All By Himself

This White House has a history of abusing its power for political purposes. When each abuse is carried out it is accompanied by some official cover story providing a narrative in which the action isn't the calculated political ploy it appears to be: Condoleeza Rice can't testify publicly because to do so would violate the separation of powers principle setting a dangerous precedent; the Plame-gate leaker didn't know Valerie Plame was undercover; etc.

The bargain in which Rice's public under-oath testimony was traded for Bush not having to speak to the commission without Cheney by his side marks the first time I can remember in which BushCo executed a political gambit that was so transparently political one can't make up any reasonable story to explain it besides the truth. Go ahead and try, I challenge you.

I wish someone in the gaggle would ask the following question:

Scottie, for what reason did the White House demand that President Bush and Vice President Cheney speak with the Sept. 11 commission together rather than separately?

The Good Old Independent

The London Independent just covered the Sibel Edmonds story:

A former translator for the FBI with top-secret security clearance says she has provided information to the panel investigating the 11 September attacks which proves senior officials knew of al-Qa'ida's plans to attack the US with aircraft months before the strikes happened.

She said the claim by the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, that there was no such information was "an outrageous lie".

Sibel Edmonds said she spent more than three hours in a closed session with the commission's investigators providing information that was circulating within the FBI in the spring and summer of 2001 suggesting that an attack using aircraft was just months away and the terrorists were in place. The Bush administration, meanwhile, has sought to silence her and has obtained a gagging order from a court by citing the rarely used "state secrets privilege".

She told The Independent yesterday: "I gave [the commission] details of specific investigation files, the specific dates, specific target information, specific managers in charge of the investigation. I gave them everything so that they could go back and follow up. This is not hearsay. These are things that are documented. These things can be established very easily."

She added: "There was general information about the time-frame, about methods to be used ­ but not specifically about how they would be used ­ and about people being in place and who was ordering these sorts of terror attacks. There were other cities that were mentioned. Major cities ­ with skyscrapers."

Canada Looking Better and Better ...

A Canadian federal judge just ruled that downloading mp3's does not infringe on the record companies' copyrights: (from "Swapping music files allowed, federal judge rules", G&M; 3/1/04)

The music industry's fight against illegal file sharing suffered a major setback yesterday when a Federal Court judge ruled that swapping songs on the Internet for personal use does not break the law.

"Downloading a song for personal use does not amount to infringement," Mr. Justice Konrad von Finckenstein of the Federal Court of Canada wrote in his decision. "I cannot see a real difference between a library that places a photocopy machine in a room full of copyrighted material and a computer user that places a personal copy on a shared directory."

The Canadian Recording Industry Association was seeking a court order to identify 29 so-called uploaders, Internet users it claimed had illegally posted hundreds of songs illegally on the Web. Judge von Finckenstein refused to grant the order, arguing that placing a song in an on-line music-sharing directory such as Kazaa "does not amount to distribution." Without the uploaders' names, CRIA cannot file lawsuits seeking damages.

Internet service providers hailed the ruling as a triumph for the privacy rights of their customers. But there was general agreement that CRIA's evidence was weak and the music industry signalled the fight will continue.

So, I guess, while you're waiting for your mp3's to download, you can walk over to the pharmacy and buy some pot -- Oh, Canada.

Fallujah is the graveyard of Americans

So I'm sure most readers have heard about the contractors who were killed and mutilated in Fallujah today. If not here's this:

In one of the bloodiest and most horrifying days since the end of the U.S.-led war in Iraq, five U.S. troops and four American civilian contractors were killed in separate attacks in the Sunni Triangle west of Baghdad. After an ambush on two vehicles carrying the civilian contractors in Fallujah, jubilant Iraqis burned and mutilated the dead, then dragged two corpses through the streets and hung them from a bridge spanning the Euphrates River.

The brutal treatment of the bodies occurred after the contractors — four American employees of a North Carolina security company — were killed in a rebel attack on their two SUVs in the city about 35 miles west of Baghdad, scene of some of the worst violence on both sides of the conflict since the beginning of the American occupation a year ago.

[ ... ]

U.S. officials, who spoke with NBC News on condition of anonymity, said that all four contractors were Americans who worked for Blackwater USA of Moyock, N.C. The company later issued a statement confirming that, but said their identities had not yet been established.

