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Learn about the trials and tribulations of our fighting forces facing resistance in occupying Iraq... in their own words. Why trust the pundits?
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The post-9/11 age of American empire will close not with a bang but a whimper, suffocated by the laws of arithmetic, the constraints of public financing, and the limits of foreign borrowing.
What remains to be determined is how much the U.S. will pay - in lost and ruined lives, as well as bills for future generations - and how many enemies it will make throughout the world, before coming to grips with reality.
The Unbearable Cost Of Empire in Business Week.
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"(H)ow violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder." - Albert Einstein
"Long before the US military got involved there directly, Vietnam was the CIA's war. At first they waged it on behalf of the French, who struggled for nine years, from 1945 to 1954, to recapture their one-time colony (despite the war's unpopularity with the French public). Even with CIA mercenaries fighting alongside the French, and air support from the CIA's Air America (at the time, the largest 'private' airline in the world), the effort proved to be in vain. After the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in early 1954, the CIA plucked Ngo Dinh Diem out of obscurity in the United States and established him as the ruler of South Vietnam. He arrived in Saigon in mid-1954, controlling nothing except the complete dedication of CIA's covert action warriors. Using the 1954-1955 Geneva-Conference-imposed cease-fire, the CIA ran propaganda and covert operations in North Vietnam - including the implied threat of nuclear destruction - to scare and lure the minority Catholic population to migrate south. Once in South Vietnam, the CIA and the U.S. military formed them into an army, police force and government for Diem. Catholic Vietnamese never represented more than 10 percent of South Vietnam's total population but under Diem, a co-religionist, that small group enjoyed all status and privileges. From 1955 to 1960 Diem, pushed by his U.S. advisers, attempted to assert his authority over rural South Vietnam. His minions (assisted, directed and inspired by the CIA) killed, tortured and
imprisoned tens of thousands who resisted his unfair rule. It was this vicious repression that eventually forced the North Vietnamese to join with their compatriots in the South to fight against Diem and his U.S. backers.
"It is also necessary to whip up the (American) population in support of foreign adventures. Usually the population is pacifist, just like they were during the First World War. The public sees no reason to get involved in foreign adventures, killing, and torture. So you have to whip them up. And to whip them up you have to frighten them. Bernays (Edward Bernays, propaganda expert) himself had an important achievement in this respect. He was the person who ran the public relations campaign for the United Fruit Company in 1954, when the
United States moved in to overthrow the capitalist-democratic government of Guatemala and installed a murderous death-squad society, which remains that way to the present day with constant infusions of U.S. aid to prevent in more than empty form democratic deviations." - Noam Chomsky
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If you truly wish to know what our coalition force is really up against in Iraq & Afghanistan... try looking up the candid accounts from one of the boots on the ground...
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Shock and Awe, Insha'allah. "Moe, Larry, and Curly Time"
For YOUR sake & theirs', I hope you don't know anyone serving in Iraq right now!
I realize the goal is to hide as many of the strings on the new Iraqi puppet goverment as possible, but this strikes me as a profoundly unwise move:
Coalition officials said they would hand over the civilian part of Baghdad International Airport to Iraqi authorities about July 1 and the military side by mid-August, a senior coalition official said.
If this is just an extension of Iraq's fig-leaf sovereignty - with the U.S. military still firmly in charge - that's one thing. But before coalition officials let any of the new Iraqi security forces take control of the BIA runways, they might want to read the preceding paragraph in that same news story:
An Iraqi police officer was killed and five Iraqi civilians were wounded when a roadside bomb exploded near a U.S. convoy in Ramadi. U.S. Marines arrested seven Iraqis, including six members of the Iraqi Civil Defense Force, for alleged involvement in the attack, military officials said. (emphasis added)
Personally, I'd give 'em Saddam instead of the airport. Because the way things are going, there just may come a time where those same senior coalition officials all want to get out of town, all at once. Baghdad isn't Saigon, and simply helicoptering everybody off the embassy roof to an aircraft carrier waiting off shore isn't going to be an option.
I'm no military expert, but even I know it's never a good idea to let the enemy take up positions across your line of retreat.
- billmon @ whiskey bar [a superlative haunt that's constantly brimming with camaderie and good strong spirits
WASHINGTON (AP)--The mounting deaths and injuries to civilian contractors in Iraq could cost the federal government millions of dollars for hundreds of workers' compensation claims.
