I live in a small town in rural Maryland. I’ve blogged before about the fact that, apart from having way more churches than one small town could possibly need, there really isn’t much here. One consolation about living here is that at least it’s not as drearily awful as the next town to it, about five miles due south. Compared to its neighbor, my home town – with its insanitary eating establishments and its three liquor stores - is the swinging and cosmopolitan Left Bank of the Seine.
03 December 2004
14 September 2004
Mission Accomplished!
Well, we knew from the beginning that US forces in Iraq were receiving training from the IDF, but who knew we’d learn so quickly?
1. The Events
19 May 2004, Israeli helicopter and tanks fire missiles and shells into a crowd of Palestinian protestors in Tel Sultan, Gaza Strip, killing eight civilians including four children.
13 Sept 2004, US helicopter fires missile into crowd of Iraqis milling around a burning Bradley fighting vehicle, killing 13 civilians.
2. The Fog of War
IDF spokesmen –
"They were killed by their own bomb".
"We did fire missiles, but not at the crowd".
"We did shoot at the crowd, but at least five of the dead were armed".
"One of the dead was armed".
"We’re not sure that that one was armed after all".
U.S. spokesmen [1] –
"There was small-arms fire at the helicopter".
"We fired to 'save' the crowd".
"We had to keep the Bradley armaments from falling into the wrong hands".
"Someone was waving a terrorist flag".
3. The Pants On Fire Moment.
IDF caught on AP news footage. (Click on Video: Attack On Rafah Camp)
US caught on BBC news footage. (Real Player).
4. The End Result
Gaza
Baghdad
It took the Israelis 38 years to descend this far, and we've managed it in 18 months. We really are #1.
Footnote [1] - Via DailyKos, US murders journalist and 11 other civilians on live TV)
09 September 2004
03 June 2004
Hearts And Minds
Bearing in mind that the U.S. Army currently has troops stationed in 120 countries, is Abu Ghraib really the most suitable assignment for this American soldier?
(Via Counterpunch)
31 May 2004
Memorial Day
How many human lives are a proper price to pay for the removal of Saddam Hussein?
Would you say removing Hussein would be worth it if a million people — Americans and Iraqis — had to die to achieve it?
If the answer is no, let's try a lower price. How about 100,000?
If that's too many, how about 10,000 lives being snuffed out to remove one man from power?
Let's make it simpler. Rather than throwing numbers around, let's ask just one question: Would removing Hussein be worth it if the cost were just one human life — but that life was yours?
If the answer is no, then anything you have to say about the world being a better place now — about collateral damage — about the glory of soldiers sacrificing their lives for their country — is meaningless.
Everyone who has died so far in Iraq had a life that meant as much to him as your life means to you. But now that life is gone, done, finished, nevermore.
By supporting the war in Iraq, you have supported the idea that it's okay to kill people — other people. But until you're willing to volunteer to be one of those killed, your words don't carry any weight.
-- Harry Browne, "How Much Is Hussein's Departure Worth?" (Via lefti)
01 May 2004
What We Have Become
As soon as the United States starts to become mired in the occupation, today's enlightened soldiers will become tomorrow's inhuman troops. They will lose the remnants of their moral image and will kill, destroy and abuse... Humiliating the occupied and stripping them of their rights will become the norm. The liberated Iraqi people will pay in the form of heavy losses, hunger and humiliation, even if these are temporary. And they will not forget. That is the impact of occupation, whether in the narrow alleys of a Gaza Strip refugee camp or in the sprawling city of Baghdad.If there is one lesson Israel can impart to the Americans, it is that every occupation is appalling, that it tramples the occupied and corrupts the occupier. If the Americans pause for a moment to see what is going on in the Tul Karm refugee camp and in the casbah of Nablus, they will see what they will soon become. And if Israelis look at what is happening in Iraq, perhaps they will understand that it is not the Palestinians but, above all, we who have created the present situation.
- Gideon Levy, Every Occupation is Appalling, 7 Apr 2003.