[ ... ]

Chanting “Fallujah is the graveyard of Americans,” residents cheered after the grisly assault on two four-wheel-drive civilian vehicles, which left both in flames. Others chanted, “We sacrifice our blood and souls for Islam.”

Associated Press Television News pictures showed one man beating a charred corpse with a metal pole. Others tied a yellow rope to a body, hooked it to a car and dragged it down the main street of town. Two blackened and mangled corpses were hung from a green iron bridge across the Euphrates.

What the mainstream media hasn't really been covering, however, is the occupation of the so-called "contractors". They were mercenaries. Here's Bill Berkowitz, of Z's Conservative Watch fame, discussing Blackwater USA:

With the casualty toll ticking ever upward and troops stretched thin on the ground, the Bush administration is looking to mercenaries to help control Iraq. These soldiers-for-hire are veterans of some of the most repressive military forces in the world, including that of the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and South Africa's apartheid regime.

In February, Blackwater USA, a North Carolina-based Pentagon contractor, began hiring former combat personnel in Chile, offering them up to $4,000 a month to guard oil wells in Iraq. The company flew the first batch of 60 former commandos to a training camp in North Carolina. These recruits will eventually wind up in Iraq where they will spend six months to a year.

"We scour the ends of the earth to find professionals – the Chilean commandos are very, very professional and they fit within the Blackwater system," Gary Jackson, the president of Blackwater USA, told the Guardian.

While Blackwater USA is not nearly as well known as Halliburton or Bechtel – two mega-corporations making a killing off the reconstruction of Iraq – it nevertheless is doing quite well financially thanks to the White House's war on terror. The company specializes in firearm, tactics and security training and in October 2003, according to Mother Jones magazine, the company won a $35.7 million contract to train more than 10,000 sailors from Virginia, Texas, and California each year in 'force protection.'

Business has been booming for Blackwater, which now owns, as its press release boasts, "the largest privately-owned firearms training facility in the nation." Jackson told the Guardian, "We have grown 300 percent over each of the past three years and we are small compared to the big ones. We have a very small niche market, we work towards putting out the cream of the crop, the best."

Sibel Edmonds and the Use of Airplanes, etc.

Today on Democracy Now, Amy Goodman interviewed Sibel Edmonds a former FBI translator who claims she's seen documents that prove beyond a shadow of a doubt the United States had intelligence prior to 9/11 about a terrorist attack involving airplanes. She calls Rice's claims to the contrary "an outrageous lie". Here's Salon on Edmonds:

Edmonds' charge comes when the Bush White House is trying to fend off former counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke's testimony that it did not take serious measures to combat the threat of Islamic terrorism, and al-Qaida specifically, in the months leading up to 9/11.

[ ... ]

She was assigned to the FBI's investigation into Sept. 11 attacks and other counterterrorism and counterintelligence cases, where she translated reams of documents seized by agents who, for the previous year, had been rounding up suspected terrorists.

She says those tapes, often connected to terrorism, money laundering or other criminal activity, provide evidence that should have made apparent that an al- Qaida plot was in the works. Edmonds cannot talk in detail about the tapes publicly because she's been under a Justice Department gag order since 2002.

"President Bush said they had no specific information about Sept. 11, and that's accurate," says Edmonds. "But there was specific information about use of airplanes, that an attack was on the way two or three months beforehand and that several people were already in the country by May of 2001. They should've alerted the people to the threat we're facing."

According to the Democracy Now interview, Edmonds attempted to get a hold of some of the documents she saw via the Freedom of Information Act, stating she "wanted to get them out and make them public", leading to the gag order mentioned in the Salon piece. Ashcroft circumvented the Freedom of Information Act by citing the state secrets privilege:

To prevent disclosure of certain classified and sensitive national security information, Attorney General Ashcroft today asserted the state secrets privilege in Sibel Edmonds v. Department of Justice. [ ... ] The state secrets privilege is well-established in federal law. It has been recognized by U.S. courts as far back as the 19th century, and allows the Executive Branch to safeguard vital information regarding the national security or diplomatic relations. In the past, this privilege has been applied many times to protect our national secrets from disclosure, and to require dismissal of cases when other litigation mechanisms would be inadequate. It is an absolute privilege that renders the information unavailable in litigation

In the Democracy Now interview Edmonds makes the following statement regarding the Justice Department's invocation of the state secrets privilege:

[The Justice Department says] this privilege is very rare and is asserted to prevent certain information from becoming public or hurting diplomatic relations and I would underline this phrase 'diplomatic relations' several times.

