Number 3

The alleged number 3 man in Al Qaeda was killed in Pakistan by a drone. At the same time, Crown Princess Mette-Marit of Norway gives birth to a boy who is number 3 in the line of succession. Coincidence? I think not!

Equality under God

In both his speech on immigration last month and his radio address today, Bush said that immigrants should assimilate and “we must continue to welcome legal immigrants and help them learn the customs and values that unite all Americans, including liberty and civic responsibility, equality under God, tolerance for others, and the English language.” Funny that he should be talking about assimilation and equality while proposing a guest worker program. Also, when will Mr. Patriot Act learn the customs and values of liberty; since when did the draft- and, just yesterday, jury-duty dodger believe in civic responsibility; what does this privileged member of the lucky sperm club know about equality; when did this god-bothering homophobe show a passing acquaintance with tolerance; or the English language? And indeed, which is the English language supposed to be, a custom or a value?

Also, what’s with the “equality under God” crap? Well, I know what the phrase means: that God values all souls equally. It’s a Christian thing (yeah, yeah, other religions too, but the expression is a Christian one), it is not an American thing. Indeed, just as he often says that freedom comes from God, what he is trying to do is Christianize the values that underlie American institutions, and it’s as creepy as the campaign to take that atheist Jefferson off the nickel and replace him with Jesus.

Okay, I made that up, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

Like Zorro

The Pentagon has decided to brazen it out and defend the practice of secretly paying to place happy-news stories in the Iraqi press as a) perfectly legitimate “rebuttal information” to counter the “lies” of the insurgents and “get the truth out there”, b) a practice “customary in Iraq.”

Although it is widely reported that Condi Rice, who is visiting Europe next week, will answer the questions of European governments about secret prisons, Irish Foreign Minister Dermot Ahern, who met her on a visit to the US this week, says (I can only found a paraphrase, not a direct quote) that she told him that “she expected allies to trust that America does not allow rights abuses.” Ah yes, the old “trust me” ploy.

The front-runner in Chile’s presidential elections is Michelle Bachelet, who was tortured as a dissident during the Pinochet years, and whose father was tortured to death.

On the 50th anniversary of Rosa Parks refusing to give up her bus seat, various bus systems kept a seat unoccupied in her honor and inevitably someone in New York – although a tourist, not a New Yorker – sat in it and wouldn’t get up. “I think I’ve got a right to sit here,” she said. Welcome to your place in history, Fiona Humphreys of Bristol.

The Chinese finally admit that they harvest organs from people they execute and sell them to rich foreigners, but promise to “tidy up the medical market.”

The annual Bad Sex in Fiction prize has been awarded, to Giles Coren’s novel Winkler. I didn’t think it was as funny as previous winners, so I was going to pass on posting it this time, but there’s something I rather like about the form in which the London Times (for which Coren is a restaurant reviewer) printed the award-winning passage:

And he **** **** in her ***** and his **** jumped around and ******* on her ***** and he blacked *** and she **** his **** out of her ***** and lifted ******* from his **** and ******* the pillow away and he ****** and ******* at the air, and he **** again so **** that his **** ******** out of her **** and a **** of it *** him straight in the *** and ***** like ******* he’d ever *** in *****, and he yelled with the pain, but the **** could have been ********, and as she ******* at his ****, which was ******* around like a ****** dropped in an ***** ****, she ********* his **** deeply with the ***** of both **** and he **** three **** times, in ***** ****** on *** chest. Like Zorro.

Robbie, do you like movies about gladiators?

