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From the Guardian:
The country’s Sunni vice president, Ghazi al-Yawer, did not show up at a Sunday ceremony marking completion of the document. When President Jalal Talabani said that al-Yawer was ill, senior government officials including Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi howled with laughter.
The WaPo reports on the increasing number of state measures imposing burdens on women seeking abortions and raising the legal status of fetuses. South Dakota even passed a law that would go into effect if Roe v Wade were overturned, because they don’t want to wait even a single day (although surely passing an unconstitutional law is just a little bit unconstitutional itself). This country still has a pro-choice majority, but legislatures are acting as if supporters of abortion rights will not exact a price from legislators who nibble away at those rights. Hopefully they’re wrong. D’s are increasingly acting as if the whole issue is toxic and they wish it would go away, which doesn’t bode well for their willingness to fight the right-to-lifers if Roe is reversed.
BBC headline: “UN Shocked by Kosovo Serb Deaths.” Yes, violence in the former Yugoslavia, shocking. That peaceful land has lost its innocence.
I know I’ve been commenting about headlines a lot, but I do read the stories too, honest.
Bush, in a statement oddly juxtaposing storm relief and patting himself on the back for the wondrous events going on in the Iraq that exists only inside his chimp-like head, does admit there might be some friendly differences of opinion: “And I suspect that when you get down to it, you’ll find a Shiia who disagrees with the constitution and Shiia who support the constitution, and perhaps some Kurds who are concerned about the constitution.” Yeah I suspect that perhaps that’s the case too.
BBC headline: “Underground Chinese Bishop Dies.” Well that’s convenient.
Sunday Telegraph headline that I just can’t tell if they realized how tasteless it was: “British Diplomat Extends Helping Hand to Europe’s Last Leper Colony.” In Romania, if you were wondering.
The WaPo has a story sub-headlined “Iraqi Draft Fails To Win Support of All Sunni Delegates.” Which under-states it just a bit, since the article fails to name a single Sunni supporter. Yesterday Chalabi, no, it was an aide to Chalabi, was asked to name one; he cited the speaker of the National Assembly, who denied it. (The LAT, however, quotes the defense minister, who it describes as a “secular Sunni Arab,” whatever that means, attacking the Sunnis on the constitutional committee because one is a truck driver and the other, he says, was an intelligence officer under Saddam Hussein.) US Ambassador Khalilzad is quoted twice by the WaPo on the need for a “Sunni buy-in,” a phrase not exactly redolent of Jeffersonian idealism. The document that will be rammed through the Nat. Assembly later today is not really a constitution, since it leaves fundamental questions, like the mechanisms of federalism, to be decided later by a simple majority of the parliament. The reason you have a separate body write a constitution is that 1) a body such as the next parliament shouldn’t decide on its own powers, 2) voters shouldn’t have to vote for people whose powers have not yet been determined.
And over in Afghanistan, things aren’t going so well either, but there aren’t enough American casualties for anybody to be asking whether there’s an exit strategy there. Well ok, they may be asking that in Afghanistan, but here, not so much. The WaPo notes about next month’s elections, “candidates who are suspected of involvement in atrocities can only be barred from running if they were convicted of an offense. But there have been no war crimes trials to date, and many former militia commanders were given posts in the transitional post-Taliban government in an attempt to win their support for democracy.” All this time there has been only one branch of government in Afghanistan, the executive, and Karzai has imposed an electoral system for the parliamentary elections which I’ve never heard of before, in which voters have only one vote in multi-seat constituencies. This will produce a fractious, disorganized and unrepresentative parliament too weak to challenge Karzai, whose power would therefore continue to be that of a dictator, if it operated beyond a few square blocs of Kabul.
Guerilla porn: separatist rebels in Tripura, India, are raising money by producing pornographic films, using kidnapped women (and, to a lesser extent, men).