It's not legal for her to elaborate on the content of the relevant documents, but this statement is obviously a clue. She seems to be implying the evidence of the eminent terrorist act implicated or was embarrassing to someone important, probably -- I would guess -- a powerful Saudi.

In a related story, I believe Atrios and Xymphora have both recently mentioned that Rice's statement to the effect that no one could guess terrorists would use airplanes as missiles is contradicted by the rumors about an airplane-based assassination attempt on Bush at the G8 conference in Genoa. Well, just to document this point for readers who don't remember the original story, here's a NY Post story from June 2001:

Bin Laden Plots Bush Hit
by Niles Lathem and Allan Hall

June 13, 2001 -- International security forces are working furiously to thwart a plot by Saudi terror master Osama bin Laden to assassinate President Bush and other world leaders at a major economic summit next month. Italian officials say they've been warned by German intelligence services that bin Laden is secretly financing neo-Nazi skinhead groups throughout Europe to commit acts of violence during the summit, sources told The Post.

The attack could also come from the sky in the form of a bizarre James Bond-style strike by remote-control airplanes packed with plastic explosives, Germany's largest newspaper reported yesterday.

The planes would fly into the compound where Bush and the heads of state of major European powers will be meeting at the July 20 G-8 summit in Genoa, Italy, the Bild newspaper reported.

Experts said bin Laden's organization is known to have a lot of technical expertise and the airplane attack is not necessarily beyond its capabilities.

Officials at the White House and the U.S. Secret Service, assigned to presidential protection, said they are aware of reports of possible threats to the president during the Genoa trip, but declined further comment.

Counterterrorism sources told The Post last night the plot was uncovered after dozens of suspected Islamic militants linked to bin Laden's Al-Qaeda global terror network were arrested in Frankfurt, Germany, and Milan, Italy, in April.

Italian police are said to be taking the bin Laden threat very seriously.

Government and other terror experts believe bin Laden has been looking for an opportunity to launch another terrorist attack at a high-profile American target - his first since the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen last October.

"I have always believed that he would like to try to attack one of these [G-8] meetings," said Kenneth Katzman, a former CIA analyst now with the Congressional Research Service.

I hadn't remembered that Osama bin Laden had been specifically implicated.

White House Caves to Public Pressure

Rice is going to testify under oath before the 911 commission; here's the AP's account. I like the headline on the AP story, "White House to Let Rice Testify in Public" -- makes it sound like she was chomping at the bit to get in there and give the American people the truth they deserve, under oath no less, but mean Mr. Cheney or someone didn't want to play games with national security -- such steadfastness.

(I think the title of this post more accurately reflects the current state of affairs, but that's just me.)

On Kissing Mad Dog's Ass

Robert Fisk's most recent Independent column chronicles the amusing and somewhat depressing sight of Tony Blair prostrating himself before Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Amusing because Gaddafi is a walking caricature of a power-mad dictator, a caricature Fisk seems to relish elucidating -- we hear about Gaddafi's Amazonian female bodyguards, nutty sense of humor, bizarre literary aspirations, etc. -- but it is depressing because of the realization that this is where Bush's war has led us: cozying up to the regimes of autocratic thugs. The point of Blair's farce is, of course, the implication that Gaddafi is behaving himself recently because of Bush's invasion of Iraq. He behaves himself by no longer pursuing a nuclear weapons program that, as Fisk notes, there's not a lot of reason to believe was ever more than a convenient fiction:

Nor does the narrative of history make our Prime Minister's voyage to the Orient any saner. First of all, he sends our soldiers into Iraq because Saddam has weapons of mass destruction which no longer exist; then he pays a social call on Libya because Gaddafi really has had weapons of mass destruction all along. Or has he?

For one of the strangest elements to the Libyan saga is the newness of all those centrifuges and nuclear gizmos which the UN, the Brits and the Americans have been "finding" in Gaddafistan. Were they really there for decades? When did Gaddafi decide to install them? And how come the US intelligence service - which could identify non-existent railroad chemical weapons labs in Iraq - failed to pick up the radiation from Gaddafi's supposed nuclear programme? It was a humble Independent reader - thank you, Willy McCourt of Manchester - who pointed out to me that Libya has a population of only six million; "imagine Ireland having a nuclear programme and nobody knowing about it," he wrote. Quite so.

