News of the Month

April 12, 2003

Well, we all know what the biggest story the month is – Oil War II is on. The newspapers are full of it. But one of the true objectives of Oil War II is to be smoke and mirrors (albeit deadly smoke and mirrors) to hide what’s going on behind the scenes. You know all you can stomach about Oil War II – whether from the misdirections and cover-ups by the corporate media liars – excuse me, reporters – or briefings by the Pentagon’s propagandists in their spiffy ironed fatigues. We’ve seen shot after shot of high-altitude airbursts, but nothing at all about the real human cost of our violent conquest of that poor country. We’ve seen talking head after talking head on the corporate propaganda machines, telling us the war is “on track.” Hah!

I don’t want to pay any more attention to the cover story – the smoke and mirrors beamed at us by the corporate media. We know what’s wrong, what’s immoral, what’s downright stupid about our terrorization and murder of the people of Iraq. So tonight I’m going to pull back the Wizard of Oz’s curtain, and talk about some things that are going on behind that curtain while the dumb, fat, happy sheep gorge on their “freedom fries” and drool over the carefully censored, antiseptic, bloodless images they see on CNN and Fox.

For example, our rulers have gone out of their way to demonize Saddam Hussein, to “justify” their illegal war against the Iraqi people – like charging that he was living high on the hog while his people did without. Well, an article in Britain’s newspaper The Sun reports that Saddam Hussein and George W Bush both wear the same kind of expensive hand-made Italian shoes, from the same shoemaker, Vito Artioli. The Sun says that both leaders wear shoes that cost £600 ($975) a pair, and both have three pairs that are just the same. The only difference is that George wears size 10, while Saddam is a nine-and-a-half. But both of them bought the same three types of shoe from the same Italian shoemaker. (For those of you who are temporarily away from your calculator, both our Führer and Iraq’s spent over $2,900 on their feet.)

Has King George gone that far ‘round the bend? Well, remember last month, we looked at the fact that our glorious leader is a “dry drunk” – someone who, although he’s stopped actively drinking, still displays all the neuroses and, yes, even psychoses of an addict? This month we have a column from the New York Times that echoes the growing understanding, both at home and abroad, that our illegally installed Führer is in fact a psychotic. Paul Krugman reports, talking about our allies abroad:

“None of them quarrel with the goal; who wouldn’t want to see Saddam Hussein overthrown? But they are finally realizing that Mr. Bush is the wrong man to do the job. And more people than you would think – including a fair number of people in the Treasury Department, the State Department and, yes, the Pentagon – don’t just question the competence of Mr. Bush and his inner circle; they believe that America’s leadership has lost touch with reality. If that sounds harsh, consider the debacle of recent diplomacy – a debacle brought on by awesome arrogance and a vastly inflated sense of self-importance.”

Remember the symptoms of a dry drunk? Arrogance – loss of touch with reality – over-inflated sense of self importance? To continue:

“The original reasons given for making Iraq an immediate priority have collapsed. No evidence has ever surfaced of the supposed link with Al Qaeda, or of an active nuclear program. ... At this point it is clear that deposing Saddam has become an obsession, detached from any real rationale.”

“What really has the insiders panicked, however, is the irresponsibility of Mr. Bush and his team, their almost childish unwillingness to face up to problems that they don’t feel like dealing with right now. I’ve talked in this column about the administration’s eerie passivity in the face of a stalling economy and an exploding budget deficit: reality isn’t allowed to intrude on the obsession with long-run tax cuts. That same ‘don’t bother me, I’m busy’ attitude is driving foreign policy experts, inside and outside the government, to despair.

“… The Nelson Report, an influential foreign policy newsletter, says: ‘It would be difficult to exaggerate the growing mixture of anger, despair, disgust, and fear actuating the foreign policy community in Washington as the attack on Iraq moves closer, and the North Korea crisis festers with no coherent U.S. policy.’ “

Or, as Jim Hightower pegs it with his usual dead-on wisdom:

“It’s time to say the obvious: The Bushites are insane. From George W on down, their behavior toward the world, toward our basic liberties, and toward the real needs of America is delusional and maniacal.

“Start with George’s war. He’s lost in a fantasy of Messianic Mission and no reality can penetrate it. Forget what liberals, Democrats, and millions of peace protestors say – people in his own party and the wiser heads from his father’s presidency also think the boy has slipped into the weird. Bush doesn’t merely think he’s right, he thinks he’s righteous, and that only God and he see the righteousness of his war wrath. He’s not thinking victory – he’s thinking Mt. Rushmore ... or higher!

“His delusions of grandeur are fueled by the likes of Donnie Rumsfeld and Paul ‘Howling’ Wolfowitz at the Pentagon. These two are bull-goose loopy, driven to their ‘world domination doctrine’ by an unbalanced and toxic load of bile and testosterone. Watch them on TV – they reek of hubris, which pours out of their pores like they’re soaked sponges, unable to contain the unnatural surge of hubris from within.”