Apart from the general lesson that occupation corrupts, US forces in Iraq seem to be learning a lot of other, more specific, skills from Israel too. According to one of the six soldiers known to be involved in the torture of Iraqi prisoners described on CBS this week, the practices photographed were not simply an aberration on the part of an unsupervised group of ill-disciplined soldiers, but were part of a systematic softening up process designed to prepare prisoners for interrogation by intelligence officials and "outside contractors". Intrigued by the similarities between the abusive techniques seen at Abu Ghraib and those that the IDF has used for years in the interrogation of Palestinian prisoners (which Israel refers to euphemistically not as "torture" but "moderate physical pressure"), Billmon at Whiskey Bar today asked who those "outside contractors" helping us torture our Arab prisoners might be.
He notes that the LA Times identifies two private contractors supplying interrogators and interpreters at Abu Ghraib prison, one of which is CACI International of Arlington, Va., whose Web site proclaims:
CACI Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer Dr. J.P. (Jack) London was selected by the Jerusalem Fund of Aish HaTorah to receive the distinguished Albert Einstein Technology Award. The award recognizes CACI's technological achievements in the field of defense and national security. It was presented by Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz and Jerusalem Mayor Uri Lupolianski at a ceremony held at the Jerusalem City Hall on January 14, 2004....
Billmon's post, Patterns and Practices, links to several of the studies from the last year that have outlined the covert support that Israeli "advisors" have been offering our forces throughout the occupation of Iraq, and is well worth reading in its entirety. Isn't it good to see that the US is learning from the real experts in running a military occupation? After all, "moderate physical pressure" against Palestinian prisoners has certainly stamped out their determination to resist in the Occupied Territories, and solved Israel's security problems, hasn't it? The really surprising thing is that it took Israel 37 years of occupation to become an international pariah, torn apart internally by the debate over its treatment of the Palestinians, and externally criticized (even hated) for its persistent resort to brute force over compromise and negotiation in dealing with its untermenschen subjects. In contrast, we have managed to plunge to the same shameful depths in barely more than a year.
The front page of today's UK Daily Mirror supports the belief that the abuse recorded at Abu Ghraib is no isolated incident.
Photos courtesy the Daily Mirror, click to enlarge;
WARNING: Disturbing Content.
The photographs were handed to the Mirror by British soldiers who participated in the events depicted, and who confirmed to the newspaper that such horrific treatment of prisoners was widespread. They show:
[A]n Iraqi prisoner being battered with rifle butts, threatened with execution and urinated on by British soldiers... The prisoner - thought to have been a thief - had his jaw broken and his teeth smashed during an eight-hour ordeal after being arrested near the southern Iraqi city of Basra.Bleeding and vomiting, he was eventually driven away from the army camp, still hooded, and thrown off the back of a moving vehicle. He was not charged with an offence and it is not known whether he lived or died.
- The Guardian: Punched, kicked, then left to die, 1 May 2004
The UK chief of general staff, General Sir Michael Jackson, has already fallen back on the "it's only a few bad apples" defence, arguing that the British Army should not be judged by the reprehensible ill-discipline of a few soldiers. (This despite the fact that Amnesty International has been reporting for months that abuse of prisoners is not the exception but the rule in Iraq).
Is anybody truly surprised at Amnesty International's assertion? In spite of the attempts at positive spin from the British and American establishment, the sad reality is that behavior like this is not an anomaly: this is the absolutely predictable, even inevitable, outcome when a power that considers itself inherently superior invades and dominates a weaker nation whose culture and history it neither knows nor respects. These abominations are what colonial occupiers do - and always have done - to the "darkies" and the "savages" (and the "towel heads", and the "sand ni**ers") they are claiming to civilize. From the day we went into Iraq on our crusade to remake it in our image, this is exactly where we were bound to end up. We became occupiers, and this is what occupiers do to the not-quite-human-like-us natives. Nobody should be surprised. The only surprise is that some of our torturers were stupid enough to film their crimes and, in the case of the Americans at Abu Ghraib, stupid enough to let the evidence circulate on the internet, where the evidence of what we have become was too public to be ignored.