Indeed, you can say what you want about Gaddafi but the man has a talent for business and a talent for politics, and it looks like he played Bush and Blair perfectly. Blair's visit to Libya is the final plank in a bridge Gaddafi has been cobbling together for a long time.

In 1988 the UN imposed sanctions on Libya for refusing to hand over two men who were allegedly involved in the Lockerbie bombing. The sanctions, much less severe than the ones imposed on Iraq, were nonetheless a major thorn in Gaddafi's side; a vane showman, he hated being isolated from the world, unable to pursue his lifelong goal of becoming a revered statesman of Mideastern politics, the unifier of the Mideastern world. Eventually Gaddafi relented, extradited the suspected terrorists to the Netherlands, and the sanctions were suspended in early 1999. Gaddafi, unhappy with the lack of support he received from the Arab world during Libya's ten years of isolation, began a campaign to reinvent himself as a non-radical, non-mad-dog leader and as an elder statesman and unifier of Africa, launching a series of high-profile meetings cum photo-ops with Nelson Mandela, seemingly his new idol. Here's a 1999 Reuters article on Gaddafi's transformation:

Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi is celebrating his 30th anniversary in power this week on a new note of openness to the outside world as the barriers isolating his country from the West begin to come down.

If the first event -- an international investment symposium on Thursday -- is anything to go by there is a new pragmatism in the air Tripoli, the Libyan capital, that under Gaddafi has been a centre for anti-Western invective.

Always capable of springing surprises, the mercurial colonel opened the anniversary celebrations by appearing to reverse years of opposition to foreign investment, telling foreign businessmen at the symposium that foreign investment was now welcome in Libya.

[ ... ]

But this week the usual excited anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist, anti-American rhetoric of Libyan anniversary speeches appears to have been replaced by a new low-key caution.

"If you want to invest in Libya, you are welcome,'' Gaddafi said.

"Now we can throw away the rifle and work for peace and development," he recently told a French newspaper.

[ ... ]

He is still a long way from full rehabilitation in the eyes of suspicious Western governments and of Amnesty International which accuses him of human rights violations.

But he is not nearly so isolated as he was a year ago.

Next week Libya hosts a special organization of African Unity summit called at his suggestion to review the 36-year-old OAU charter.

Abandoning his Pan-Arab dream after a series of failed unification pacts with Arab countries, Gaddafi is now looking south and proposing the creation of the United States of Africa.

After 911 Gaddafi joined the rest of the world in supporting the United States and condemning terrorism, calling al-Qaeda members "crazy" and urging Libyans to donate blood for American relief efforts*. Hawks, of course, view such actions as Gaddafi quaking in his boots at the thought of an American attack on Libya, but such an assessment is a pretty big stretch given (a) Gaddafi's ongoing efforts to moderate his image for the past decade as sketched above, (b) the fact that according to a US State Department report from 1999 Libya had not been supporting international terrorism for "a number of years"*, and (c) the fact that none of the fiery rhetoric from the Bush administration following 911 even so much as mentioned Libya. Rather, it makes a lot more sense to view Gaddafi's post-911 behavior in light of his ongoing project to become a dignified African statesman and to bring foreign investment into Libya. Agreeing to put a stop to a nuclear program that didn't exist was Gaddafi's checkmate move in normalizing relations with the West.

To the extent that Gaddafi's new moderate image is a good thing, it is largely a result of the success of the framework of international law that BushCo belittles at every opportunity and of the success of the general strategy of treating acts of terrorism as crimes to be dealt with by the world's police apparatus rather than acts of war best stopped by military aggression, the neoconservatives' preferred remedy for all ailments. The UN security council, the Dutch international criminal court, sanctions, and banal multi-lateral diplomacy worked in this case, leading to a man Reagan called a "mad dog" making public statements against radical Islamicists. Still, the Bush administration offers up Gaddafi as a victory of its failed policies hoping the world will simply ignore the facts of the matter -- these people seem to be immune to many things; one of them is irony.

For Keeps and a Single Day: The Tin-Whistle of American Letters

The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man. -- Nelson Algren

Today is Nelson Algren's birthday. If he was alive he'd be ninety-five. Although best known now for a crummy Otto Preminger movie made from his most famous work and for his affair with Simone De Beauvior, in his day Algren was considered one of the greatest novelists of his generation; Hemingway said that he was better than Faulkner, etc. But Algren never had a lot of luck and wouldn't have known what to do with success anyway, a champion of underdogs and lost causes--he was always something of a lost cause himself.