Normally when someone thinks he’s Napoleon we give him help and treatment – usually in a nice, safe, padded room. What do we give our would-be Napoleon? Armies, for God’s sake! And a nice, fish-in-a-barrel “enemy” to play his deadly games against. Talk about enabling!

So what do we get from Emperor Napoleon Bush’s dirty war? Lies from the front. That’s all we’re given – not news, not truth – lies. Reminds me of a Russian saying from the Soviet era. To understand it, you have to know that the two major newspapers of that era were Pravda, which means “truth,” and Izvestia, which means “News.” The saying? Just that the two papers’ reporting staffs were separate: “In Pravda there is no Izvestia, and in Izvestia there is no Pravda.” Soviet truth for American times. No surprise there – especially when you learn that the Department of Homeland Security has hired former KGB chief General Yevgeni Primakov, as well as another former Soviet General, Alexander Karpov, to consult on the implementation of what General Primakov has called “internal passports” for our driver’s licenses.

Want some more lies from the front? Listen to this report about a week ago on the situation in Basra, from journalist Robert Fisk:

“Two British soldiers lie dead on a Basra roadway; a small Iraqi girl – victim of an Anglo American air strike – is brought to hospital with her intestines spilling out of her stomach; a terribly wounded woman screams in agony as doctors try to take off her black dress. An Iraqi general, surrounded by hundreds of his armed troops, stands in central Basra and announces that Iraq’s second city remains firmly in Iraqi hands. The unedited al-Jazeera videotape – filmed over the past 36 hours and newly arrived in Baghdad – is raw, painful, devastating.

“It is also proof that Basra – reportedly ‘captured’ and ‘secured’ by British troops last week – is indeed under the control of Saddam Hussein’s forces. Despite claims by British officers that some form of uprising has broken out in Basra, cars and buses continue to move through the streets while Iraqis queue patiently for gas bottles as they are unloaded from a government truck.”

And of course, we aren’t being told about the deaths of civilians, far from any military target, in the center of Baghdad. I look at the front page of the Statesman and I understand what Berlin’s newspapers must have looked like as the Luftwaffe pounded London into powder – and bones – in the early ‘40s. Except this time we wield the illegally invading aggressor army, sweeping into a sovereign nation and killing its men, women, and children. Here’s just one report; there are hundreds of them if you know where on the Internet to look; it’s from March 27, by Jo Wilding, a British student in Baghdad, shortly before she was ordered to leave Iraq:

“Husham Hussein said he was about 200 metres away … when it happened. He saw the missile hit the front of the building where Mohammed’s shop used to be. …. He thought 25 people were killed. Someone else said 45-50 people had gone to hospital. No one could think of a military target nearby.

Mohammed said five people died in the restaurant near his shop. Abu Hassan, a 45 year old father of five, 17 year old Malik Hamoud, and Sabah Nouri, 28, were all working in the restaurant. Two customers also died, but no one we met knew their names. The crowd of men told of women in cars which caught fire, burning to death because no one could get to them. ...

“Within the same district a missile hit a home next door to Balqis Secondary School for Girls. … The school was damaged: most of the neighbours think that was the intended target. The bomb ploughed through the wall of number 74 next door, bursting into square fragments about half a centimetre each way, pocking the walls in all directions with what looked like a rash of bulletholes: small pits about two inches in diameter at the surface.

“... The mattress where the family were sleeping is covered with blood. Munib Abid Hamid managed to shield his wife and child with his body. His wife Sahar Taha had chest injuries but has been discharged from the An-Naman surgical hospital. Their six year son Khaiser Munib has two broken legs. …

“Munib is a solid looking bloke. The doctor said he’d only survived this far because he’s so strong. His mother told us in gestures that he was cut from his chest to the bottom of his torso. His body was peppered with the metal squares: the doctor said he had multiple injuries to his abdomen: they had removed bits from his intestines and liver, both legs and feet, but some had had to be left where they were.

“The bandages which encase his legs are yellowed and foul-looking – he’s fighting gas gangrene and still in danger of losing his legs. ‘How can I work in future?’ he asked. ‘I am a car mechanic. I think I am finished.’ Another livelihood destroyed. The same question as in previous days echoes like the after-rumbles of the bombs: ‘Is this democracy? Is this freedom?’

Or this report, from the Al-Zazeera news service’s English-language web site:

“Razzaq Kazem al-Khafaji said he lost his wife, six children, his father, his mother, his three brothers, and their wives late Monday when their pickup truck was blown up by a rocket from a US Apache helicopter. They were fleeing fierce fighting further south in the city of Nassariyah.