One other thought on the "it's just a few bad apples defense". Why should the Arab or Muslim worlds care whether the torture and killing of their compatriots or coreligionists is the policy of our nation or the work of a few rogue elements? On September 11, 2001, the US was attacked by 19 members of al-Qaeda, a small rogue element on the very fringes of Islam, which enjoyed no significant public following in any Arab or Muslim country. And what was our response? For the deeds of one group of criminals we have occupied Iraq - a country that was in no way involved in their crime - and killed up to 20,000 of its citizens; we have killed over 3,000 Afghan civilians (while failing to find Bin Laden); we have been complicit in the slow ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people by a Likud-led government that, if it represented any country other than Israel, would be on our State Department's list of terrorist sponsors; we have treated our own Muslim compatriots like fifth columnists (anyone remember James Yee and Ahmad Halabi?) and jailed hundreds of Muslims without charge or trial at Guantanamo Bay.
And now we ask the Arab world to understand that you do not blame everyone for the acts of the few....
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(See also UN Observer's Racism at Core of Iraq Invasion, and Juan Cole on Arab Reaction to Photos of Prisoner Abuse. Both links courtesy of Mohsan at Je Blog.)
NB: post edited for typos, 9:20am 2 May 2004
Update: 13 May 2004, the UK government is conducting an inquiry into allegations of abuse by the Queen's Lancashire Regt in Iraq, and reported in a Commons statement today that the Daily Mirror photos were definitely not taken in Iraq.
29 April 2004
American Values
Jay Severin, radio talk show host on WTKK-FM (in Boston) was apparently upset to have been left out of my recent Racist Idiot Quiz of the Week. He is clearly determined not to be left out of the next installment, judging by the phone-in segment of his 22 April 2004 show, in which he disagreed with one caller who felt that non-Muslim Americans should reach out in friendship to their Muslim compatriots, and suggested instead: "You think we should befriend them; I think we should kill them."
When challenged about his comments, Severin offered the standard non-apology, saying that he regretted that anyone might have misunderstood or misconstrued his remarks. That is pathetic and insulting: the offensiveness doesn’t lie in how listeners understood or construed the words, but in the words themselves. Severin doesn’t need to apologize for the fact that other people are offended by his suggestion that we should “kill them”, he needs to apologize for saying it in the first place.
He then went on to invoke a second line of defense popular with anti-Arab / anti-Muslim bigots who get caught on tape saying what they really believe: specifically, the “when I said kill them, I really meant kill the bad Muslims, not the good ones” argument. This is what I call the “Armey Defense”, in honor of former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, who pioneered the method as a means of covering his ass after suggesting on national television that ethnic cleansing was his preferred method of resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict:
ARMEY: I'm content to have Israel grab the entire West Bank.MATTHEWS: Well, where do you put the Palestinian state, in Norway? Once the Israelis take back the West Bank permanently and annex it, there's no place else for the Palestinians to have a state.
ARMEY: No, no, that's not--that's not at all true. There are many Arab nations that have many hundreds of thousands of acres of land and--and soil and property and opportunity to create a Palestinian state.
MATTHEWS: So you would transport--you would transport the Palestinians from Palestine to somewhere else and call it their state?
< snip >
ARMEY: That's right...I happened to believe that the Palestinians should leave.
MATTHEWS: Have you ever told George Bush, the president from your home state of Texas, that you think the Palestinians should get up and go and leave Palestine and that's the solution?
ARMEY: I'm probably telling him that right now.
MATTHEWS: Well, just to repeat, you believe that the Palestinians who are now living on the West Bank should get out of there?
ARMEY: Yes.
(Partial transcript from Chris Matthews’ Hardball, MSNBC, May 1, 2002)
The following day - no doubt after a worried staffer or two had pointed out to Armey the awkward reality that he had publicly advocated ethnic cleansing which in international law is a War Crime, also a Crime against Humanity, and potentially an act of genocide - Armey backtracked and insisted that he only wanted the bad Palestinians, the terrorists, to leave. Never mind the fact that that’s clearly not what he said, it was good enough to get him off the hook. What the hell, they’re only Arabs and Muslims.