The son of Swedish immigrants, he grew up on Chicago's west side, hoboed his way through the South during the depression, and ended up entering the world of literature by way of a WPA program. Algren went to jail for a little while because he stole a typewriter to finish his first novel -- he was an American's American. He was also, as per the name of this blog, a leftist of the American-persuasion. Here's how De Beauvior described him in her fictional account of their relationship:

At first, I had found it amusing meeting in the flesh that classic American species: self-made leftist writer. [ ... ] Through his stories, you got the feeling that he claimed no rights on life and that nevertheless he had always had a passionate desire to live. I liked that mixture of modesty and eagerness."

His greatest work was The Man with the Golden Arm, a bitterly beautiful account of the life and death of a junkie in the slums of 40's Chicago. Algren depicted a world of junkies, pimps, petty thieves, cynical bartenders, drug dealers, drunks, gamblers, thugs, freaks, corrupt politicians, and prostitutes who "just want to settle down with a nice pick-pocket" with tremendous lyricism and compassion; he wrote, as someone or other said of Raymond Chandler, like a slumming angel.

Anyway, I've made it a minor mission in my life to evangelize on behalf of the genius of Nelson Algren. He, afterall, more so than anyone else, was responsible for my conversion to the good side of the political spectrum when I encountered his writing in college, more than a decade ago now. So the next time you're in some dive somewhere, have a boiler-maker for Nelson Algren, and if you're looking for a novel try The Man with the Golden Arm.

Here's a short film by Warren Leming and Carmine Cervi featuring narration lifted from the man's writing and interviews.

March 20th, East Timor

Of all of the demonstrations that took place last Saturday I think this one was the most courageous given the history of East Timor.

The East Timorese activists read the following statement outside the US embassy:

The United States Must Respect Iraqi Sovereignty and Global Peace

One year ago today, the United States, supported by the United Kingdom, Australia and so-called Coalition Forces, invaded Iraq to find Saddamâ??s weapons of mass destruction which they claimed threaten the peace and stability worldwide. However by invading Iraq the United States and its allies refused to respect the sovereignty of the Iraqi people, especially the right of the people to determine their own future. The invasion and subsequent illegal occupation of Iraq took place after the U.S. and its allied forces ignored the cries of more than 10 million people around the whole who protested the impending invasion. They also defied the United Nations that did not agree to use force in Iraq, but suggested the continuation of peaceful negotiations and inspections to see if Iraq had any weapons of mass destruction.

Hans Blix, chief of the UN investigation team prior to the U.S. invasion, said his team had not found any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, removing the reason the United States used to support their invasion. However the United States and its allies went on to oppress and kill the people of Iraq, especially their innocent children and women. Recently, U.S. president George Bush admitted that the occupying forces have not found any weapons of mass destruction, but he continues to argue that Saddam Hussein supported and protected terrorist organizations such as Al-Qaeda, even though there is no evidence to support this statement.

After the occupation forces in Iraq arrested Saddam, Bush said that he had saved the people of Iraq from Saddam's regime and therefore he assumed responsibility to free the people. But how can a war-monger liberate the people of Iraq?

The current situation in Iraq is that many people have already died from the occupation, and many more will die. The people who suffered with the invasion will suffer even more. In Iraq, the United States has killed with its economic embargo, which starved hundreds of thousands of children to death, and the current foreign occupation denies people their right to determine their own future.

The United States talks about democracy, liberty and human rights, but in reality the U.S. has installed and supported many dictatorships around the world, like Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Suharto in Indonesia, closing its eyes to human rights violations inflicted by these governments, including against the people of East Timor. For many decades, the United States trained soldiers from military dictatorships in Latin America, Indonesia and other countries how to better torture their people.

Because of all this, we understand the United States' concept of liberation. Using this concept, the United States supported Suharto's invasion of our country on 7 December 1975, and continued its support throughout the occupation by his brutal military regime until 1999. During 24 years of illegal occupation, more then 200,000 people were killed or disappeared; many children lost their parents and other members of their families. Today we see our friends in Iraq suffering the same fate.