Bush today: “the Iraqis are grappling with difficult issues, such as the role of the federal government. What is important is that Iraqis are now addressing these issues through debate and discussion -- not at the barrel of a gun.” Is there maybe another entirely different Iraq?
Here’s something that happened in the Good Universe Iraq, according to Bush:
We saw that unity earlier this month when followers of the terrorist Zarqawi tried to force Shiite Muslims to leave the Iraqi city of Ramadi. Sunni Muslims in that city came to the defense of their Shiite neighbors. As one Sunni leader put it, “We have had enough of Zarqawi’s nonsense. We don’t accept that a non-Iraqi should try to enforce his control over Iraqis.”
Yes... a non-Iraqi... trying to enforce his control over Iraqis... that would be bad.
Bush’s argument for continuing the war to honor the (American) dead, it occurs to me, is rather like the classic definition of chutzpah, someone who kills his parents and asks for lenience because he is an orphan.
The University of California system is being sued by religious schools for a new admissions policy I didn’t know about, not certifying high school science courses that teach creationism, as well as other overly religious courses.
General Richard Myers, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is finally at long last thinking ahead about Iraq. He is planning strategically to assign blame for that clusterfuck and, surprise surprise, it’s the old stab-in-the-back theory (Dolchstoß in the original German, and most recently seen in the smearing of John Kerry for undermining the national will to win in Vietnam). The soldiers are all great and “want to finish the job at hand” and don’t think they’re losing at all, says Myers, but “Our troops overwhelmingly want reassurance that they will be allowed to finish what we began four years ago.” Really, that’s what the troops want, reassurance that they can stay in Iraq waiting for victory, or an IED as the case might be? “This military can do anything as long as they have the will and resolve of the American people.” No it can’t. It can’t turn another country into a liberal, democratic, peaceful state by military means, and your failure to understand that is an ongoing problem. Stop blaming the media for not showing all the good news. Stop talking about our nation’s “will and resolve,” because closing our eyes and wishing really hard will not actually change the facts on the ground in Iraq.
This sort of talk is no longer about trying to silence the war critics. The US has already lost and I think Myers, if not Bush and Rumsfeld, knows this. It’s about explaining why it wasn’t his fault. Good luck with that, Myers, you’ll need it.
The juxtaposition of three stories in the UK news section of the Indy shows that Britain has its priorities well and truly straight; it 1) deported a mother and her 4 children to Malawi, despite protests from their neighbors, 2) is about to deport Iraqis back to the, you know, safe parts of Iraq, despite protests by the UN High Commissioner on Refugees, 3) fined a local councillor in South Lanarkshire (Scotland) £750 for a “racially aggravated breach of the peace” for calling a Welshman “boyo.”
Home Secretary Charles Clarke reacted to the UN criticism of his plan to deport any wogs foreigners for a long list of “unacceptable behaviours” by accusing the UN of coddling terrorists: “The human rights of those people who were blown up on the Tube in London on July 7, are, to be quite frank, more important than the human rights on the people who committed those acts.” Clarke gets it entirely wrong in a way that demonstrates his failure to understand the concept of human rights, which is worrying but not uncommon in a home secretary. Human rights are by definition rights which accrue to humans. Those of some humans are not less important than those of other humans, because all humans are in fact human. Stop me if this is too fucking complicated.
The Times says “The Home Office says that Muslim leaders helped them to identify these undesirables, but officials refuse to name the Islamic groups involved.” The largest Muslim groups deny having named names. What the HO is doing here, claiming Muslims are finking for them but we can’t say who, is a blatant, indeed astoundingly blatant, divide-and-conquer tactic to make Muslims suspicious of each other. And its blatancy won’t make it less effective.
A member of Thailand’s cabinet, a woman involved in a lawsuit has disclosed, had silicone injected into his penis. But which one? Which member, not which penis. Oh dear, I said member, didn’t I?
A library in the Netherlands will start loaning out human beings. You can check out a homosexual (so to speak), a Gypsy, a drug addict, etc, and ask them about their lives for an hour.