Very clear

A couple of days ago I commented on the insanity in the White House whereby they believe that George Bush making a speech about his Iraq policy, emitting word-like sounds from his chimp-like mouth, would actually increase support for it. But it’s actually worse than that, much worse. Let me give you two quotes. Bush two days ago: “The United States of America does not torture. And that’s important for people around the world to understand”. And Scotty McClellan today, after he refused to confirm or deny the existence of secret prisons: “The President has made it very clear that we do not torture”. Now maybe this was obvious to all of you, but the concept is so alien to my way of thinking that my brain may just have rejected it out of hand before now, succumbing to audacity overload: they expect everyone, and not just Americans either, to take Bush’s word for it, to treat Bush’s say-so as if it were incontrovertible evidence, to say “Well, I’ve read all these stories about torture, and it really seemed like there was something to them, but George Bush has said that we do not torture, and that obviously clears up that little misunderstanding completely and conclusively.” They won’t let the UN into Guantanamo, they won’t admit the existence of the prisons: they are literally offering no other proof than Chimpy’s verbal denial.

Look for the union label, when you are buying that coat, dress or IED

So the Bushies didn’t realize that torturing Iraqis would look bad, or the use of chemical weapons like white phosphorus, or... Israeli commandos training Kurds in Israeli-style “anti-terrorist” techniques.

327 parties are running in the Iraqi elections, among them: the Islamic Virtue Party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution In Iraq, the Assyrian Patriotic Party, the Turkmen Loyalty Movement, Kurdistan Democratic Solution Party, Iraqi Dignitaries Council, Gathering for the Future of Iraq, Assyrian Independent Gathering Movement, Society of Turkmen Tribes and Elites, the Independent Cultivated League, the Arabic Unifying Front (I think not), The Sixth of January Movement, Democratic Iraqi Sons Gathering, Amal Association for Intifada Martyrs, a party simply called Consistency, the Future Party, the Future, We All For Iraq, Prisoners and Political Martyrs Gathering, Syndicate of the Honorable Gentlemen, etc.

And the insurgency ELIGgers exhibit the same fragmentation, with over 100 groups. The NYT quotes a leaflet found in Ramadi complaining about this: “We are asking people to reject any statement signed by the Sajeel Battalion of the Islamic Army that does not carry their slogan or seal.”

Singapore must have found a new hangman, because they executed the Australian drug smuggler, Nguyen Tuong Van. After intense lobbying by Australia, they allowed him to hold hands with (but not hug) his mother before they strung him up. Interestingly, his mother was a Vietnamese refugee, who escaped Vietnam the same year she gave birth to him (I don’t know whether before or after), while the victim of the 1,000th American execution since 1976, Kenneth Boyd, was a Vietnam veteran. Also, Nguyen was executed in Changi Prison, which Australians will remember as the site of a Japanese prisoner of war camp where many Australians were kept during World War II.

Texas was responsible for 355 of those 1,000 executions, and George W. Bush signed the death warrants for 152 of them.

A leading Kazakhstan opposition leader, Zamenbek Nurkadilov, has been found dead of what the police are calling a suicide. He was shot twice in the chest and once in the head, so he must have been really quite depressed.

CBS is in talks with Al Sharpton for him to star in a sitcom, possibly called “Al in the Family.”

We don’t lie - we don’t need to lie

Free at last: Nelson Mandela has been made a freeman of Salford, England, which means he has the right to herd sheep over London Bridge, be drunk and disorderly without risk of arrest, or wander the streets with a drawn sword and if convicted of a capital crime (and the combination of sheep, a drawn sword and being drunk & disorderly has brought down many a man before now), to be hanged with a silken rope. I’m pretty sure this is what he was working towards, those 27 years on Robben Island.

Back in South Africa, the Constitutional Court rules that confining marriage to heterosexuals is a form of discrimination inconsistent with the constitution.

The Pentagon admits that it is currently force feeding 22 hunger-striking prisoners in Guantanamo, but says it is doing so “humanely,” so that’s okay, then. Says Brig. Gen. John Gong, “We have a great desire to ensure they are healthy.” And, heck, says the press release, “For the most part, the feedings are not involuntary... Most agree to the procedure” (if they don’t “agree to the procedure,” they’re put in restraints). Why some of them even insert their own NG tubes into their own noses. And no you may not confirm any of this by speaking with the prisoners.