Last year, we East Timorese joined people around the world who love peace and justice in our cry not to invade Iraq. The United States refused to listen, and pursued its disastrous invasion. Today, we again join with people worldwide to demonstrate that we are still against the illegal and deadly occupation of Iraq.

We are angry that the United States will not leave Iraq by June 2004, because we know that there will be many more victims. Therefore, in order to promote true democracy and peace in Iraq, and to stop the ongoing killing of Iraqi and other people, we demand:

* The United States and its coalition to immediately withdraw from Iraq, allowing the people of Iraq to decide their own future.

* The United States to abandon its illegitimate policy of pre-emptive war, and to respect international laws against aggressive or invasive war, and help to create a peaceful world environment.

* The International Community, through the United Nations, to create an international tribunal to prosecute and punish those who directed the invasion of Iraq, similar to the international tribunal which needs to be created to try Suharto and others for their crimes against humanity in East Timor.

King & King

Lynn Kendall at Unnatural History has posted a Publisher's Weekly article about the controversy surrounding a socially progressive picture book:

King & King, a 2002 picture book in which a prince rejects a series of princesses and marries another handsome prince, has aroused an angry challenge in Wilmington, N.C., and brought a mixture of scorn and kudos upon the book's publisher, Tricycle Press.

After first-grader Olivia Hartsell brought the book home on March 1, her parents Michael and Tonya Hartsell complained to administrators at Rachel Freeman Elementary School. The Hartsells objected to the book's acknowledgement of homosexuality and also of divorce ("When I was your age, I'd been married twice already," the prince's mother tells him, in encouraging him to find a mate). The Hartsells have since threatened to enroll their daughter in a different school and refused to return the book to the Freeman school library, for fear some other child might check it out. The book's due date is March 30.

Further, the Hartsells contacted the national media and received coverage through AP, CNN and ABC. Tricycle Press publisher Nicole Geiger arrived at work yesterday to find a deluge of messages. "There's a lot of vitriol in this country right now, and hate mail is very much outnumbering the letters of support," Geiger says. "But I wouldn't say we've been directly threatened, and many wonderful organizations have come to our defense."

Tricycle has received support from the Lambda Literary Foundation, along with the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression. "The book is there as information for kids who are curious about the subject," says ABFFE president Chris Finan. "It's First Amendment-protected, and they can't go pulling books out of the school library just because some parents are offended by the material."

Beverly Becker, associate director of the American Library Association's Office of Intellectual Freedom, concurs, saying, "Libraries are there to serve the entire community. It's important that they have books that address the issues of the day. The very reason this book is getting so much interest is that it addresses an issue that's important right now. To me that argues as to why it belongs in the library--it's in the public debate, and kids are part of that wider world too."

Z Enters the Blogosphere

Well ... I've got two new interesting additions to the blogroll:

Goodbye Maggie
Turning the Tide

Both are affiliated with the radical left site Znet. Goodbye Maggie is going to be a multi-author blog focusing on alternatives to capitalism, in particular Michael Albert's participatory economics, a socialist economic model that seeks to allocate resources within a society according to the democratic principles America is supposed to value and to eliminate all instances of illegitimate hierarchical authority from the society. It looks like Michael Albert is going to be posting personally, which will be a great addition to the blogosphere. Michael is a longtime activist of the Vietnam protest generation, which is probably apparent from the blog's title, a reference to Dylan's "Maggie's Farm". He was one of the founders of Z Magazine and South End Press, still run according to participatory economic principles to this day, and is currently the primary moderator/sysop of Znet.

Turning the Tide is Noam Chomsky's blog. Before you get too excited, understand that Chomsky is pretty much a technophobe, so I don't think Noam is going to be posting personally. Rather, some Z-affiliated person, possibly whoever is currently posting Chomsky's replies to the Z sustainer forum ChomskyChat, is going to cull Chomsky's writings and post relevant pieces to the blog. If nothing else it should be a good source of ChomskyChat posts for people who aren't Z sustainers.

Looks like there's going to be a few other Z blogs that aren't up yet:

Another World
Hotel Satire
Thought Dreams

Hotel Satire is a column by Lydia Sargent in Z Magazine, so it's pretty clear what that's going to be. Another World is a reference to the slogan of the World Social Forum, "Another world is possible" so maybe it will have something to do with globalization. And the phrase "Thought Dreams" is another Dylan reference.