And from the Guardian: “Belarus retaliated against Lithuania’s decision to build a radioactive waste dump close to their shared border by announcing plans to put two giant pig farms in sniffing distance of its neighbour.”
Normally I’d invite you to provide captions for this picture,
and you may still do so, but I need to identify the woman for you. Bush’s people found themselves an anti-Cindy Sheehan, a Stakhanovite military mother, Tammy Pruett (even the name is over-the-top homespun) who has not one, not two, not three, but four sons in the military in Iraq. Come back with your hillbilly armor or on it, she told them.
Bush said, at that event in Idaho, that after 9/11, “We faced a clear choice. We could hunker down, retreating behind a false sense of security, or we could bring the war to the terrorists, striking them before they could kill more of our people.” I’m sorry, that was the choice? First, putting aside the whole “Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside America” thing, who had a false sense of security after 9/11? So that’s obviously not actually a choice at all (the word “false” was kind of a clue), and what he’s saying is that there was only one choice, doing exactly what he did.
He says of the “Terrorists [who] have converged on Iraq” (he’s still pretending that only non-Iraqis are fighting us; I think he secretly believes that the Iraqis actually did dance in the streets and throw rose petals in our path) that they “lack popular support so they’re targeting innocent Iraqis with car bombs and suicide attacks.” As opposed to the smart bombs and depleted uranium shells we used?
Pat Robertson takes back, sorta, the whole hey-I-know-let’s-assassinate-Hugo-Chavez thing, saying, “I spoke in frustration that we should accommodate the man who thinks the U.S. is out to kill him.” I’ve read that sentence several times now, and I can only think that by “accommodate,” he means “not assassinate.” And then he compared Chavez to Hitler and Saddam Hussein, so it wasn’t really much of an apology. When I first wrote about this, I didn’t include a joke I decided was a bit weak, that Robertson wasn’t advocating breaking any commandments because it says Do Not Kill, not Do Not “Take Out.” But today Robertson himself gave a variant of that joke, saying his comments had been taken out of context: “I didn’t say ‘assassination.’ [Actually, he did] I said our special forces should ‘take him out.’ And ‘take him out’ can be a number of things, including kidnapping; there are a number of ways to take out a dictator from power besides killing him.” And you could have meant “take him out to dinner and a movie,” but you didn’t. You could have meant “take him out to the ball game, take him out with the crowd, buy him some peanuts and Cracker Jacks, I don’t care if he ever gets back, wink wink,” but again, you didn’t.
Checking back through my old notes (which are archived dating back to 1986, links on the right, I pause to remind you), I find that Robertson said in February 1988 (when he was running for president) that he would have had Qadaffi offed (and that he wanted Ollie North as his veep; I’d forgotten that). And he sent money to the Contras and RENAMO.
20 months ago, the WaPo reports, the Pentagon decided that 15 Chinese Muslims, Uighurs, being held at Guantanamo had either done nothing wrong, at least not to us. They haven’t been released because they can’t be sent back to China. My favorite detail: nobody bothered telling them for some months that they had been cleared. My favorite new piece of military jargon: the Justice Dept says it has the right to hand on to them under its “wind-up power,” the power to hold onto POWs for a while at the end of a war while making arrangements to return them.
The Post also has a lively story about a near major prison break by Iraqis held by the US, who dug a 357-foot tunnel, involving the removal of 100 tons of dirt. Full of great details. Only took 5 months for anybody to tell us about it.
Bush has responded to Cindy Sheehan after all, by a slight change in rhetoric. Seeing that the death of her son gave her so much moral authority, he has taken to trying to give himself stature by standing on top of his much higher stack of corpses, even going so far Monday as to say out loud for the first time the number of dead. Suddenly they’re useful to him, even Casey Sheehan, as the basis for an argument that the dead need to be “honored” by continuing the war. “We will finish the task that they gave their lives for. We will honor their sacrifice by staying on the offensive against the terrorists etc etc”. We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here...