Asked about the program whereby the Pentagon paid for happy-talk stories to be printed in Iraqi newspapers, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch responded, Yeah, but Zarqawi cuts people’s heads off and stuff, “so that he gets international coverage to look like he has more capability than he truly has”. Also, Zarqawi lies and stuff, but “We don’t lie - we don’t need to lie,” he lied.

No war has ever been won on a timetable

The lower house of the Czech parliament has voted to reduce, in tandem, the age of consent and the age of criminal responsibility from 15 to 14. They also voted to make communist genocide denial a crime.

Bush’s National Strategy for Victory says, “No war has ever been won on a timetable - and neither will this one.” This follows the strategy of such great American generals as Eisenhower who, when asked to set a date for the invasion of France, a “D-Day,” as one aide, a youngster possibly named Murtha, called it, refused out of hand, declaring, “No war has ever been won on a timetable: I won’t be bound by your fancy-shmancy ‘watches’ and your hoity-toity ‘calendars’ and your la-di-da ‘measured progression of events in relation to time’...”

We don’t need no stinkin’ cute kitty calendars
Fred Kaplan at Slate points out some of the inconsistencies, to put it kindly, in Bush’s speech, including multiple definitions of when the “mission” is complete, and no definition at all of “victory.” So it’s not just timetables Bush rejects, but dictionaries as well. But you knew that.

I watch Bush’s Iraq speech – oh God, make it stop – so you don’t have to

Because people in the White House still believe that the way to revive support for something is to have the Chimperor make a speech about it, Bush gave a “strategy for victory” speech today at Annapolis, although I’m pretty sure the Navy isn’t a big part of that strategy.


Actually, after listening to it, I’m not sure I heard any actual strategy. He did repeatedly refer to it as a “clear strategy,” so it may be see-through, which would explain a lot.

He also called it a national strategy, but he didn’t say which nation, and for most of the speech American troops were also see-through, invisible. Mostly he spoke about Iraqis. Good Iraqis, and bad Iraqis. The good ones have all joined the Iraqi army or police, all for altruistic reasons of course, no death squads here, and they are standing up so... well, you know the rest. They’re being trained and increasing in numbers and in every day in every way they’re getting better and better.


For the bad Iraqis, who Rumsfeld says we’re no longer allowed to call insurgents, Bush created a handy taxonomy, applying labels that are in no way useful in assisting understanding and which bear little resemblance to the actual people involved. They consist, he says, of Rejectionists, Saddamists & terrorists. Rejectionist, which sounds like a label Stalin might have used for his ideological opponents or kulaks or something, actually means Sunni. Evidently we’re going to “marginalize” these Rejectionists, he said it several times, but I don’t know what that actually means. I suspect he doesn’t either. Saddamists (shouldn’t it be Husseinistas?) are just a few guys, also Sunnis, and will also be marginalized or turned into margarine or something. Terrorists are defined as “affiliated with or inspired by Al Qaeda,” and Bush emphasized the foreigners among them; they’re like outside agitators and “These terrorists have nothing to offer the Iraqi people.”

Bush twice refers to violence as media events (“the suicide bombings and the beheadings and the other atrocities we see on our television” and “creat[ing] chaos for the cameras”), as if the terrorists were run by an Arab Karl Rove.

I fell into a hypnotic state after a while, but I could swear he made fun of Democrats for saying that his only plan is to “stay the course,” like they just made up the phrase themselves.

Anyway, if you were wondering what our mission in Iraq is, “Our mission in Iraq is to win the war - our troops will return home when that mission is complete.” As opposed to when the mission is accomplished, which was a couple of years ago.

And then it was over, leaving us all re-energized and re-dedicated to whatever it was he was talking about.

Rumsfeld spots a sign of progress in Iraq

When Secretary of War Rumsfeld is bored, he likes to rename stuff (and torture puppies). Today, he decided (full transcript here) that the Iraqi insurgency doesn’t merit the word insurgency. “These people don’t have a legitimate gripe,” he says, so from now on, they’ll be “enemies of the legitimate Iraqi government” or ELIGgers for short. Also, since the Iraqi government is legitimate, “Any contention that there’s some sort of an occupation taking place or that coalition forces are there at anything other than the invitation of the government and the United Nations becomes a weaker argument.” Yeah, heaven forfend they get the idea into their heads that there’s some sort of an occupation taking place.


