Always an Open Thread
[back now - sorry, took a bit longer than expected]
News and views ...
Posted by b on November 18, 2005 at 04:27 PM | Permalink
« previous pageif you have some time, check out these lucid comments from "gamal" over at stan goff's place. compelling stuff. start here.
Posted by: b real | Nov 19, 2005 11:46:23 PM | 102
from b reals link to goff (comments);
we have no reason to fulfill anyones demands to see our country free, it is rather the occupiers who must justify their continued occupation, and by the way the 100 illegal edicts of the cpa are out of reach of the sovereing government of carpet baggers foriegn agents and sectarians installed by a vicious and murderous occupation.
the bombs mean nothing, do you really believe the soap opera that is presented to represent iraqi history, i am as much shia as i am sunni, and my psuedonym is gamal kangal karabash, which is a joke, but it is a kurdish psuedonym, not arabic but kurdish, becuase i am as much turkic as i am arabic most of us are pretty mixed we have lived in the land of the two rivers for millenia and cope far better than americans do with the complexities of our real identities, i have documents 600 years old from family archives and we are mentioned in ancient treaties, competition for resources? we are not scavenging dogs living in a hobbesian nightmare we cooperate and care for each other.
i owe you nothing and will not accept your callous bromides about what i need to do.
Posted by: anna missed | Nov 20, 2005 1:55:30 AM | 103
Billmon:
The Salvadoran Option IIThey really ought to send John Negroponte back to Iraq. It would be just like old home week:
Baghdad's Medical Forensic Institute - the mortuary - is a low, modern building reached via a narrow street. Most days it is filled with families of the dead. They come here for two reasons. One group, animated and noisy in grief, comes to collect its dead. The other, however, returns day after day to poke through the new cargoes of corpses ferried in by ambulance, looking for a face or clothes they might recognise. They are the relatives and friends of the 'disappeared', searching for their men. And when the disappeared are finally found, on the streets or in the city's massive rubbish dumps, or in the river, their bodies bear the all-too-telling signs of a savage beating, often with electrical cables, followed by the inevitable bullet to the head.
It's apparent -- both from this story and from reports by human rights groups (note the date on that one) -- that the U.S. and U.K. embassies have been aware for some time that Iraq's Ministry of the Interior has been turned into what the old National Guard used to be in El Salvador, or the Presidential Intelligence Unit in Guatemala, or the National Directorate of Investigation in Honduras, which is to say: death squad central.
And it's more than a bit noteworthy that something like this was predicted -- boasted about, really -- by anonymous Pentagon sources earlier this year:
The Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. . . . One military source involved in the Pentagon debate . . . suggests that new offensive operations are needed that would create a fear of aiding the insurgency. "The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists," he said. "From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation."
One of Sy Hersh's sources was a little more picturesque about it:
"Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?" the former high-level intelligence official asked me, referring to the military-led gangs that committed atrocities in the early nineteen-eighties. "We founded them and we financed them," he said. "The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren't going to tell Congress about it." A former military officer, who has knowledge of the Pentagon's commando capabilities, said, "We're going to be riding with the bad boys."
Indeed. Not that the "bad boys" of SCIRI and the Badr Organization particularly needed any encouragement from Uncle Sam.
But now that the Salvadoran Option is up and running -- very smoothly, by all accounts -- one can wonder why the Americans suddenly changed their mind, and busted down the doors of one of SCIRI's secret prisons the other day.
Did things get out of hand, ala Abu Ghraib? (Ala the entire war, for that matter.) Or was the Death Squad Program-Related Activities Bureau ordered to switch gears, once the Finding a Political Solution to the Insurgency Department finally realized that sending Shi'a death squads out to torture and kill Sunni politicians, their bodyguards and their supporters was a bit counterproductive? These kind of bureacratic snafus happen.
Personally, I think it probably just dawned on the architects of the Salvadoran Option that while they thought they were riding with the bad boys, the real bad boys were out riding with the Iranian secret police, who don't need any Spanish lessons on how to run a dirty war.
And so now we have Iranian-backed Shi'a death squads hunting their political enemies through the slums of Baghdad under the pretext of fighting the insurgency, while Sunni Baathists (and/or their jihadist allies) blow up Shi'a mosques at prayer time under the pretext of fighting the American occupation.
Meanwhile, back here in the good old U.S. of A (the A is for assholes) the ruling party is reliving Joe McCarthy's glory years, while the leaders of the so-called opposition party try to hide their worthless carcasses behind an ex-Marine congressman who finally saw one too many broken bodies warehoused at Walter Reed and suffered a temporary fit of sanity, causing him to blurt out the ugly truth that the war is hopelessly lost. For which crime he will now be the subject of an ethics investigation by the same people who made Jack Abramoff an honorary member of the House Republican Caucus.
Truly, to quote Leonard -- the psychotic recruit in Full Metal Jacket -- we are in a world of shit.
Posted by billmon at 11:24 PM
reading this - and see also this weekends's report in the Independent - I for one am getting a bit pyschotic waiting for someone/anyone who is actually in a position to do something about these fuckwits to actually do something.