Federal law requires all U.S. government contractors and subcontractors to obtain workers' compensation insurance for civilian employees who work overseas. If an injury or death claim is related to a "war-risk hazard,'' the War Hazards Compensation Act provides for government reimbursement to insurance carriers.
Since January 2003, there have been claims for 476 injuries and 80 deaths in Iraq.
fair question: after June 1st does the Iraqi Government take responsibility for claims?
"The primitive moral vision Bush subscribes to - in which the world is divided into the good, 'freedom-loving' people of America and 'evildoers' like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein - is another inflexible schema that imposes order on the internal chaos that's
always threatening to rise up and swamp him."
- Georgetown psychoanalyst Justin Frank, Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President
Source: Froomkin, White House Briefings, Washington Post
“...In the latest incident, saboteurs attacked the Kirkuk-Turkey pipeline on Sunday, the security chief for Iraq's Northern Oil Company (NOC) said yesterday, shortly after another official of the firm had denied any such attack.
"Assailants detonated sound grenades on the pipeline Sunday at dawn, [75 miles] east of Kirkuk, causing damage, and a loss of a huge quantity of oil," said company security chief Ghazi Talabani.
Ghazi Talabani was assassinated during another pipeline attack yesterday, June 16.
I hear there's an opening for an ambitious pipeline security chief in Iraq. Are YOU up for it?
The late Ghazi Talabani - a qualified obituary
The Erinys group that the late, unlamented Ghazi Talabani was fronting is a UK-South African outfit. Erinys Management recruited 350 foreign soldiers, many of them ex-special forces from the hey-day of apartheid South Africa, to command some 14,500 Iraqi soldiers. In 2003
Erinys secured an $80,000,000 from the Coalition Provisional Authority to guard oil installations in Iraq. Even though Erinys had no experience at all in the Middle East it secured the contract without having to complete such messy formalities as going through competitive tendering arrangements.
Erinys South Africa formed a joint venture, Erinys Iraq, with one Faisal Daghastani, son of Tamara Daghastani, one of Ahmed Chalabi's most trusted confidantes and heavily instrumental in setting up the Iraqi National Congress. (INC doesn't have quite the same majesty as ANC does it?)
So, $80,000,000 buys a lot of support, hires quite a few guns (Erinys is often referred to in Baghdad as 'Chalabi's private militia), and needs a good legal mind to keep track of the cash. How fortunate Erinys was then, to secure the services of Salam Chalabi, nephew of
Ahmed and wannabe prosecutor of Saddam Husayn, as the company's lawyer.
And how fortunate too, that last month, just before Ahmed's alleged 'fall from grace', that Erinys was re-awarded the private security contract for guarding Iraqi oil for another year. Even though Bremer's CPA was on the brink of extinction it's nice that he was able to look after his friends.
Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish mafioso, is a longstanding co-plotter with Ahmed Chalabi. The execution of his cousin Ghazi Talabani will doubtless make some American politicians and certain returned Iraqi exiles frown, but to most people in Iraq his death will be viewed as a 'popular hit'
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by Thom Hartmann
The 70th anniversary wasn't noticed in the United States, and was barely reported in the corporate media. But the Germans remembered well that fateful day seventy years ago - February 27, 1933. They commemorated the anniversary by joining in demonstrations for peace that mobilized citizens all across the world.
It started when the government, in the midst of a worldwide economic crisis, received reports of an imminent terrorist attack. A foreign ideologue had launched feeble attacks on a few famous buildings, but the media largely ignored his relatively small efforts. The intelligence services knew, however, that the odds were he would eventually succeed. (Historians are still arguing whether or not rogue elements in the intelligence service helped the terrorist; the most recent research implies they did not.)
But the warnings of investigators were ignored at the highest levels, in part because the government was distracted; the man who claimed to be the nation's leader had not been elected by a majority vote and the majority of citizens claimed he had no right to the powers he coveted. He was a simpleton, some said, a cartoon character of a man who saw things in black-and-white terms and didn't have the intellect to understand the subtleties of running a nation in a complex and internationalist world. His coarse use of language - reflecting his political roots in a southernmost state - and his simplistic and often-inflammatory nationalistic rhetoric offended the aristocrats, foreign leaders, and the well-educated elite in the government and media. And, as a young man, he'd joined a secret society with an occult-sounding name and bizarre initiation rituals that involved skulls and human bones.