Asked about white phosphorus, Rummy handed off to the alliterative Gen. Peter Pace, and here there’s something interesting in the transcript. Pace insists willy pete is “a legitimate tool of the military” and that

It is not a chemical weapon, it is an incendiary (sic) [It is not an incendiary weapon as defined by the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons], and it is well within the law of war to use those weapons as they are being used for marking and for screening.

The sic & brackets are in the transcript. I think Pace accidentally admitted to a war crime.

Asked about the uniformed death squads working within the, uh, legitimate Iraqi government, Rumsfeld: “I’m not going to comment on hypothetical questions. I’ve not seen reports that hundreds are being killed by roving death squads at all.” As Maureen Dowd once said, fire Rummy or make him read faster. He went on, “I can only talk about what I know. That’s life.” He actually suggested that the death squad claims are purely “politicking,” part of the December 15 elections, so they’re yet one more “sign of progress” – see if you can follow this – because instead of “repression by a vicious dictator,” “They’re tugging; they’re pulling; they’re arguing; they’re debating; they’re making charges and countercharges. That’s a good thing. That’s a sign of progress, in my view.” Yes, Sunnis complaining about being murdered by roving Shiite death squads is a sign of progress.

In response to a question about torture by Iraqi security types, there was this already-famous exchange:

GEN. PACE: It is absolutely the responsibility of every U.S. service member, if they see inhumane treatment being conducted, to intervene to stop it. ...

SEC. RUMSFELD: But I don’t think you mean they have an obligation to physically stop it; it’s to report it.

GEN. PACE: If they are physically present when inhumane treatment is taking place, sir, they have an obligation to try to stop it.

Rummy emits an odd combination of happy talk – “But by golly, the people who have been denigrating the Iraqi security forces are flat wrong!” – and language designed to distance himself from any responsibility for the atrocities that are going on now, and the atrocities to come:

Our problem is that any time something needs to be done, we have a feeling we should rush in and fill the vacuum and do it ourselves. ... It is the Iraqis’ country, 28 million of them. They are perfectly capable of running that country. They’re not going to run it the way you would or I would or the way we do here in this country, but they’re going to run it.

At 6:45 a.m. PST, Bush will give his speech outlining his “strategy for victory” in Iraq.

And that’s important for people around the world to understand

Bush:

Q Is there going to be investigating the allegations that there are U.S.-run terrorist detention centers abroad? Don’t the American people deserve an accounting of why these places exist and what’s being done there?

THE PRESIDENT: The United States of America does not torture. And that’s important for people around the world to understand.

You’ll notice that even when evading a question, he does it in the form of a bald-faced lie.

Speaking of bald-face lies, the London Times details those by the British (Labour party) government in the 1970s to cover up the atrocities committed by Indonesia after it invaded East Timor, doing the bidding of Henry Kissinger.

Spain just really pissed off the Bushies by selling arms to Venezuela. As much as I enjoy seeing the “imperialist elite which seeks to dominate the world,” as Chávez calls them (imperialist, check, seek to dominate the world, check, but “elite?”), with smoke coming out of their ears, I’m not especially comfortable with his description of the signing ceremony as “more than a commercial [deal], this ceremony is one of dignity”. I get worried when countries, especially those run by former military officers, start defining their national dignity in terms of weaponry; that’s the sort of rhetoric we hear from Iran, India and Pakistan about their nuclear programs.

In Iraq, the US is bribing newspapers to print, as if they were real news stories, good-news stories written by American military personnel, stories with titles like “Iraqis Insist on Living Despite Terrorism” and “More Money Goes to Iraq’s Development.” The managing editor of one paper said that if he’d known the stories came from the US government, journalistic ethics would have required him to... “charge much, much more.” Also, the Americans have bought a newspaper, and through some mechanism taken over a radio station; they won’t say which ones, but only to protect the employees, of course.

