalist they have seen in four months.

"No one wants to talk about Falluja," says one of the Marines.

The next time you hear or read one of pro-war chums witter on about libertating Iraq, remind them of Falluja, remind them of what continues to be done in their name.

The Day Satire Died

2005-07-28T14:39:00.000-07:00

Things going wrong? just change the brand

Tom Lehrer famously said that satire died the day Henry Kissinger won a Nobel peace prize, but today may have topped it.

The press today is full of articles such as this one about the Bush administration's decision to change the name of the global War on Terror to the "the global struggle against violent extremism"

Much ink is shed over what a smart move this is,

"The Bush administration is retooling its slogan for the fight against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, pushing the idea that the long-term struggle is as much an ideological battle as a military mission, senior administration and military officials said Monday."

or

"Administration and Pentagon officials say the revamped campaign has grown out of meetings of President Bush's senior national security advisers that began in January, and it reflects the evolution in Mr. Bush's own thinking nearly four years after the Sept. 11 attacks."

Now that all sounds fine and dandy, here it is, the new strategy (and god knows they need one) and who can disagree that violent extremism is a bad thing (especially when compared to it's polar opposite peaceful moderation)

However there appears to be one little point thet the gentlemen of the press to missed, except for Fred Kaplan in Slate

Fred points out that the original acronym for the Global War on terror (GWOT or G-WOT) is a bit of a mouthful, a bit negative a bit you know, out of date, yesterdays news. However the super-duper new acronym you get with a simple name change to the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism is GSAVE or even better G-SAVE! Don't you just feel better about it already, G-SAVE!, who could argue with that?

This great new branding, as national security adviser Stephen Hadley puts it is caused by a "need to dispute both the gloomy vision and offer a positive alternative." Save the world, not go to war with it.

So it comes to this, Iraq is a disaster area, the Taliban are back in Afghanistan and the world is less safe from terrorist attacks than it has ever been. but we have a snappy new acronym (SNA) so all is well.

Pass the sick bag Doris.

Ted Rall of the day

2005-07-27T09:07:00.000-07:00

Right-Wing talking points on the London Execution

2005-07-26T09:15:00.000-07:00

Lets see how many we can spot over the next few days:

TALKING POINTS FOR MAN SHOT DEAD

Urgent Release For All Press

Talking Points for man mistakenly killed by UK police. The following
points should be emphasised in your reports:

* The dead man is to be referred to as the "suspect" and never the "victim". The intent of these talking points is to cast suspicision onto the dead man and direct any criticism away from the police.

* He was not Caucasian. Preferably he was of Asian or Arab appearance.

* Do not just mention that he was (mistakenly) taken for a suicide bomber, but describe suicide bombings in detail. Especially the aftermath. The intention should be to frighten the reader.

* Remind the reader what would (never say "might") have happened if the suspect "had" been a suicide bomber and the police had "not" shot him. Exaggerate.

* Imply that he had a rucksack of the same colour, size, and design as preferred by real suicide bombers.

* Blame the terrorists for his death and be sympathetic towards the police at all times.

* When describing the man use imagary drawn only from the CCTV pictures of the alleged bombers. Conjour up the image of a suicide bomber.

* Mention but do not discuss his innocence. Mention it only when necessary.

* Belittle the suspect. Describe him in negative terms as poorly dressed, unshaven, and nervous, but also as a physically intimidating man, burly, agile, fit, dangerous.

* It should not be written that he "failed" to obey police as failure may be construed as meaning that there was some other possible reason for his not stoping than presumed guilt. Avoid passive associations by describing his actions only with action words commonly associated with guilt such as "refused" or "resisted".

* Give conflicting eye-witness accounts of the actual moments of the shooting so as to protect officers.

* One witness thought he saw a "bomb-belt" on the suspect. Quote this witness extensively and as often as possible. Offer no speculation or implication that he may have been mistaken (which of course he was), or hired to say just that. Use his observation as if it was the sworn testimony of an expert in suicide bombings requiring no further comment.

* The police allegedly began following the suspect after he left an apartment in the same block in which another apartment was under surveillance. Use this in such a way as to connect him to the alleged bombers (by describing the apartment block as a "house", for example). Do not speculate that the police may have followed the wrong man.