Rumsfeld pooh-poohs Pat Robertson’s suggestion that Hugo Chavez be assassinated, “Our department doesn’t do that kind of thing. It’s against the law.” I feel soooo reassured. Don’t you feel soooo reassured? Given his many attempts to do just that “kind of thing” to Saddam Hussein and Mullah Omar, I think what he meant to say is “Our department doesn’t do that kind of thing successfully.” He added that there was no planning to assassinate Chavez: “Not to my knowledge and I would think I would have knowledge.” After five years as secretary of war, no one else thinks Rummy would have knowledge about much of anything.
Except for things that aren’t actually true, like progress in Iraq. He says, rebutting those who are “being tossed about by the winds of concern,” that “It’s worth noting that the enemy does not appear to share that view. On the contrary, terrorists like Zarqawi are indicating concern about the lack of support from the Iraqi people.” Really, where precisely is he indicating that?
From The Onion:
The blackout of blogs in South Korea, mentioned here one week ago, went on for some days and perhaps still goes on. The censorship isn’t completely effective, depending on who provides your web access, so honestly what’s the point, Korea? Blogger support informs me that it is indeed the government which is responsible.
White liberal bingo.
Bush blathers on about the wondrous Iraqi political process: “First of all, the fact that they’re even writing a constitution is vastly different from living under the iron hand of a dictator.” And he insists that the comparable American process was kind of sucky too: “We had trouble at our own conventions writing a constitution.” Oh ƒure, becauƒe Madiƒon kept forgetting to make his S’s look like F’s and having to ƒtart over. “It took a lot of work and a lot of interest, and willingness of people to work for the common good.” Can you name one Iraqi involved in this process who is working for the common good?
On Cindy Sheehan: “So I appreciate her right to protest. I understand her anguish. I met with a lot of families. She doesn’t represent the view of a lot of the families I have met with. And I’ll continue to meet with families.” A few questions later, avoiding answering a question about what the US would do in the event of a Sunni uprising, he says, apropos of nothing, “And I suspect most mothers, no matter what their religion may be, will choose a free society, so that their children can grow up in a peaceful world.” Bush idealizes mothers in the abstract; it’s the actual mothers, like Cindy Sheehan or Barbara Bush, that he can’t stand. Still, if the influence of mothers is so beneficial, he seems rather complacent about the status of women in Iraq. Asked by Fox, of all sources, about how women would fare under Sharia law: “as I understand it, the way the constitution is written is that women have got rights”. So that’s ok then.
Cute NYT headline Monday: “Critics Say Soda Policy for Schools Lacks Teeth.”
Unintentionally (probably) funny WaPo headline: “Federal Funds For Abstinence Group Withheld.” Well I’m sure if the group (“Silver Ring Thing”) respects the federal government, it won’t mind waiting.
The Iraqi constitution is postponed again, and the Bushies again portray it as a great victory. Condi sez, “In a statesmanlike decision, the men and women of the Assembly have decided to use the next three days to continue reaching out to build the broadest national consensus for Iraq’s new Constitution. ... The process by which Iraqis have reached this point is historic and in the best tradition of democracy.” I don’t know, the best tradition of democracy usually entails fewer car bombs, beheadings and the like.
Here’s the factor that determines whether this constitution ever goes into effect: who counts the votes in the Sunni provinces.
The Metropolitan Police’s story is that all 8 cameras in the tube station that should have recorded de Menezes on the day he was shot were non-functioning. Eight of them. Just went dead. All at the same time. Funny, that.
For fans of printed propaganda, of whom I am one, there is a nice example here of a Japanese World War II pamphlet, translated, aimed at the children of the Co-Prosperity Sphere. Pictures of the Japanese being welcomed as liberators (“Our Commander is a friendly Japanese Commander”), you know the sort of thing.
Even with our differing languages and religions, let’s adopt a good attitude and be friendly like brothers. In happy times and sad, let’s be friends.