Severin adopted the same argument in defending his “kill them” comment, claiming that he was referring only to those Muslim terrorists “who are killing us”. Unfortunately, the transcript of Severin’s conversation doesn’t support his excuse any better than Armey’s did. This was no inadvertant omission or slip of the tongue: Severin does not suggest that he is talking about a terrorist minority, but explicitly says that he is talking about "the vast majority" of American Muslims, and he goads his caller three times into defending Muslims, so that he [Severin] can rebut it with his opinion that they should be killed instead:
Severin: "I believe that Muslims in this country are a fifth column. . . . The vast majority of Muslims in this country are very obviously loyal, not to the United States, but to their religion. And I'm worried that when the time comes for them to stand up and be counted, the reason they are here is to take over our culture and eventually take over our country…My suspicion is that the majority of Muslims in the United States, who regard themselves as Muslims first and not as Americans really at all, see an American map one day where this is the United States of Islam, not the United States of America. I think it pays to harbor those suspicions…… Do you think we should befriend them?"Caller: "Well, I see Muslims in this country, they seem to like freedom."
Severin: "Would you answer my question? Do you think we should befriend them?"
Caller: "I think we should . . ."
Severin (interrupting): “I'm going to try one more time…Do you believe we should befriend them?"
Caller: "Yes."
Severin: "I've got good news for you: We have. …I have an alternative viewpoint. It's slightly different than yours. You think we should befriend them; I think we should kill them."
Well, I guess Severin’s talk show is one snippet of American discourse that won’t get a lot of air time in the programming of al-Hurra , our latest attempt to educate the “brown-skinned peoples” of the Arab world about our democratic, tolerant and implicitly superior ways. And nor will this story about our treatment of prisoners in Iraq, which apparently only came to light because photographic evidence was circulating about what was going on Abu Ghraib prison:
Last month, the U.S. Army announced 17 soldiers in Iraq, including a brigadier general, had been removed from duty after charges of mistreating Iraqi prisoners... The Army has photographs that show a detainee with wires attached to his genitals. Another shows a dog attacking an Iraqi prisoner…. Part of the Army's own investigation is a statement from an Iraqi detainee who charges a translator - hired to work at the prison - with raping a male juvenile prisoner… There is also a picture of an Iraqi man who appears to be dead -- and badly beaten.…It was American soldiers serving as military police at Abu Ghraib who took these pictures. The investigation started when one soldier got them from a friend, and gave them to his commanders. 60 Minutes II has a dozen of these pictures, and there are many more – pictures that show Americans, men and women in military uniforms, posing with naked Iraqi prisoners.
… According to the U.S. Army, one Iraqi prisoner was told to stand on a box with his head covered, wires attached to his hands. He was told that if he fell off the box, he would be electrocuted….There are shots of the prisoners stacked in a pyramid, one with a slur written on his skin in English. In some, the male prisoners are positioned to simulate sex with each other. And in most of the pictures, the Americans are laughing, posing, pointing, or giving the camera a thumbs-up.
(60 Minutes II, 29 April 2004, Abuse Of Iraqi POWs By GIs Probed )
You can see more of the Abu Ghraib photos online at Democratic Underground. Warning: these photos are explicit and disturbing.
When we launched al-Hurra, Farid Abu Dhuhair (Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication at an-Najah National University in Nablus) predicted that the new channel would fail to win hearts and minds because it was based on the faulty premise that those who hate us do so because they don’t know what we’re really like:
“The Americans think that we hate them because we don’t receive accurate information about the reality of American politics. This is not true. America’s image is ugly because American policies and actions are ugly. America can’t act the way it is acting and expect Arabs and Muslims to love her.”
When I listen to the hateful sentiments about Muslims that Jay Severin can utter on air without even losing his job (try inserting "blacks" or "Jews" instead of "Muslims" into his comments, and ask yourself how long he would last), or look at the photos of how we treat the untermenschen at Abu Ghraib, I wonder who it really is that has the false impression of what the US represents to the world. Since 9/11, we have been treated to an orchestrated fantasy world of flag-waving xenophobia, in which anything we do is right because we are Americans who, by that accident of birth, automatically have a monopoly on justice, freedom, democracy, tolerance and all the other virtues upon which our national mythology is founded. But the 96% of the world’s population that lives outside of our self-congratulatory bubble sees us not as we claim to be, but as we really behave**. Isn’t it scary to think that “they”, and not “us”, might know more about who we really are than we do ourselves?