* Bury the information that the real bombers are still on the loose by mentioning some vague arrests but do not give details as those arrested in the early days of such crises invariably turn out to be innocent.

* Avoid mention of the suspect's family (especially if it turns out he had a wife and kids) but report in depth on how sorry the police are. Use words like "regret" and "tragic".

* Assert that the way in which the suspect "dived or fell to ground" was cause for suspicion in itself. Never connect this to the simultaneous shouting by armed police for every one to "get down" as this may contradict prior assertions that he refused to obey the police.

* Report it as if "the regulations" required the police to shoot him.

* Report that there will be an internal enquiry as if this is a magnanimous police gesture as opposed to mere routine. Report on the process but not the substance of the enquiry, and phrase process descriptions in terms of thoroughness, accountability, and above all sufficiency. Avoid mention of previous police-shootings that have resulted in public enquiries.

* Don't mention the war.

* Generate debate on the circumstances in which the police *should* shoot to kill, and avoid moral or legal issues. Frame the debate in terms of terrorism only and dismiss mistaken-identity arguments as left-wing or liberal.

* If the suspect turns out to be non-muslim you should still continue to question muslim clerics on matters related to terrorism.

* If the suspect does turn out to be muslim connect muslim sympathy or sorrow over his death with radical extremism.

* Use the tiniest flaw in the suspect's character (drugs, fare-dodging, infidelity, etc) as ultimate justification. For example, "If he hadn't have been deaf, he would have heard the police and still be alive today..."

* Utterly groundless speculation is allowed to be presented as fact only when it results in a positive image for HMG.

* Do not attempt in any way to ascertain the identity of the shooter, or what specific unit or intelligence service he is connected to.

All other topics, speculation, criticisms of the police, or discussions, are forbidden.

The Ever Changing Story

2005-07-25T11:47:00.000-07:00

The New York Times has out together an interesting piece on the ever changing stories coming out of the Met re the London bombs here (Registration required but it is free)

Most disgracefully of all of course is the case of Jean Charles de Menezes who after being executed by the police was then fingered as "directly linked" to the investigation.

But as the NYT points out it's not the first, or even the third, time police have had to back away from information they had confidently announced.

On the afternoon of the attacks, the police gave a precise but inaccurate account of when the bombs exploded. They said 26 minutes separated the first explosion on a subway train from the third and final explosion.

At two consecutive news conferences, senior police officials inaccurately reported that the first bomb exploded at 8:51 a.m., on a train near Liverpool Street station, on the edge of the city's financial district. They said the second bomb exploded five minutes later, at 8:56 a.m., on a train at Russell Square station. And the third, they said, hit a train at 9:17 a.m. as it approached Edgware Road.

On the evening of July 8, cellphone video aired by the BBC showed that the bomb at Edgware Road had exploded at 8:51 a.m. - not at 9:17 a.m., as the police had said.

On July 9, the police acknowledged their mistake and revealed that the bombs had exploded within 50 seconds of each other

Next

One of the most important questions, in the early days, was whether the attacks were launched by suicide bombers. If true, it would be a first in the history of Western Europe.

But for several days, the police denied repeated questions by reporters about whether the bombers had died in the attacks. It was not until July 12 that the police said they had identified the bombers, but did not release their names. Though their identities emerged gradually from other sources in the ensuing days, two days later, the police said only two suspected bombers had been formally identified. On July 15, Scotland Yard identified the four bombers who had died in the attacks.

The police have still steadfastly avoided calling the men suicide bombers, possibly because of a live theory inside Scotland Yard that the men were duped into carrying the bombs on board the trains.

There was also much interest in the makeup of the bombs, as it is one of the most important forensic clues that investigators have to help them solve a case. On July 9, two days after the bombings, the Metropolitan Police made a preliminary conclusion that the bombs were of "military grade." They passed the information on to their counterparts in Europe and the United States, and some news organizations reported it.

But within days, Scotland Yard determined that the bombs were powerful but crude, homemade explosive devices made with TATP, a mixture of widely available chemicals, including acetone, hydrogen peroxide and mineral acid.

On Friday night, the police arrested two men held under the Terrorism Act, a development that they said was "promising." One senior police official said one of the suspects might be one of the would-be suicide bombers who had attempted to carry out Thursday's attacks.