America, Britain, and the Netherlands were scared of East Asian prosperity; we must not forget this undeniable fact. If we have good relations and help each other, we shall definitely be happy.
Pat Robertson has come under fire for promoting a diet drink, “Pat’s Age-Defying Shake,” on his tax-exempt tv ministry. And he might get into trouble for that, as opposed to praying for the death of Supreme Court justices or calling for the assassination of Hugo Chavez, cuz, c’mon people, li’l perspective.
Department of Yeah, That’s Gonna Work: “A U.S. judge has taken out ads in Colombian newspapers and magazines ordering the country's main rebel group to appear in his Washington courtroom to face charges of kidnapping three Americans in 2003.” He explained that he had to because he doesn’t have FARC’s address on file.
In a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, George Bush, a veteran of hanging out in Houston bars wearing a Texas Air National Guard uniform, is still talking about how a free, democratic Iraq will deal a decisive blow yadda yadda, totally disconnected from the events taking place in the actually existing Iraq, the one that exists outside of Bush’s chimp-like head. “We admire their thoughtful deliberations; we salute their determination to lay the foundation for lasting democracy amid the ruins of a brutal dictatorship.” Yeah, thoughtful deliberations, lasting democracy. Sure.
Which brings us to today’s caption contest:
Let go of my damned hand, old man.
How did I miss this detail before? The Metropolitan cop in charge when Jean Charles de Menezes was shot is named Commander Cressida Dick. Anyhoo, Sir Ian Blair, in an interview with the News of the World (not a permanent URL), complains that “this part of the story is concentrating on the death of one individual when we have 52 dead people from all faiths and communities in London and from abroad. ... It seems the balance of reporting is in the wrong place.” Well thank heavens the guy responsible for the death of that one individual and the cover-up that followed is here to put it all in proper perspective.
It was inevitable: a Fort Qualls to counterpoise Camp Casey, and named after another dead soldier, one whose father is pro-war and can’t wait for his other, 16-year old, son to come of age so he can sign up. The “Fort” consists, according to the AP, of a “large tent with ‘God Bless Our President!’ and ‘God Bless Our Troops’ banners and a life-size cardboard cutout of Bush.” What do those banners have in common, besides the religiosity? That they say nothing about the war and in fact have almost the minimum amount of content possible to still count as communication, barely above the content level of a chant of “USA! USA!” Cindy Sheehan wants answers. These people have none; they can provide only a life-size cardboard cutout Bush and life-size cardboard cutout patriotism.
Pope Benedict XVI suggests to Muslim leaders that they should really crack down on terrorists and steer young Muslims away from “the darkness of a new barbarism” through proper religious instruction, that is, instruction in Islam, which I assume would be the old barbarism in Pope Benny’s eyes. Pope Benny knows a lot about steering young people away from extremism from his days in the Hitler Youth.
Ariel Sharon, that’s Ariel fucking Sharon mind you, accuses the settlers of playing politics and causing unnecessary suffering. Presumably as opposed to necessary suffering, which is when Palestinians do the suffering.
Robert Fisk mentions a news release from the US military in Iraq entitled “Comics Bring Barrels of Laughs to Baghdad.” But does he quote from it? Depressive sod that he is, of course not. Evidently the comedians “touched on the funnier side of military life in a combat zone”. It will help, when you read the story, to imagine it spoken over the MASH public address system. That is all.
Good article by Andrew Arato, posting on Juan Cole’s site, on the constitution-writing process in Iraq.
Bill Frist says that intelligent design should be taught in public schools so as not to “force any particular theory on anyone. ... I think in a pluralistic society that is the fairest way to go about education and training people for the future.” I can only assume that when he’s practicing medicine, he tells patients, “I recommend heart surgery and I am a doctor, as you can tell by my degrees, handsomely displayed in the cat-fur-lined picture frames, but in a pluralistic society it’s fair that I also tell you about the options of faith-healing, crystals, sacrificing a goat to Odin...”