** Scroll down to 28 Apr 2004 entry.
28 April 2004
Memo To Bremer
L.Paul (Jerry),
Just wanted to send you a quickie to congratulate you guys at the CPA and IGC on selecting the proposed new flag for Iraq. Good luck with its official unveiling tomorrow. With all that stuff going on in Najaf and Fallujah, I thought you'd all be too busy for stuff like this. But were you too busy? You were not. Well done.
Hard to believe we've been in Iraq for only a year, but already we've given them a new Olympic logo, and now a flag too.
I'm really glad to see that you ditched that red, white, black, and green theme that those Arabs seem so attached to in their flags. Personally, I've always felt that the white background with blue lines and a big blue religious symbol is a combination that is under-represented in the vexillology (look it up) of the Mid East region. I'm proud that America has been able to put that right.
What is it with that Arab attachment to red, white, black and green anyway? Just because those colors have been used individually for 1400 years by proud Muslim and Arab kingdoms from al-Andalus to Baghdad, and used in combination as a sign of Arab brotherhood, unity and freedom from colonial rule ever since the Arab Revolt of 1916, doesn't mean they have any place on an Iraqi flag. (1400 years? Is that a typo? Gosh, who knew foreigners had so much history?)
Special congratulations for managing to push this decision through now, rather than leave it for the Iraqi people to freely decide for themselves what kind of flag - if any - should replace their existing one. Let them choose their own flag, and next thing you know they'll be wanting to choose their own leaders. Fat chance.
Can you believe that the BBC has been inundated with complaints from Iraqis who object to the flag we've chosen for them? I swear those Iraqis are the most ungrateful people on the face of the earth. (I'm still waiting for my sweets and rose petals, by the way). And now they're complaining that the new flag doesn't represent them. What are they talking about? It was chosen without any consultation with the people, it's disrespectful of Arab tradition and offensive to local sensibilities, and it just happened to be designed by the brother of the IGC member who picked the winning entry. Autocracy, colonial arrogance and nepotism all in one flag! What could represent the new Iraq better than that?
Me and the boys have been doing a little photoshopping of our own. If it's not too late, do you think you could take our designs into consideration?
This one was Powell's suggestion. (Way to go, Mr Secretary of State. Very original).
Cheney liked this one.
And Arik helped our Commander in Chief prepare this one during their historic visit last week. (Did you hear we gave away the West Bank? And it's not even ours to give! Boy, did we laugh. I don't suppose it even made the news over there, did it?).
This is my personal favourite - I just love that Jerusalem Cross in the hoist. Brings a tear to the eye. That Crusader imagery wouldn't cause any problems for you, would it? After all, does anyone over there even remember the Crusades?
Anyway, the final decision is yours of course. Looking forward to seeing what you unveil tomorrow. Pleased to see that everything is going so well with you that you have nothing better to with your time than come up with insensitive and unartistic flag designs that, let's face it, will be jettisoned by the locals the day after we withdraw. Can't wait to hear what you come up with for a new national anthem.
Regards,
-- Rummy
P.S. If you do go ahead with the Israel-lookalike design, don't forget to use fire-retardant fabric.
26 April 2004
08 April 2004
My Father's Shoes
Caption: Shoes on the body of an Iraqi soldier killed as Army troops advanced north through Iraq tell a story about a poorly equipped army. Almost all of the Iraqi dead -- more than eight in one location -- were wearing worn-out civilian-style shoes.
(Photo: David Leeson / Dallas Morning News / Corbis).
I was very struck by this photo of a dead Iraqi soldier when I first came across it a couple of days ago. Of course it is because of the shoes. They look like the dress shoes that my Dad used to wear. And they turn a picture of an Iraqi soldier into a picture of an Iraqi who was someone's father, or brother, or uncle or husband or son.
I don't suppose his children have seen this photo. I wonder if they even know he is dead, or if they are still hoping that somehow in the chaos of occupied Iraq he might still one day emerge from Abu Ghraib?
So now we can add one more item to the list of things the Iraqi military didn't have when we invaded Iraq:
1. They didn't have uranium;2. They didn't have nuclear weapons;
3. They didn't have chemical weapons;
4. They didn't have biological weapons;
5. They didn't have long-range missiles;
6. They didn't have long-range UAV's.
7. They didn't have boots.
The Iraqis, who were supposed to be an imminent threat to the most powerful nation on the face of the earth, didn't even have boots.
Recent Comments