Free regime world change

Currently on auction at Christie’s: the employment log of a Turkish bath attendant on the Titanic. They decided that her wages terminated the second the ship went down. After all, she wasn’t working any more, now was she?

Last month a Canadian (with Syrian citizenship) was seized by the INS at Kennedy Airport, where he was actually just changing planes on his way back to Canada. He was then deported to Syria. That’s a man with a Canadian passport, who lives in Canada. And the US won’t share any of its alleged evidence with Canada. That was 3 weeks ago, and they can’t find him in Syria, where he is liable for arrest for missing his military service (he has lived in Canada since he was a teenager).

Dubya’s relationship with the English language is getting odder, if that’s possible. In the last couple of weeks he keeps talking about the “free world” taking on Iraq. I’d love to see a list of countries that constitute this free world. He also says that “regime change” could mean Iraq complying with Security Council diktats. So when he says “the policy of the United States is regime change”, it means what, exactly?

Today’s another day when the newspapers might as well be reporting from different planets. The NY Times has Bush saying that he was trying diplomacy over Iraq (another misuse of a word: issuing orders to be complied with without question, with the threat of military force behind those orders, is not diplomacy), while the London Times, which comes today from that alternative universe where Spock has a goatee, says that the US is promoting “zero tolerance” (a phrase to be found nowhere in today’s NY Times), meaning the slightest deviation by Iraq--a single weapons facility left off a list (and remember the US likes to define anything chemical, including drug factories and water purification plants, as potential dual-use facilities for chemical warfare), a delay of two hours in letting inspectors into some facility-- would lead to war.

There’s a good piece in today’s Wash Post on how Bush supports his policy with lies.

Speaking of lies, FAIR examines 10 media outlets (LA Times, AP, ABC, etc etc), comparing their 1998 reports of the UN pulling inspectors out of Iraq with current reports falsely claiming that Hussein kicked them out.