Ony THREE people in the US Congress who are not complicit with war crimes.
This has to stop. Pitchforks - but not just some weasel word analogy - or say goodbye to the USA.
Posted by: DM | Nov 20, 2005 4:23:16 AM | 104
fuck it! what actually is the point of the 2nd Amendment?
Posted by: DM | Nov 20, 2005 4:27:07 AM | 105
I was kinda surprised too about the get out of Iraq vote, Kos was advocating the safe bet was to have everyone vote against. As Pelosi clearly did get ...
I would have voted for the get out immediately "sense of the House" vote -- even Mothra didn't vote for it.
What gives?
Posted by: jonku | Nov 20, 2005 4:38:39 AM | 106
The almost innate, ingrained belief that America and by extension Americans can do no wrong, that we have the right to do as we wish with other peoples cultures, countries, lives in order to serve our narrowly defined 'self-interest', is repugnant in the extreme.
Such haughty arrogance, such immoral, self-righteous authority ... we exist, deluded by sustained and clearly manipulated myths.
The Democrats are not an opposition party, nor are they an Antiwar party ... we are where we are not solely because of Bush&Co or the Repugs, but because of our totally corrupted system of 'government' ... expecting the Dems to act honorably, or morally, out of principle is utterly futile ... their primary objection is that Bush didn't WIN the Iraq War, not how, why, or what it has been run for ...
And may I suggest, most, certainly not all, representatives couldn't really give a flying f__k for the human cost to our 'troops', let alone non-Americans, non-combatant or otherwise. Their primary interest is political power, for themselves and their party and by extension their cashed-up lobbyists and supporters ... not because they are there to do, 'Good' ... our 'system' is all smoke and mirrors or to paraphrase rep Murtha 'Our democracy is a lie, it is militarism and moneyed corruption dressed up in the whole cloth falsity of a democracy' ...
If all we did was to withdraw from Iraq without a fundamental accounting domestically and internationally, a gutting of our myth of government 'of, for and by the People', then we will in a very short time launch false-pretext new wars for resources and profit as we have since 1898 and 'Remember the Maine!'.
There is a reason why polls universally show the single greatest perceived threat to the world is, America, not it's citizens, but its government ...
Eventually, if we don't fix our society ourselves, the rest of the world will do it for us, and that won't be pretty ... and the butchers bill rise yet higher ...
2,000 + U.S. servicemen dead in Iraq ? As many vets died of suicide of stress/mental health complications AFTER they returned stateside as did in combat in Vietnam ... that's ~58,000 KIA in Vietnam and another unacknowledged ~58,000 'deferred' KIA here ... If we left Iraq tomorrow we could still expect another 2,000 + deaths due to suicide et al, within the next 2-10 years amongst our Iraq vets ... how many such additional deaths amongst our victims, the civilian population of the country we invaded and militarily occupied in service of narrow 'self-interest' ?
Vegetarians Between Meals: This War Cannot Be Stopped By a Loyal Opposition
Posted by: Outraged | Nov 20, 2005 7:00:10 AM | 108
Long LA Times piece on "Curveball" etc. How U.S. Fell Under the Spell of 'Curveball'
"Fell under the spell" is spin, says the article. The Germans said we regard this is as unreliable information but we give to you anyhow because you may verify it.
It was not verified but used.
@ b
Someone should nail Scott Ritter as he wends his way around studios promoting his new book and himself as some kind of man of honor.
As he kept mute while the C.I.A. took his imaginary projections of what kind of WMD the Iraqis might have and converted them into firm charges that they were, in fact, what the Iraqis did have, and as he sat tight lipped and allowed this misuse of his musings to go ahead, he should be good enough to explain exactly how it came about that following his meetings with Chalabi, at the insistence of Charles Duelfer, friend and dining companion of Judith Miller, the defector / serial liar known as 'Curveball' suddenly appeared in Germany providing details of exactly the kind of 'intelligence' that Ritter had told Chalabi he was looking for. Not similar, not in the area of but EXACTLY the 'evidence' Ritter had told Chalabi would help him, Ritter, build a case against Iraq.
Ritter might want to play Pontius Pilate now and scramble for brownie points as a 'good guy' but if he has a shred of honesty left in his conniving body he should step forward and shed more light on the Curveball story. Curveball reproduced what Chalabi told him Ritter was looking for. Are there any journalists left in the U.S.A. or anywhere else who know what investigative reporting means?
One question: "Was the bogus information supplied by Curveball identical to the hypothetical 'missing material' you told Chalabi would be required to build a cast iron case against Iraq?"
Another question: "Weren't you in any way shocked when this 'defector' suddenly came out of nowhere and began making allegations that 'confirmed' not only the 'missing materials' you had discussed with Chalabi but also supported the bogus hypotheses that YOU had been feeding to the C.I.A. for years and in so doing perpetuated the misery of the Iraqi people under sanctions?"