He doesn’t walk around Washington with a lot of airs like some of them do

The LAT on Iraqi death squads within the interior ministry, or possibly on the interior ministry within the death squads. A must-read. NYT on same.

Bayan Jabr, the interior minister, and other government officials denied any government involvement, saying the killings were carried out by men driving stolen police cars and wearing police and army uniforms purchased at local markets. “Impossible! Impossible!” Mr. Jabr said. “That is totally wrong; it’s only rumors; it is nonsense.”

Back in January, Newsweek ran an article suggesting that it was Pentagon policy to set up death squads, the Salvador Option. I believe Rumsfeld’s sole response, which he was allowed to get away with, was that he hadn’t read the story because he couldn’t find it in his copy, and he hadn’t heard of a country called El Salvador either, but he could deny the existence of “this so-called Salvatore -- Salvador option, I think it’s called.” No one seems to have revisited the issue with Rummy this week, although the Pentagon website does feature a story, “Iraqi Security Forces Steadily Improving, But Still Need Support.”

Bush, at a Jon Kyl fundraiser, addressed these concerns dead on:

We’re going to succeed in Iraq because our vision, and the vision of those in Iraq who believe in democracy, is positive and hopeful, as opposed to the vision of the suiciders and killers of the innocent. We’re going to succeed in Iraq because we’ve got a plan that will help the Iraqis not only develop a democracy, but a security force.

Fabulous.

And on Jon Kyl: “Look, I don’t know how many U.S. senators there are that like NASCAR. (Laughter.) I view that as a pretty good sign, to have a United States senator who follows NASCAR. It means he’s down to earth. He doesn’t walk around Washington with a lot of airs like some of them do.”

They need to stay at home

I think I need to clarify my last post about the Bushies’ new spin. With the backlash against the attempt to swift-boat (or michael-mooreize) Murtha, they’ve decided on this new tack of focusing on wishy-washy D’s like Biden, which is most of them, who won’t call for an immediate pull-out but would prefer not to occupy Iraq forever, and, instead of portraying them as defeatist cut & runners, paint them as unoriginal copycats, “adopting key portions of the administration’s plan for victory.” By pretending that there are no substantive policy differences (which in Biden’s case isn’t far from the truth, which is precisely why they chose him to stand in for all centrist Democrats), they can claim that any criticism must be partisan in nature. In other words, they are once again pretending to be uniters, not dividers.

Speaking of dividing, Bush talked about “securing the border” today in Arizona. He lauded something called “interior repatriation,” which means dumping illegal immigrants well inside Mexico. How exactly the United States has the power to put someone on a bus in a foreign country and keep them on that bus until it reaches its destination, I do not know. He said, “We want to make it clear that when people violate immigration laws, they’re going to be sent home, and they need to stay at home.” And it’s no television for you either, young man!

In the rest of the speech, he talked about streamlining deportations, increasing the size of the border patrol and giving it lots of fancy toys, a temporary worker program not leading to permanent residence or citizenship, and so forth. He talked of immigrants as illegal workers, murderers, child molesters, gang members, etc, but his speech was carefully written to avoid conferring upon them even the humanity of the singular personal pronoun; that is, he never calls them “he” or “she,” they are always part of a depersonalized horde. Or possibly a depersonalized school, as in fish, since he also derides the current “catch and release” policy.

I like how the Indy puts it: “Six years after Grozny was blasted to smithereens on the orders of Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, it was claimed that the separatist-minded people of Chechnya now support the man who commanded the almost total destruction of their capital.” “President” Alu Alkhanov described the elections as “democratic, honest and transparent,” speaking, the Indy points out, amid the ruins of the city: “A bombed out Soviet-style apartment block seemed like an unlikely prop for feel-good propaganda but the authorities obviously had no choice.” The caption to this AP photo is “Chechen police guard the Finance ministry during a news conference of Chechya's president, Alu Alkhanov in the Chechen capital of Grozny, Monday, Nov. 28, 2005.”