But by late Saturday evening, police officials gloomily cautioned reporters that the two men may not be the would-be suicide bombers after all.

Why does all this matter? well given the hysteria around the press and interweb, with every new rumour or story being pontificated on I think it's important that we treat everything we hear with scepticism, as it is almost certainly going to be corrected later.

Off to the G8!

2005-06-22T15:59:00.000-07:00

This will be the last post for a bit as I'm off to do my bit at the protests against the G8 in Scotland. It seemed a bit of a shame, that after going to Genoa in 2002 and Evian in 2004, I would miss out when the ~~biggest terrorists in the world~~ esteemed world leaders take the trouble to go to Scotland.

So I'm off tomorrow for the thrilling 31 hour journey from Auckland to Edinburgh.

I'll try and get to a PC as soon as I can to fill you all in on the fun and games around the summit.

Cartoon of the day

2005-06-21T14:34:00.000-07:00

What a bloody waste

2005-06-21T13:07:00.000-07:00

If have any doubts about the social class of the American troops who are being killed over in Iraq this story gives us an idea.

By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 20, 2005; C01

Under the glare of a midmorning sun, Staff Sgt. Jody Hayes stands sweating in the hatch of his M-113 armored vehicle, scanning for insurgents. Hayes and his Iowa National Guard crew have been stalled for nearly 30 minutes on a risky, slow-moving mission to clear road bombs, and he's getting nervous.

Suddenly he hears the snap of a sniper's bullet flying past his head. The round pierces the neck of the soldier next to him, Spec. John Miller, entering the two-inch gap between his Kevlar vest collar and helmet.

"Get down!" Hayes yells. Miller falls heavily against Hayes's leg, and at first Hayes believes his friend is taking cover. "Man, he got down pretty quick," he recalls thinking. Then he glances down and sees Miller bleeding at his feet.

Sgt. Ty Dermer, who is manning a .50-caliber machine gun within arm's reach of Miller, radios for help: "We got a man down! We need a medic, ASAP!"

Hayes drops down and cradles Miller's head in his lap, while Dermer rips open a pressure dressing and places it on the neck wound. Each man grabs one of Miller's hands and feels for a pulse. They still haven't found one when medic Spec. Jaymie Holschlag pulls open the back door of the M-113 and rushes, breathless, to Miller's side.

"Doc," Hayes says, looking up at her. "He's gone."

Holschlag begins checking Miller's pulse herself, as if she hasn't heard.
"Doc," Hayes repeats, louder. "He's gone!"

It is 10:18 a.m. on April 12, and John Wayne Miller is no more.

In the frenzy to save Miller, no one was thinking about why the war had snatched away the gangly 21-year-old Wal-Mart stocker from West Burlington, Iowa. Only later, as darkness falls and details of the day's horrors ricochet through their camp, do that question and others begin to haunt Hayes and his tightknit Iowa platoon. With a fifth of its soldiers killed or wounded, the platoon is reeling from the trauma of repeated loss, facing a constant threat from bombs and gunfire on Ramadi's streets, or mortar strikes on their base. They are angry, anxious, wracked by guilt -- one soldier suffers from combat stress so acute that he is unable to go on missions, and stays behind camp walls.
..........................

Holschlag runs to Miller. When the platoon medic sees that insurgents have taken out another of her "boys," she swears, grabs her medic's bag and walks back to her Humvee, slamming the side of it with her fist. Then she pulls out the gray body bag she has learned to carry at all times, and waits for a vehicle to evacuate Miller's body.
........................................
To Holschlag and many in the unit, Miller was their "boy," their "kid," and in his sudden death, the good-hearted but awkward young man was mourned as a family member. "You live on top of each other. You get used to working together . . . then you go out one day and -- boom -- he's gone," she says.

"In 2 1/2 seconds, for no particular reason, because we found their weapons cache, they took him out," she says. "And never again will John Wayne Miller steal my Pepsi"

"J-Dub," as platoon mates called Miller, was an unlikely hero. His mother died when he was a teen, and his father was in and out of jail, they said. After high school he found a job stocking shelves at Wal-Mart on the graveyard shift, which he liked because it let him devote his days to his real passion -- video games. Miller had a one-bedroom apartment on Prairie Street in West Burlington and a mean pet ferret. Other than that, they said, the lanky young man didn't have much going on in his life. So one day in March 2002, more for friendship than anything else, Miller signed up for the Iowa National Guard.