It doesn't take rocket science to work out the murderous echo-chamber games that the U.S. was playing. Ritter should come clean on whether he was a dupe or an active participant in them.
Posted by: Time | Nov 20, 2005 9:38:00 AM | 110
@b
No Exit
So sad, embarassing and funny all at the same time.
Posted by: Outraged | Nov 20, 2005 4:01:13 PM | 112
outraged
it is clear that you citation on the salvador option ll - refers to manipulation of events, people & organisations
to that end it is quite possible indeed probable that suicide bombers have indeed been manipulated
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Nov 20, 2005 5:31:09 PM | 113
Apparently the dentists of the US have got their lobbyists working flat out in Congress
New Zealand dental training for health workers in Eskimo communities in Alaska is at the centre of controversy in the United States.The two-year diploma of dental therapy courses, at Otago University's dental school, have started providing indigenous cultures, with health workers trained to carry out preventative and restorative dental care.
The students arrived in New Zealand in February 2003 to begin their training, but are now being criticised by some members of the US Congress -- and the American Dental Association (ADA) -- as having insufficient experience, and having the potential risk of doing permanent harm to their patients.
I'll try and give a little background. Back during Mickey Savage's first Labour government in NZ it was decided that while the country could afford to institute universal medical and hospital care, universal dental care was beyond the budget. However children and adolescents teeth should be covered by the state. So dental therapists were trained to work on infant teeth (the first set you get aka milk teeth) and set up in surgeries (forever known as 'the murder house') located at every primary school.
Once school students got their adult teeth, dentists would be contracted to provide care under the adolescent dental program.
The system worked well for over 50 years and during that time various other countries or in the case of Australia, states have adopted the model and used the training facilities in NZ to train their own therapists.
There have been hiccups though because not many dentists are known for their empathy and approval of paying patients getting for free what a dentist could charge an arm and a leg for. So the NZ dentists started to jack up about the payments they were receiving for working on children's adult teeth.
The upshot was that the therapists were trained to perform certain procedures on adult teeth. I dunno exactly what happened cause I wasn't here but it looks like who ever was running the joint, maybe David Lange, called the dentists' bluff.
One of the trade offs was that since the therapists would be working on adult teeth they would shift all training to the University of Otago Dental School which had previously only trained dentists. Now it's not a bad dental school in fact my old man went there and he worked in the dentistry game all around the world and one thing that could be said about him was he was a good dentist.
OK fast forward to now and the problems that societies unused to high sugar processed diets are having with eating what is now sold as 'food'.
Children from indigenous and migrant cultures unused to western dental hygene, solely because brushing and flossing are only really neccessary if you have a mouthful of sugar and plaque, both of which are byproducts of the high sugar mush food western society encourages people to eat, are being laid waste before they even start school.
I have a friend who is an unusual type of dentist in that he works as an A&E dentist in a low income area. Most dentists in NZ, just like their colleagues worldwide tend to coagulate in groups around where the rich or bourgois live.
Anyway a heap of my friend's work is trying to restore totally ruined teeth in 18 month old infants. He also spends considerable effort running community education programs for Pacific Island migrants who come from an environment where the food wasn't poisonous. Bowel cancer also hits hard when PI's come to NZ.
Since dentists have never been falling over themselves to work in the developing world there were few objections when various poorer countries adopted the dental therapist model for their communities.
If the problem among the native American societies is anything like that of the polynesian community one can understand how it was that the Alaskan authorities came to seek training for dental therapists in NZ.
Once a mouth does become massively infected with caries, that is pretty much it unless major restorative and preventative work is undertaken. The infection spreads from the infant teeth to the adult ones as they cut through the gum. Frequently the adult teeth will have rotted out and abscessed before they have even come through.
The other issue is that if the problem is anything like the same in Alaska as it is elsewhere in the world, there won't be a big mob of dentists queuing up to repair the teeth of Athabascan and Tsimshian Indians and Inupiat and Yupik Eskimos.
So what we are seeing is the usual protection racket that professional bodies that purport to represent the interests of the oppressed such as doctors, dentists and lawyers try on where ever they can.
If I lived in the US I would be contacting my local besuited hack and letting him (oh well there is about a 1 in 50 chance the hack will be a woman) know that I was onto the scam and asking how the continued genocide of indigenous Alaskans can be countenenced.
There was no sarcasm in that last sentence, having a massively infected mouth will kill you and do it quite fast.
Heart disease is the quickest way that tooth decay can kill, but our bodies don't deal with having to create massive numbers of white corpuscles to fight infection on a daily basis, at all well.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Nov 20, 2005 8:14:08 PM | 114
the sordid story of delays bagman abrahamof
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Nov 20, 2005 8:49:33 PM | 115
John Dean aiming to light a fire under Patrick Fitzgerald's ass?
John Dean's Open Letter to Patrick Fitzgerald
Posted by: manonfyre | Nov 21, 2005 2:01:41 AM | 116
The comments to this entry are closed.
Posted by: Outraged | Nov 19, 2005 7:46:26 PM | 101