“ ‘Should I cry over my children? Should I cry over my wife? Should I cry over my father? Should I cry over my mother?’ he repeated as he went from one coffin to another. He lifted a sheet on one of the coffins and saw the mutilated bodies of his young children, and then unveiled another coffin to find a dead child lying next to the remains of an infant, a pacifier still in her mouth.

“The 15 casualties were among 33 civilians killed and more than 300 injured in a bombing outside the town of Hilla.”

Do you want the truth about what’s really happening over there? The unsanitized, unvarnished truth? Then your best resource is the Al-Jazeera web site. It’s so effective at telling the truth our glorious leaders don’t want us to hear that it gets hacked several times a day – people are scared to let themselves believe we’re doing all this, and the easiest way out is not to change what we’re doing, but to stop reading about what we’re doing – and to stop everyone else from reading about it, too. The web site is english.aljazeera.net, if you’re lucky enough to get to it between hackings.

Here, for example, is part of an interview by that news service with the British Home Secretary:

“Well into the war that was supposed to rid Iraq of its alleged stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, a senior British official admitted on Saturday that no chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons of mass destruction may after all be found.

“The confession reconfirms the worst fears of opponents of the war that ‘weapons of mass destruction’ is only a ruse for the US and the British to go to war against Iraq. At the very least the admission certainly deals a serious blow to the moral legitimacy that the US and the British have been seeking in prosecuting the war.

“In making the confession in an interview with BBC radio, the British Home Secretary however admitted that the non-discovery of any weapons of mass destruction would ‘lead to a very interesting debate’ about the war. ‘We will obviously have a very interesting debate if there are no biological, chemical, radiological, or nuclear weapons or facilities to produce them found anywhere in Iraq once Iraq is free,’ the Home Secretary added.”

Of course, some of our atrocities are so horrible that they’ve even made it through the wall of censorship, despite our wise rulers’ best efforts to keep the news from us. Take this case of a car-full of women and children trying to flee from the murder all around them. They were fleeing just a little too fast, and they took 6 or 7 cannon rounds, fired directly into the car. One pitiful little car, full of women and children, in full flight from our atrocities – but our atrocities followed them, all the way to the … grave. In the words of William Branigin of the Washington Post:

“Fifteen Iraqi civilians were packed inside the Toyota, officers said, along with as many of their possessions as the jammed vehicle could hold. Ten of them, including five children who appeared to be under 5 years old, were killed on the spot when the high-explosive rounds slammed into their target, (Captain) Johnson’s company reported. Of the five others, one man was so severely injured that medics said he was not expected to live.

“Medics gave the group 10 body bags. U.S. officials offered an unspecified amount of money to compensate them.”

Now, stop and think: what would you do? What would you do if a foreign army landed several combat divisions at Galveston, then sent those divisions marching up from the coast to take over what – and who – was left in Austin after hundreds of aircraft from offshore finished weeks of laying down a blanket of rockets and bombs on the city? What would you do if some of those bombs and rockets hit – oh, say, HEB at 5 PM, or Travis High School at 10 AM, killing innocent, noncombatant men, women, and children? And what would you do if some of those innocent men, woman, and children remotely massacred by those random rockets and bombs were your friends – or your spouse – or your children? Would you hail the army that was marching on Austin – killing everyone it could on the way, of course – as liberators? Or would you take up whatever guns you had, and do all you could to kill everyone you could in that invading army? Now add just one more factor, and you’ll understand the situation we’re facing in Iraq. Add the fact that thousands of Kalashnikov AK-47 machine guns have been passed out to the people of Iraq so they can defend themselves and their homes – those we haven’t destroyed with our rockets and bombs, that is – from our aggressor forces!

But, then, our Government has always considered American soldiers to be just as expendable as enemy soldiers. Don’t believe me? Look what veterans of the Vietnam conflict came home to – it took years before the government would admit what Agent Orange did to our own troops. Or take Oil War I – our troops came back with what came to be known as “Gulf War Syndrome.” Actually, it was depleted uranium poisoning, but the government wasn’t even admitting that they had given radiation poisoning to the people of Iraq, let alone to our own troops.

How are we “supporting our troops” during the current atrocity? Well, we on the anti-war side want to support our troops by bringing them home now, alive and un-maimed, before they’re faced, even one more time, with having to die – or to kill – to support our Führer’s rich oil partners. How is the Bush junta supporting our troops now?

· By cutting 25 billion dollars in veterans’ benefits over the next 10 years.

· By cutting 172 million dollars from the Impact Aid program that provides school funding for children of military personnel.

· By ordering the Department of Veterans Affairs to stop publicizing health benefits available to veterans.