This is the war the chickenhawks support, but won't fight in. As long as Wal Mart employees do the dying, it's fine.

Looking for a Scapegoat

2005-06-21T10:08:00.000-07:00

We're starting to see a new Meme from the increasingly embattled warmongers as the disaster on the Euphrates gets clearer and clearer.

Of course they cannot admit it is their fault, that the war they called for was obviously doomed from the beginning, so of course, like German generals after World war one the blame must lie elsewhere, the "Stab in the Back" theory has returned

From the USA Billmon Brings us some chilling quotes.

What evil, darkness of mind and absence of conscience, would drive a man to commit such an atrocity upon his fellow soldiers? Could it be possible that among the voices in Staff Sgt. Martinez’ head were those of Amnesty International, Senator Dick Durbin, and all the others who are publicly condemning America’s military by falsely accusing U.S. soliders of crimes against humanity?
California Conservative
U.S. Soldier Kills His Superiors:
Casualties of Liberal Warfare?
June 18, 2005

And

The primary reason that Americans are losing heart in the war on terror is because the media is lying to them. The media's lies are lies of omission, gorging on the bad news while ignoring the good news. The effect has been to portray the war in Iraq as an unwinnable war that is costing more and more American lives. The left has contributed to the lies by constantly trying to compare the war in Iraq to the war in Vietnam . . . and by trumpeting every abuse by an American soldier as though it was the equivalent of the routine beheadings, assassinations and bombings of the terrorists.
Media Lies
The primary reason that Americans are losing heart
June 19, 2005

And

Let me tell you something, folks, if we are hit again, if we are hit again, we need to hold these people in our country who are undermining our efforts responsible. It ain't going to be the FBI's fault next time. It isn't going to be the CIA's fault next time. It isn't going to be some bureaucracy's fault next time. It's going to be the fault of politicians, left-wing groups and the like who have names and identities and spend their every waking moment trying to obstruct our ability to secure intelligence information for our own national security.
Rush Limbaugh
The Rush Limbaugh Show
June 14, 2005

So lets have a little Sonic's place competition to see which one of the "Decent" left websites is first to pick up this ball and run with it, will it be Squealer? Little Green Soccerballs? Or Ollie?

Or will it take a Nick Cohen article to get them going?

One thing is clear, as the occupation of Iraq winds down to it's inevitable defeat things are going to get even more nasty.

Fighting for Women's rights in Iraq

2005-06-20T10:11:00.000-07:00

Amongst the ever shifting rationales for the ongoing disaster in Iraq one theme that keeps cropping up is that by blowing the hell out of the country we are somehow involved in freeing the women of Iraq from tyranny.

Some of those very women have been out demonstrating in Mosul this week, as pictured below.

For those who do not read arabic (myself included) here is the reason for the march.

US Frees Iraqi Woman Detainees After Protests

MOSUL, June 19, 2005 (IslamOnline.net) – US occupation forces completed on Sunday, June 19, the release of twenty one Iraqi women held as a bargain chip in the northern city of Mosul.

"The release came after massive protests organized by the Islamic Party and the Islamic organization for human rights over the past three days," Nour Al-Din Al-Hayalli, the Islamic Party's media officer in Mosul, told IslamOnline.net.

The Islamic party championed a massive demonstration following the Friday prayers on June 17 to press for the immediate release of all Iraqi women in the US custody.

Assembling outside the Sedek Rashan mosque, protestors denounced the American occupation for dishonoring the Iraqi people by detaining women.

They carried photos of detained women, demanding the government of Ibrahim Jaafari to live up to its responsibilities toward the Iraqi people.

The demonstrators also issued a statement calling for an immediate release of all Iraqi women detainees across the occupied country.

There is no available figures on Iraqi women in the custody of American occupation forces

And why are they arrested?

In a demonstration staged on Thursday, June 16, an Iraqi woman said her daughter-in-law was detained by US soldiers after they failed to find her husband.