Nonetheless, he knew the terrorist was going to strike (although he didn't know where or when), and he had already considered his response. When an aide brought him word that the nation's most prestigious building was ablaze, he verified it was the terrorist who had struck and then rushed to the scene and called a press conference.
"You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch in history," he proclaimed, standing in front of the burned-out building, surrounded by national media. "This fire," he said, his voice trembling with emotion, "is the beginning." He used the occasion - "a sign from God," he called it - to declare an all-out war on terrorism and its ideological sponsors, a people, he said, who traced their origins to the Middle East and found motivation for their evil deeds in their religion.
Two weeks later, the first detention center for terrorists was built in Oranianberg to hold the first suspected allies of the infamous terrorist. In a national outburst of patriotism, the leader's flag was everywhere, even printed large in newspapers suitable for window display.
Within four weeks of the terrorist attack, the nation's now-popular leader had pushed through legislation - in the name of combating terrorism and fighting the philosophy he said spawned it - that suspended constitutional guarantees of free speech, privacy, and habeas corpus. Police could now intercept mail and wiretap phones; suspected terrorists could be imprisoned without specific charges and without access to their lawyers; police could sneak into people's homes without warrants if the cases involved terrorism.
To get his patriotic "Decree on the Protection of People and State" passed over the objections of concerned legislators and civil libertarians, he agreed to put a 4-year sunset provision on it: if the national emergency provoked by the terrorist attack was over by then, the freedoms and rights would be returned to the people, and the police agencies would be re-restrained. Legislators would later say they hadn't had time to read the bill before voting on it.
Immediately after passage of the anti-terrorism act, his federal police agencies stepped up their program of arresting suspicious persons and holding them without access to lawyers or courts. In the first year only a few hundred were interred, and those who objected were largely ignored by the mainstream press, which was afraid to offend and thus lose access to a leader with such high popularity ratings. Citizens who protested the leader in public - and there were many - quickly found themselves confronting the newly empowered police's batons, gas, and jail cells, or fenced off in protest zones safely out of earshot of the leader's public speeches. (In the meantime, he was taking almost daily lessons in public speaking, learning to control his tonality, gestures, and facial expressions. He became a very competent orator.)
Within the first months after that terrorist attack, at the suggestion of a political advisor, he brought a formerly obscure word into common usage. He wanted to stir a "racial pride" among his countrymen, so, instead of referring to the nation by its name, he began to refer to it as "The Homeland," a phrase publicly promoted in the introduction to a 1934 speech recorded in Leni Riefenstahl's famous propaganda movie "Triumph Of The Will." As hoped, people's hearts swelled with pride, and the beginning of an us-versus-them mentality was sewn. Our land was "the" homeland, citizens thought: all others were simply foreign lands. We are the "true people," he suggested, the only ones worthy of our nation's concern; if bombs fall on others, or human rights are violated in other nations and it makes our lives better, it's of little concern to us.
Playing on this new nationalism, and exploiting a disagreement with the French over his increasing militarism, he argued that any international body that didn't act first and foremost in the best interest of his own nation was neither relevant nor useful. He thus withdrew his country from the League Of Nations in October, 1933, and then negotiated a separate naval armaments agreement with Anthony Eden of The United Kingdom to create a worldwide military ruling elite.
His propaganda minister orchestrated a campaign to ensure the people that he was a deeply religious man and that his motivations were rooted in Christianity. He even proclaimed the need for a revival of the Christian faith across his nation, what he called a "New Christianity." Every man in his rapidly growing army wore a belt buckle that declared "Gott Mit Uns" - God Is With Us - and most of them fervently believed it was true.
Within a year of the terrorist attack, the nation's leader determined that the various local police and federal agencies around the nation were lacking the clear communication and overall coordinated administration necessary to deal with the terrorist threat facing the nation, particularly those citizens who were of Middle Eastern ancestry and thus probably terrorist and communist sympathizers, and various troublesome "intellectuals" and "liberals." He proposed a single new national agency to protect the security of the homeland, consolidating the actions of dozens of previously independent police, border, and investigative agencies under a single leader.
He appointed one of his most trusted associates to be leader of this new agency, the Central Security Office for the homeland, and gave it a role in the government equal to the other major departments.