Putin is pretending this is some sort of purple-finger moment, claiming, for fuck’s sake, that the Chechen people “have shown that no one can scare them.”

Adopting key portions of administration’s plan for victory in Iraq

The new White House line is that everyone actually agrees on the fundamentals about Iraq, so why all the fussin’ and the feudin’? The implication being that any remaining dissent must therefore all be about partisan politics, which is why they single out Joe Biden, who thinks he’s running for president, in a hilarious piece of spin, entitled “Setting the Record Straight: Sen. Biden Adopts Key Portions of Administration’s Plan for Victory in Iraq,” that must be read to be believed.

Among the people who are evidently not adopting key portions of the administration’s plan for victory in Iraq are the members of the US Air Force who spoke to Seymour Hersh for this week’s New Yorker article. They are scared that the Bushies’ Vietnamization plan will involve wogs Iraqis setting bombing targets – oh, it just won’t do – and abusing the privilege by getting the Americans to bomb their sectarian enemies. Evidently Hersh’s sources are unaware that they’re already fully involved in an Iraqi civil war. Whether they are also concerned that a greater reliance on air-power, as American ground troops are moved to relative safety, will dramatically increase the number of deaths of innocent Iraqis is not clear.

Okay, it is clear.

The important thing is for someone not to come away thinking this whole process is arbitrary, which it is not

Adam Liptak in the NYT writes that the Bush admin “sets its own rules” as to whether prisoners in The War Against Terror (TWAT) are charged with a crime or held forever as an enemy combatant, although even that gives them too much credit, since there is no evidence that rules actually exist. A Justice Dept spokesmodel says, “The important thing is for someone not to come away thinking this whole process is arbitrary, which it is not,” but if we go by my computer dictionary’s definition of arbitrary, “2. (of power or authority) used without constraint; autocratic”, then that is exactly what we’re talking about. The factors the spokesmodel cites for how someone will be treated are:

national security interests, the need to gather intelligence and the best and quickest way to obtain it, the concern about protecting intelligence sources and methods and ongoing information gathering, the ability to use information as evidence in a criminal proceeding, the circumstances of the manner in which the individual was detained, the applicable criminal charges, and classified-evidence issues.

And evil lawyer John Yoo adds,

The main factors that will determine how you will be charged are, one, how strong your link to Al Qaeda is and, two, whether you have any actionable intelligence that will prevent an attack on the United States.

What’s missing from these lists? Human and civil rights, the rule of law, fair trials, justice. Every factor they cite is about the convenience of the state, and the state alone.

Speaking of the rule of law, Singapore has fired its long-serving hangman, Darshan Singh, after his name (and most of his body) were revealed in The Australian. Singh has hanged more than 850 people, as many as 18 in a single day. Singapore is scrambling to import a new executioner in time for the scheduled hanging of an Australian drug-smuggler. Singh will miss the extra cash, but says, “In a way I am happy.” And that’s the important thing.

These goats are a gift from God

There’s a week-old (so the link may not be good for much longer) LAT story I missed until the Miami Herald ran a shorter version, about how harmless American Christian missionaries in Venezuela are and how Chávez is a) paranoid and b) a big meanie for expelling some of them (others have left voluntarily, including all the Mormons. Result!) and how the poor benighted Indians will surely suffer. The article says that “many of the estimated 45,000 indigenous people in the Amazon basin resent the expulsion order, saying the missionaries have improved their lives,” but only quotes one of these resentful indigenous people, a politician.

County officials in Miami, Ohio, have ordered a 12-year old boy to get rid of his trampolining goats. His mother says they’re necessary to help him manage his ADD. “These goats are a gift from God,” she says.

But honestly, I mean, conspiracy theories...