[Thank to The Bone for the tip]

Not So Obscure At The Moment...

Dick Cheney said the following on the Limbaugh show a couple of days ago:

So I guess, the other thing I would say about Dick Clarke is that he was here throughout those eight years, going back to 1993, and the first attack on the World Trade Center; and '98, when the embassies were hit in East Africa; in 2000, when the USS Cole was hit. And the question that ought to be asked is, what were they doing in those days when he was in charge of counterterrorism efforts?

Here's a Washington Post article answering Cheney's question, in which Clarke gets criticized for being too focused on the possibility of catastrophic terrorism: (from "An Obscure Chief in U.S. War on Terror", WP, 4/2/00)

Richard Clarke witnessed the dawn of the millennium in a top-secret government communications vault, monitoring intelligence traffic for any sign of activity by Islamic terrorist groups loyal to Osama bin Laden. It was not until midnight in California--3 a.m. Washington time--that the Clinton administration's counterterrorism chief finally permitted himself a celebratory sip of champagne.
Four weeks before, Clarke had sketched out a plan on the whiteboard in his office at the National Security Council for neutralizing the latest threat from the Afghanistan-based Saudi exile. Approved by President Clinton and his top foreign policy advisers, Clarke's plan became the basis of administration efforts to prevent bin Laden supporters from ringing in the New Year with what officials believed could be dozens, perhaps hundreds, of American deaths in a series of simultaneous attacks from the Middle East to the West Coast.

Central to Clarke's strategy was a major disruption effort, orchestrated by the CIA and implemented by friendly intelligence agencies around the world, aimed at harassing members of bin Laden's al Qaeda organization and forcing them onto the defensive. Other moves included putting the FBI on a heightened state of alert, dispatching counterterrorism teams to Europe and having the State Department issue an informal ultimatum to Afghanistan to keep bin Laden under control.

U.S. officials credit these countermeasures--and what many acknowledge was sheer "good luck"--with a peaceful start to the new year. But the millennium alert--initially triggered by reports of a plan to attack American and Israeli tourists in Jordan--also underlined the influence of one of the least known but most controversial members of Clinton's national security team.

Operating from an Old Executive Office Building suite once inhabited by Col. Oliver North, Clarke has played a key role both in defining the new post-Cold War security threats to the United States and coming up with a response. But he also has come to personify what some critics, particularly abroad, view as an unhealthy American obsession with high-tech threats and a "Fortress America" approach to dealing with them.

As the national coordinator for infrastructure protection and counterterrorism, Clarke has presided over a huge increase in counterterrorism budgets over the past five years to meet a wide array of new--and some would argue, still hypothetical--challenges, such as cyber warfare or chemical or biological attacks in New York or Washington. Last month, the administration submitted an $11.1 billion request to Congress to strengthen "domestic preparedness" against a terrorist attack. In the meantime, by contrast, security assistance to the former Soviet Union to tackle proliferation problems has been stuck in the region of $800 million a year.

"In America, there is a morbid fascination with greater-than-life technological threats, which you don't see in other countries," says Ehud Sprinzak, a terrorism expert at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. "Clarke has an ax to grind. It makes him big. If nobody talked about catastrophic terrorism, what would people like Dick Clarke be doing?"

Such talk irritates national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, Clarke's direct supervisor, who insists that the threat of large-scale terrorist attacks on U.S. soil is "a reality, not a perception." "We would be irresponsible if we did not take this seriously," he says. "I hope that in 10 years' time, they will say we did too much, not too little."

Clarke's warnings about America's vulnerability to new kinds of terrorist attack have found a receptive ear in Clinton. With little fanfare, the president has begun to articulate a new national security doctrine in which terrorists and other "enemies of the nation-state" are coming to occupy the position once filled by a monolithic communist superpower. In January, he departed from the prepared text of his State of the Union address to predict that terrorists and organized criminals "with increasing access to ever more sophisticated chemical and biological weapons" will pose "the major security threat" to the United States in 10 to 20 years.

"We should have a very low barrier in terms of acting when there is a threat of weapons of mass destruction being used against American citizens," says Clarke, brushing aside suggestions that a preoccupation with bin Laden has caused errors in judgment, such as the decision to retaliate for the attack on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998 by bombing a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, suspected of producing chemical agents. "We should not have a barrier of evidence that can be used in a court of law," Clarke says.