His assistant who dealt with the press noted that, since the terrorist attack, "Radio and press are at out disposal." Those voices questioning the legitimacy of their nation's leader, or raising questions about his checkered past, had by now faded from the public's recollection as his central security office began advertising a program encouraging people to phone in tips about suspicious neighbors. This program was so successful that the names of some of the people "denounced" were soon being broadcast on radio stations. Those denounced often included opposition politicians and celebrities who dared speak out - a favorite target of his regime and the media he now controlled through intimidation and ownership by corporate allies.
To consolidate his power, he concluded that government alone wasn't enough. He reached out to industry and forged an alliance, bringing former executives of the nation's largest corporations into high government positions. A flood of government money poured into corporate coffers to fight the war against the Middle Eastern ancestry terrorists lurking within the homeland, and to prepare for wars overseas. He encouraged large corporations friendly to him to acquire media outlets and other industrial concerns across the nation, particularly those previously owned by suspicious people of Middle Eastern ancestry. He built powerful alliances with industry; one corporate ally got the lucrative contract worth millions to build the first large-scale detention center for enemies of the state. Soon more would follow. Industry flourished.
But after an interval of peace following the terrorist attack, voices of dissent again arose within and without the government. Students had started an active program opposing him (later known as the White Rose Society), and leaders of nearby nations were speaking out against his bellicose rhetoric. He needed a diversion, something to direct people away from the corporate cronyism being exposed in his own government, questions of his possibly illegitimate rise to power, and the oft-voiced concerns of civil libertarians about the people being held in detention without due process or access to attorneys or family.
With his number two man - a master at manipulating the media - he began a campaign to convince the people of the nation that a small, limited war was necessary. Another nation was harboring many of the suspicious Middle Eastern people, and even though its connection with the terrorist who had set afire the nation's most important building was tenuous at best, it held resources their nation badly needed if they were to have room to live and maintain their prosperity. He called a press conference and publicly delivered an ultimatum to the leader of the other nation, provoking an international uproar. He claimed the right to strike preemptively in self-defense, and nations across Europe - at first - denounced him for it, pointing out that it was a doctrine only claimed in the past by nations seeking worldwide empire, like Caesar's Rome or Alexander's Greece.
It took a few months, and intense international debate and lobbying with European nations, but, after he personally met with the leader of the United Kingdom, finally a deal was struck. After the military action began, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain told the nervous British people that giving in to this leader's new first-strike doctrine would bring "peace for our time." Thus Hitler annexed Austria in a lightning move, riding a wave of popular support as leaders so often do in times of war. The Austrian government was unseated and replaced by a new leadership friendly to Germany, and German corporations began to take over Austrian resources.
In a speech responding to critics of the invasion, Hitler said, "Certain foreign newspapers have said that we fell on Austria with brutal methods. I can only say; even in death they cannot stop lying. I have in the course of my political struggle won much love from my people, but when I crossed the former frontier [into Austria] there met me such a stream of love as I have never experienced. Not as tyrants have we come, but as liberators."
To deal with those who dissented from his policies, at the advice of his politically savvy advisors, he and his handmaidens in the press began a campaign to equate him and his policies with patriotism and the nation itself. National unity was essential, they said, to ensure that the terrorists or their sponsors didn't think they'd succeeded in splitting the nation or weakening its will. In times of war, they said, there could be only "one people, one nation, and one commander-in-chief" ("Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer"), and so his advocates in the media began a nationwide campaign charging that critics of his policies were attacking the nation itself. Those questioning him were labeled "anti-German" or "not good Germans," and it was suggested they were aiding the enemies of the state by failing in the patriotic necessity of supporting the nation's valiant men in uniform. It was one of his most effective ways to stifle dissent and pit wage-earning people (from whom most of the army came) against the "intellectuals and liberals" who were critical of his policies.
Nonetheless, once the "small war" annexation of Austria was successfully and quickly completed, and peace returned, voices of opposition were again raised in the Homeland. The almost-daily release of news bulletins about the dangers of terrorist communist cells wasn't enough to rouse the populace and totally suppress dissent. A full-out war was necessary to divert public attention from the growing rumbles within the country about disappearing dissidents; violence against liberals, Jews, and union leaders; and the epidemic of crony capitalism that was producing empires of wealth in the corporate sector but threatening the middle class's way of life.