Last month, you’ll remember, US troops in Afghanistan burned the bodies of two Taliban fighters and taunted locals as “lady boys” for not coming out to recapture the corpses, and did it all on Australian television. A military investigation has just cleared them, upholding their laughable explanation that it was done for reasons of hygiene with “no intent to desecrate the remains”. They may yet be charged with “failing to show local understanding,” although the whole point of the exercise was to implement local understanding in the form of crude psychological warfare – “You allowed your fighters to be laid down facing west and burned,” they sneered through loudspeakers. As in Abu Ghraib, Americans’ sociological interest in foreign cultures is in finding points of cultural sensitivity to exploit: fear of dogs, dislike of nakedness, taboos against physical contact with strange women, etc.

I haven’t written about Bush’s supposed plan to bomb Al Jazeera before now because I’m still not sure how seriously to take it, although the British government’s ferocious efforts to suppress, by threatening British editors with imprisonment, reports of this plot to suppress Al Jazeera’s reports through rather more robust measures does give it more credibility, as does Tony Blair scoffing comment, “But honestly, I mean, conspiracy theories...” However, the Sunday Times and the Sindy believe there are other things in the memo that the government wants kept hushed up, like details of the siege of Fallujah, Bush’s endorsement without consulting Blair of Sharon’s plan to withdraw unilaterally from Gaza, and secret negotiations with Iran, which Britain hoped to persuade to rein in al-Sadr.

US military attacks on Al Jazeera are nothing new, and were, Robert Fisk points out, presaged by the 1998 bombing of Serbian tv, but my agnosticism comes from the fact that such a move inside Qatar would have been spectacularly self-defeating even for the Bushies: being expelled from the US base there would have seriously complicated the Iraq war. I’m sure the truth will come out in 3 or 7 or 15 or 53 years. The Sunday Times notes that the day before the Bush-Blair meeting in April ‘04, Rumsfeld accused Al Jazeera of “vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable” reports that the siege of Fallujah was targeting civilians. My favorite bit was the phone interview they did a few days before that with Gen. Mark Kimmitt, Military Moron, claiming that the US had declared a unilateral cease-fire in Fallujah, which they ran with live pictures of the town being bombed by F-16s. One of the US conditions for ending the siege: the expulsion of Al Jazeera from the town. Later, they got their puppet government to expel it from the whole country. In April ‘04, the US also tried to get Qatar to censor the channel.

Du Bist Deutschland

So the German government is spending $30m on a campaign to make Germans feel better about being Germans. The campaign’s slogan, “Du Bist Deutschland (You are Germany)” was carefully chosen, except for the failure to check if the Nazis had ever used it...


and the fact that it sounds like an accusation (“Who, me? I’m not Germany, you must be thinkin’ of some other guy.”) And that one of the ads features Albert Einstein, who renounced his German citizenship in 1896.

Also, the name of Ariel Sharon’s new party, Kadima (forward) is criticized for echoing one of Mussolini’s slogans, “Avanti (forward)” (which is also the name of a not-at-all-good Jack Lemmon movie). Sharon claims he won’t spend time attacking Likud, which would a) be very uncharacteristic of him, b) screw up a joke I was holding in reserve, something about Sharon withdrawing from Likud and then bombing it, just like Gaza.

Shouting fire in a crowded torture house

John Kerry served on a jury this week (“I’m John Kerry, and I’m reporting for jury duty!”). He was even elected jury foreman. The AP says his “fellow jurors called him a natural leader.” Hopefully they exercised better judgment than that in coming to a verdict in the case.

Today is Augusto Pinochet’s 90th birthday (and the Bush twins’ 24th), and he’s spending it under house arrest. Good.

Speaking of house arrest, Riverbend writes that what I’ve been calling secret prisons in Iraq were no secret to people who lived near them:

The neighbors had tried to get the Americans to check the house for months - no one bothered. They finally raided it because they got information from someone in the area that it was an insurgents hiding place. I read once that in New York, if a woman is being raped, she should scream ‘fire’ instead of ‘rape’ because no one would come to save her if she was screaming ‘rape’. That’s the way it is with Iraqi torture houses – the only way they’ll check it is if you tell them it’s a terrorist cell.