"They stormed the house on May 24, searching for my son. When they failed to find him they detained his wife and threw his six-month-old child to the ground," she recalled

Now I'm not an expert in military tactics (I just play one on the internet), but could one of the pro-war people who regularly pop in here tell me how they justify this?

update

For those who may be ready to dismiss these reports as propaganda due to the source, a further article from the WP reveals that it was standard practice as far back as 2003.

"It is a practice in some U.S. units to detain family members of anti-coalition suspects in an effort to induce the suspects to turn themselves in, in exchange for the release of their family members,"

Guest Column, Christopher Snitchens

2005-05-31T08:56:00.000-07:00

Stolen from Here

Stop Accusing Me of Intellectual Dishonesty
Christopher Snitchens

March 30, 2004

Christopher Snitchens takes to task the anti-war Left for its short-sighted demands for scholarly and political consistency.

More than a decade ago now, with the no-fly zones firmly in place over northern and southern Iraq, and with the Iraqi Kurds in the north finally beginning to carve out, after many years of brutal oppression, some degree of autonomy, I found myself, thanks to a few embassy friends who will remain unnamed, in an airy sublet in the Village, not far from Lower Manahattan, which, though not war-torn, ought to have been.

Flashing forward. The anti-war Left, unencumbered by memories of the horror of 9-11 (“9 what?” several former colleagues of the Left have asked me on more than one occasion), and apparently unconcerned that the Ivory Tower would, if the Islamofascists had their say, go the way of its twin counterparts, is content to contend that Saddam Hussein never actually met with Osama bin Laden or his henchmen, despite the fact that everyone who believes such meetings took place says firmly that such meetings took place. This is pure cowardice, a failure to make assertions in the face of a mounting threat. “How do you know it is mounting?” such so-called progressives ask. The answer is obvious: how could one not know when confronted with so much confidence that it is so?

The rapport between these first two paragraphs is, I hope, clear. Though I didn’t feel the shockwaves of the first Trade Center bombings on that crisp day in 1993, I know in retrospect that I must have felt them, unlike those Leftists who have no discernible feelings, and who would have been quite happy to allow Saddam Hussein to continue to brutalize his own people. Indeed, it was on that fateful day, eight years before the same miscreants accomplished their fanatical goal, sometime between high tea and happy hour, that I began to realize that unreconstructed Trotskyism was an ideology insufficient to the gathering threat posed by the medieval-minded populations of the world and their festering anger at the success of the West.

I should point out, since it is fashionable for the anti-war set to hurl unthinking accusations of racism and neo-imperialism at any who sit in disagreement, that such medieval mentalities are not confined solely to the Islamic world, though they have there reached, perhaps, their apogee. Indeed, religious sentiment, regardless its source, breeds backward-looking thought, and so it must be done away with, except in the United Kingdom and the United States, where monotheism has given moral backbone to the two principle architects of our necessary war against barbarism - Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair.

Of course, the Left will read in these statements about religion a “root cause,” and will go on and on about Muslim anger and the conditions of poverty in Islamic nations, though they know as well as I that all through Europe’s Dark Ages Islam kept alive the light of learning. For centuries, quite literally, while European Christians hacked each other to death, lost their literacy, lost medicine, lost architecture, lost art, the great Islamic civilizations of Northern Africa and the Middle East preserved Classical learning through the Arabic language. Were it not for the Islamic universities of Spain and Persia, the Renaissance and indeed the Enlightenment would never have occurred, and I would have had nothing to rebel against during that not so distant time when I believed neo-Marxian thought to be the necessary antidote to colonialism. Since past is prelude, there is no excuse for the failure of Islam to embrace once again the light of learning, science, and democracy. One might contend - believably, I believe - that only Saddam Hussein had been their downfall. I may be accused of exaggeration. Very well, I stand accused. But I am accused by the supposed humanitarians that lacked the uprightness to destroy a nation in order to save it. Now that Hussein has been deposed and the marshes of Southern Iraq re-flooded, there is no reason to suppose that the Muslim world cannot once again flower with learning and democracy, as it did under the caliphates, minus the democracy.

Lest we forget, George W. Bush had given Saddam an ultimatum, thinking perhaps of Dr. Johnson’s famous words: “Let him go abroad to a distant country; let him go to some place where he is not known. Don’t let him go to the devil, where he is known.” I for one am happy that this devil has been dispatched. That is morality - that it is a good thing is clear as day.