A year later, to the week, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia; the nation was now fully at war, and all internal dissent was suppressed in the name of national security. It was the end of Germany's first experiment with democracy.
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"And each, though enemies to either's reign,
Do in consent shake hands to torture me"
- William Shakespeare: Sonnet 28 -
"News, far more than art, is artifact."
- Marshall McLuhan -
Posthumous war heroes, far more than art, are also artifacts; theirs as well as ours. Just say no to becoming an artifact yourselves... or not. The gene pool can use a little chlorine at this stage - obviously - so suit yer self. - The FOG
"Darkness is powerless in the presence of light. The relationship between light and darkness in the everyday world reveals a profound secret of spirituality. Spiritual darkness can exist only in the Light's absence.
"It is a universal law that desire is increased when others demand you to grow. It is very difficult to change by yourself because, well, you are who you are. But if you pay close attention, you will find that the people who come into your life are not there by accident. They are channels for the Light, sent to awaken and inspire in you the desire to change. If you are open, they can lead you to a whole new place of desire you're not even familiar with."
- Yehuda Berg -
"Cheney's biggest trick is making George Bush wake up every morning and believe he's the president."
- John Dean: Worse Than Watergate -
"There are two types of dictatorship. There is overt, in your face, control like communism and fascism; and there is the most effective control of all - the covert dictatorship that masquerades as freedom. People do not rebel against not being free when they think they are."
- David Icke: The Fourth Reich is Masquerading as "Liberation" and the "War on Terror" -
"Nowadays, curmudgeon is likely to refer to anyone who hates hypocrisy, cant, sham, dogmatic ideologies, the pretenses and evasions of euphemism, and has the nerve to point out unpleasant facts and takes the trouble to impale these sins on the skewer of humor and roast them over the fires of empiric fact, common sense,and native intelligence. In this nation of bleating sheep and braying jackasses, it then becomes an honor to be labeled a curmudgeon."
- Edward Abbey -
"No mulligans, except on the first tee."
- George W. Bush, speaking to reporters August 7, 2001, the day after he was handed the PDB titled Bin Laden Determined To Strike Inside The U.S. that [National Security ill-advisor] Ms. Rice insists "only contained historical data". -
"Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;"
- W.B. Yeats: An Irish Airman Foresees His Death -
"I first figured that Gaza might be for sale when Ariel Sharon was accused of corrupt real estate dealings in Greece. And I was right too. Sharon has put together a real estate package in Gaza that is a sleazy developer's dream:
Trading that run-down Gaza dump for the eloquent olive groves and high rises of East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Score! "That's like trading the South Bronx for The Garden State - including Princeton, Washington Crossing AND Atlantic City.
That's like dumping Mediterranean Avenue and buying the Boardwalk. AND Park Place!
"But wait. Won't the Palestinians at least come out of the deal owning Gaza? Isn't that a trade up for them?
They will now own houses and hotels, right? Wrong. Palestinians will not be passing Go. And they will not be collecting $200.
They will not be owning Gaza. Ariel Sharon will still own Gaza.
What the Palestinians will be getting from this real estate deal is the right to continue to live in a prison, a jail and a slum.
"Being an Arab these days is chillingly similar to being a Jew in 1939. The only difference I can see is that instead of Prescott financing genocide, we now have his grandson George." - Jane Stillwater: Ariel Sharon: Real estate developer extraordinaire -
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Our little Army Boy
Is coming home from B.F.P.O.
I've a bunch of purple flowers
To decorate a mammy's hero.
Mourning in the
aerodrome,
The weather warmer, he is colder.
Four men in uniform
To carry home my little soldier.
(Chorus:)
What could he do?
Should have been a rock star,
But he didn't have the money for a guitar.
What could he do?
Should have been a
politician,
But he never had a proper education.
What could he do?
Should have been a father.
But he never even made
it to his twenties.
What a waste.
Army Dreamers.
Tears o'er a tin box,
Oh, Jesus Christ, he
wasn't to know,
Like a chicken with a fox,
He cannot win the war with ego.
Give the kid the pick of pips,
And give him all your
stripes and ribbons.
Now he's sitting in his hole,
He might as well have buttons and bows.
(Chorus)
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T. H. Huxley
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts." - Bertrand Russell