From the BBC, a laundry woman’s tale:

A Nigerian state governor has denied reports that he escaped charges of money-laundering in the UK by disguising himself as a woman.

However, Diepreye Alamieyeseigha told the BBC that he could not remember other details of his journey back to the oil-rich southern Bayelsa State.

Why did the Americans come here?

Headline in a British newspaper that probably sounds more alarming to Americans than to Brits: “Murdered Head’s School in Academy Row.”

Today, some American soldiers went to deliver candy and toys to the child patients in a hospital in Mahmoudiya, Iraq. You already know this story isn’t going to end well, don’t you? But let’s pause to wonder: how were they planning to spin the Thanksgiving tale for Iraqi consumption? Well, people fleeing their homes because of religious persecution, I guess Iraqis can relate to that. Puritanical religious fanatics whose goal is to stamp out every sign of free will and joy, especially among females, that might seem familiar too (Muqtada al-Sadr is of course Arabic for Cotton Mather, and I’m pretty sure somewhere in that new constitution is the phrase “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”). White guys with guns arriving from a foreign land and taking control of all the natural resources? Check.

So the Americans went to the hospital, and a suicide bomb attack killed 30 or 34 people. Shouted one survivor, in a question that is in no way a metaphor for the wider situation, “Why did the Americans come here? They must have known they would bring the killers with them.”

And Kadima spelled backwards is Amidak. OK, I got nothing.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, in Pakistan, says that the Crusades were a bad idea after all, sorry about that.

I’ve been asking what happened to the prisoners in the secret Iraqi prison: they were transferred to Abu Ghraib, according to the BBC. And probably happy to be there. Yes, we’ve created a brand-new Iraq, where Abu Ghraib is considered the soft option, and an Iraqi prisoner at the bottom of a naked human pyramid is even now giving thanks that he is no longer in the clutches of his fellow countrymen, who we installed in power.

Ariel Sharon has finally chosen a name for his new party: Kadima, meaning “forward,” which my computer dictionary defines as “noun: an attacking player in football, hockey, or other sports.” Or possibly it indicates the direction Sharon plans to fall when the inevitable heart attack hits.

Speaking of attacking players, here are some more London Review of Books (LRB) personal ads:

I use this column principally as a sounding board for my radical philosophical theories. This time, however, I’d like some sexual intercourse. Radical philosopher and occasional lust monkey. M, 41. Box no. 22/04

Last night I had that dream again. The one were dinosaurs hadn’t been wiped out but stalked the earth for human prey. They found it too. It was you and me hiding beneath some twigs. I tried to save you but the dinosaurs sniffed you out and tore you from my arms. Then they all turned into clowns and told me that I couldn’t have a balloon because I’d been a naughty girl. When I cried, the head clown roared like a tyrannosaur and bit your head off. I looked down and noticed I’d become a dinosaur too. I felt like a herbivore. Woman, 38. Sees every social situation as an opportunity for free psychotherapy. WLTM fully-qualified psychotherapist. Box no. 22/08

I want my mummy. Man (37) with far too many issues to go into detail about in this column seeks psychoanalyst/tailor/stevedore. Whitstable. Box no. 23/07

I am not afraid to say what I feel. At this moment in time I feel anger, giddiness, and the urge to dress like a bear and forage for berries at motorway hedgerows. Man, 38. Box no. 23/09

We brushed hands in the British Library, then again in the London Review Bookshop, reaching for Musil. And then once more on the tube, getting off at Ladbroke Grove. Serial random hand-brusher (F, 32, publicity exec) demands attention, followed by more attention, followed by extended periods of self-pity. It's all me, me, me at box no. 23/10

I have known only shame. Then, last week, I experienced surprise. Man, 37. Box no. 22/06

For all my favorite LRB personals, click here.

Well, shortly I’m off to a Chinese restaurant, as is traditional, commemorating the first Thanksgiving, when the Puritans were saved from starvation by the native Chinese. “You white men call it noodles, we call it chow mein.”