The government cares no more that our troops are being poisoned by depleted uranium than that Iraqi women and children are. Soldiers – and loved ones of soldiers – listen to me: George W Bush and his cronies consider you to be ammunition in this war to control Middle East oil, and nothing more. Once you’ve been fired, you’ll be forgotten, a used shell casing, just like your predecessors in Vietnam and Oil War I. Is that the freedom the government flacks say our troops are fighting for? Remember, the man who sends you into that quagmire is himself a deserter from the US military. There’s no nice way to put it – by strict military law, anyone AWOL (absent without leave) for over 30 days is automatically treated – and prosecuted – as a deserter. Georgie was gone from the Texas Air National Guard, off playing rich-boy games, for over a year. Oh! I forgot; the law is different for rich people with powerful daddies. My mistake!

Next, on another topic entirely, how many of you have heard the name Rachael Corrie? (Picture) She was a 24-year old American, working in occupied Palestine to help deter the Israeli Army from bulldozing people’s homes. You see, the Palestinian people – just like you or me, I’d bet – are none too happy about having the army of a foreign nation occupying their homeland, killing and torturing their women and children for fun, and using bulldozers to demolish people’s homes on the flimsiest of excuses. Well, on March 16, Rachael was standing outside a private Palestinian home, pleading with an Israeli bulldozer driver to spare a family’s house from destruction. (Picture) What happened next? Let me read you the report of the photographer who took that picture:

“Still wearing her fluorescent jacket, she sat down at least 15 meters in front of the bulldozer, and began waving her arms and shouting, just as activists had successfully done dozens of times that day. The bulldozer continued driving forward, headed straight for Rachel. When it got so close that it was moving the earth beneath her, she climbed onto the pile of rubble being pushed by the bulldozer. She got so high onto it that she was at eye-level with the cab of the bulldozer. Her head and upper torso were above the bulldozer’s blade, and the bulldozer driver and co-operator could clearly see her. Despite this, he continued forward, which pulled her legs into the pile of rubble, and pulled her down out of view of the driver. If he’d stopped at this point, he may have only broken her legs, but he continued forward, which pulled her underneath the bulldozer.

“We ran towards him, and waved our arms and shouted, one activist with the megaphone. But the bulldozer driver continued forward, until Rachel was underneath the cab of the bulldozer. At this point, it was more than clear that she was nowhere but underneath the bulldozer, there was simply nowhere else she could have been, as she had not appeared on either side of the bulldozer, and could not have stayed in front of it that long without being crushed. Despite the obviousness of her position, the bulldozer began to reverse, without lifting its blade, and dragged the blade over her body again. He continued to reverse until he was on the border strip, about 100 meters away, and left her crushed body in the sand.” (Picture)

For more information about Rachael Corrie and the occupation by the Israelis of the territory into which they shoved the residents of Palestine when they moved in, in 1948, see the Electronic Intifadah website, electronicintifada.net. (“Intifadah,” by the way, doesn’t mean “revolution,” as our media whores would have us believe – rather, it means “shaking off,” as in shaking off the illegally occupying Israeli Army and settlers from the Palestinian homeland.)

Finally, as we look behind the war news tonight, we need to remember the other half of the Bush junta’s program for the establishment of a worldwide American empire – their so-called “Pax Americana” – the denial of our freedoms in the name of the phony “war on terrorism.” Here’s one example, reported by Prof. Elizabeth Brandt of the University of Idaho School of Law:

“(Y)esterday was an exciting day in my small town. The FBI flew in 120 agents, fully armed in riot gear, on two C-17 military aircraft … to Moscow, Idaho (population 17,000 +/-) to arrest one Saudi graduate student for visa fraud. The raid went down in University of Idaho student housing at 4:30 AM …, terrorizing not only the suspect’s family …), but also the families of neighboring students who were awakened by the shouting and lights, and were required to remain in their homes until after 8:30 AM.

“At least 20 other students who had the misfortune to either know the suspect or to have some minor immigration irregularities were also subjected to substantial, surprise interrogations (4+ hours), although none were detained or arrested yesterday. Now, however, a witch-hunt for additional unnamed suspects who supposedly helped the guy who was arrested(ed) is on.

“The INS and FBI are working together using Gestapo tactics to question the students – threatening their immigration status (and hence their education) if they don’t answer questions which are really aimed at the criminal investigation. They have also threatened their partners and spouses with perjury charges if they don’t talk. I spent yesterday working with our immigration clinic director and local criminal defense attorneys to organize legal representation for the students who are being swept into the hunt for co-conspirators. We have reached out to our entire area (40 -mile radius) to find enough attorneys. Now I’m working on getting resources and support to them. The Saudi government is providing financial support. Reading about this stuff is one thing. Having it in your backyard is another. The international students at the University of Idaho are terrorized and scared.”

Sieg heil!