Christopher Snitchens is not related to columnist and raconteur Christopher Hitchens. No, not in any way, shape or form. Not related. To Christopher Hitchens

Hmmm

2005-05-27T10:53:00.000-07:00

From AP

NORFOLK, Va. - As part of its faster response to requests from overseas, the Navy announced Tuesday it is sending five ships to the Middle East with a mission to disrupt terrorist operations at sea

Terrorist operations at Sea? now I have trouble imagining what they could be, but I suppose they could be small boat suicide operations, or perhaps smuggling. So assuming that is true you would be looking for something fast, with perhaps a good Aircraft platform.
...

Leaving Wednesday are the USS Saipan, an amphibious assault ship, the USS Nashville, an amphibious transport ship, the frigate USS Nicholas and the cruiser USS Philippine Sea. The Saipan, Nashville and Nicholas are all based in Norfolk, while the Philippine Sea's home port is Mayport, Fla.

....

The USS Gunston Hall, an amphibious dock landing ship, is to leave June 1 from Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base in Virginia Beach.

....

Fitzgerald said the ships were ready to deploy, but acknowledged that the short notice created a hardship for the crews.

"Obviously this is hard on the sailors," he said, "but we're at war."

Now this may just be me being paranoid but these ships have one purpose, amphibious assault, they are not specialised for anything else, and as you already have carrier battle groups in place you do not need any extra aircraft capacity. So why deploy them to the Middle East on short notice unlesss you are looking for the ability to mount one of that sort of operation?

26th MEU AAV's disembark from the USS Gunston Hall

update
Thanks to N for her always invaluable help, why she does not set up her own blog I'll never know!

Pipelineistan

2005-05-26T12:31:00.000-07:00

Pepe Escobar at Asia times takes a look at the new Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline (BTC)

The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline (BTC) - conceived by the US as the ultimate Western escape route from dependence on oil from the Persian Gulf - is finally in business.

This is what Pipelineistan is all about: a supreme law unto itself - untouchable by national sovereignty, serious environmental concerns (expressed both in the Caucasus and in Europe), labor legislation, protests against the World Bank, not to mention mountains 2,700 meters high and 1,500 small rivers. BTC took 10 years of hard work and at least US$4 billion - $3 billion of which is in bank loans. BTC is not merely a pipeline: it is a sovereign state.

...

BTC would be impossible without the usual, strategically positioned US-supported dictator - in this case old, ruthless Caucasus hand Heydar Aliyev, who died in December 2003. A dynastic dictatorship is even better, since his son Ilham became the successor in fraudulent elections in October 2003. It also helped that Ilham, a former playboy, happened to be the head of the state oil company, SOCAR. Azerbaijan was never about "liberty and democracy" or color-coded revolutions in the style of Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan. Just last Saturday in Baku, Azeri police beat up and arrested more than 100 opposition protesters demanding "Freedom!" and "Free elections!" This is a regime that according to Transparency International ranks 140th out of 146 in the global corruption index. From Washington's point of view, the Aliyev dynasty in Azerbaijan performs the same role as Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan: they are "our" dictators.

Read the whole thing Here

2005-05-25T10:33:00.000-07:00

The Glories of the Free market finally arrive in Iraq!

2005-05-24T13:39:00.000-07:00

Just when you thought that Iraq was going downhill at hearwarming tale (Via Boing Boing)

The black market organ trade is apparently taking off in Baghdad. The Daily Telegraph reports that wealthy "tourists" from Arab countries are now visiting Iraq to score inexpensive kidneys and other organs for transplant. For example, a kidney can be had in Baghdad for thousands of dollars less than than the market price in Turkey or India. From the article:
Would-be buyers with an eye for a bargain can now pick up a new kidney for as little as $700, given the desperation of fit and healthy Iraqis for money.

Young men like Mr Hameed can be seen loitering around many big hospitals in Baghdad these days, open to bids passed on via networks of shadowy middlemen who lurk in nearby cafés.

With unemployment in Iraq at about 60 per cent, the chance to earn money by touting body parts is a more calculated risk than, say, becoming a $150-a-month rookie policeman at the mercy of suicide attackers.