Excuse the longish (by my standards) silence. I was feeling stale and uninspired and didn’t wish to blog just for the sake of blogging. At one point I got as far as “John Roberts turns out to have been quite the snide little shit, doesn’t he?” before giving it up as a bad job. Not that he isn’t a snide little shit, but the various quotes from his old memos speak for themselves.
Jonathan Steele’s op-ed on the “theatre of the cynical” playing out in Gaza notes the settlers’ inability to understand how they, and Israel, are seen, epitomized in their obnoxious chant “Jews do not expel Jews.” The settlers mean to imply that “Jews do not expel Jews; Nazis expel Jews,” but what most of us actually hear is, “Jews do not expel Jews, they expel Arabs.”
The king of Swaziland has ended one year early his 5-year ban on teenagers having sex, which was supposed to end AIDS in Swaziland, a year early. Girls will no longer be required to wear a tasseled scarf to indicate their virginity (I assume they wore other clothes as well).
We now know that Sir Ian Blair, the least competent commissioner of the Met since Sir Charles Warren (a little bone for all you Jack the Ripper fans to gnaw on, you know who you are), tried to prevent investigation of the Menezes shooting, that the Met tried to bribe the Menezes family with $1 million in “compensation” (yes, that’s US dollars, the currency of choice for cover-ups, not British pounds), that the pathologist was given the same false information the public was, and that Blair does not intend to resign.
The 9th Circuit rules that when Congress banned abortions being performed at military bases, along with other measures intended to prevent service members and their families exercising their right to abortion, it actually intended that the Navy’s insurance not pay for a woman with a fetus lacking most of its brain to terminate her pregnancy. The government, in a brief written by some future John Roberts, argued that this case represented a “slippery slope.”
Pfc. Willie Brand, convicted of a variety of crimes in relation to a prisoner he beat to death in Afghanistan in 2002 by hitting him in the knee thirty times (one of two prisoners he beat to death: he was acquitted for the other one), including assault, maiming, and making a false statement, but not murder, is sentenced to diddly squat, that is, a reduction in rank to private, no jail time. That’ll show him. Brand told the jury, “We were trained on these things and when we implement them we were condemned; if we asked questions we are condemned.” Yup, damned if you beat two prisoners to death, damned if you don’t. And here’s what his lawyer said, with no trace of irony: “For Willie Brand, the war on terror ends today.”
NYT headline: “Rumsfeld’s Tour of South America Is Directed at Promoting Stability.” Because when you think stability, you think Rummy.
While in Peru, we are informed, Rummy visited a museum featuring the arts and crafts of the Indios. Something tells me the Secretary of War isn’t much of a museum person, possibly this quote about the looting of the Iraqi museums in 2003: “It is the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase and you see it 20 times. And you think, my goodness, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?”
When Rumsfeld et al accuse Venezuela of being “unhelpful” about drug trafficking, perhaps they had in mind its failure to participate in the “Air Bridge Denial Program,” under which Bush just reauthorized helping Colombia shoot down planes suspected of carrying drugs. Bush claimed the Colombians are working to “minimize the loss of innocent life,” although evidently not by refraining from shooting at airplanes. Best way to minimize loss of life, innocent or otherwise: stop with the shooting.
This is just a little reminder that Americans have been sent by our government to help kill people, without trial, for something that is not a capital crime in our country. The AP story mentions the incident in which a plane full of missionaries was shot down over Peru in 2001 by a Peruvian fighter “guided by US intelligence operatives” who nevertheless “couldn’t stop the Peruvians from shooting.” For what AP left out about who those “operatives” were and why they couldn’t stop the missionaries’ deaths (hint: they didn’t speak the fucking language), read my 2002 post here. It would also have been nice if the AP had mentioned how many planes have been shot down under this program; I know dozens have been in Peru but I’ve never seen a number for Colombia.
