News of the Month

May 10, 2003

Well, we all know what the biggest story the month is – Oil War II is over! Emperor George told us so himself. While it was going on, you couldn’t find a newspaper or a TV news channel that wasn’t full of it. (Look up: smile.) Now, all that’s over with, and kidnapped children again take the limelight. (Never mind the murdered children of Iraq we never saw during the war.)

We all saw TV news shots of joyful Iraqi people, welcoming the American soldiers to their towns. We all saw TV coverage of that big statue of Saddam Hussein being toppled by a huge crowd of Iraqi people. We all saw stories about how the US forces were working ceaselessly to restore utility services to Baghdad. (Now, how did those utility services get destroyed, again?) We all saw, in other words, the lies that the US corporate media wanted us to see – and believe.

The welcoming people? To quote a news report that was not allowed to make it out of Iraq,
“I’m sure they’re out there, but I have yet to meet a Baghdadi who is grateful to the Americans for this war at all. One young girl told a friend that she waves at the Marines but she really hates them. And she thinks they’re ugly.”

The utility restoration? From that same story, by freelance reporter Matthew Green:
“The Marines have next to nothing to do with restoring power. Neither does the army. Power is being restored by Iraqi power plant workers going back to work, without pay, on their own. The Marines guard the power plants, but otherwise do nothing else. I know this because I saw it with my own eyes.”

US Major General James Mattis told Reuters in an interview that electricity would be restored to some of the city in a few days, saying, “We expect to get the power back on by tomorrow,” and added that Marines were working alongside Iraqis to try to restore other services. “Getting the water, the power, the trash back up, that’s absolutely critical,” he said.

To which Mr. Green responds,
“The Marines are not tasked with any of this – restoring power, water, or trash. In fact, the Marines are going to be leaving Baghdad in a few days. I don’t know what this guy is talking about.”

Of course, restoring Baghdad’s utilities is going to be just a tad difficult, given that our glorious occupying army put an armed guard around the Iraqi oil ministry offices and booby-trapped the entrances to a Baghdad power station. This was reported on April 22 by the Qatar news service Al-Jazeera:

“As many as 100 oil-industry employees loitered around the ministry complex, as soldiers stood guard behind barbed wire barriers. Unlike other state buildings, the Ministry of Oil escaped the bombing unscathed, and has been heavily guarded by American troops since invasion forces entered the capital.

“Meanwhile, employees of a major Baghdad power plant were also bewildered by the presence of several explosive devices planted around the Jameela facility, which supplies one third of the capital’s electricity. Trip-wire detonators could be seen strung across doorways inside the building, and packs of ready meals (MREs), trademark of western military forces, were visibly scattered across the floor.”

As one commentator said, “It’s amazing how the US was able to protect to oil installations but not cultural installations,” Henry said in a reference to the widespread looting of Baghdad’s museums.”

And the toppled statue? That’s especially interesting. Tom Tomorrow even referred to it in his editorial cartoon strip This Modern World this week. All the TV news coverage was from close up, as if the camera were right there in the crowd doing the pulling. And, in fact, it was. Why? Because if the camera had been stationed back from the crowd at all, it would have shown this: (Picture). In case you can’t read the text to the right of the picture, let me read it to you:

“Does the scene at right (left) look like the fall of the Berlin wall? The area circled in red is where the US Marines, the Press, and a small number of Iraqis gathered to pull down the statue of Saddam Hussein. No more than 150 people were involved. The plaza was empty and sealed off by the Marines. It all occurred just opposite the Palestine Hotel where the international media are based. This was a carefully staged media event. The pro-American Iraqis involved were members of Ahmed Chalabi’s Free Iraqi Forces Militia, recently flown into Iraq by the Pentagon. Chalabi is a Washington favorite to head the new government. The toppling of the statue was promoted as a massive uprising – does this event look massive to you?”

You can see in the yellow circles where US tanks are keeping the riff-raff out of the square; and the white circle shows the US mechanized armored vehicle that actually did the pulling. (You didn’t think the Iraqi people would do it, did you?) Fascinating.

Oh, by the way – Ahmed Chalabi? Interesting fellow, all in his own right, as this article from the Iraq War web site shows:

“No one is more upset at the idea of Mr. Chalabi becoming Washington’s man in Baghdad than Jordanian leaders, past and present. He was sentenced April 9, 1992, to 22 years hard labor by a Jordanian state security court on 31 charges of embezzlement, theft, misuse of depositor funds and speculation with the Jordanian dinar. The court also handed down harsh sentences and fines to 16 others, including several brothers and close relatives who were members of the board of Mr. Chalabi’s Petra Bank, or owners of affiliated companies.

“Mr. Chalabi, a one-time favorite of King Hussein’s royal court, had already skipped across the border to Syria hidden in the trunk of a royal palace car. Mr. Chalabi says former Crown Prince Hassan drove him to the border. Both the driver and the woman friend who organized the getaway deny this. …

“What was undeniable was that Mr. Chalabi’s Petra Bank, Jordan’s third largest, had gone belly up and some $300 million in depositors’ accounts had suddenly vanished. Mr. Chalabi, who had studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earned a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Chicago in 1969, denies wrongdoing and claims jealous royal courtiers framed him.

“In the 12 years between when Mr. Chalabi founded the bank and its crash, this scion of a wealthy and powerful Iraqi Shi’ite family developed a reputation for contacts at the highest level. When the free market value of the dinar plunged in 1988, it was common knowledge in Amman that the Petra Bank was one of the most active purchasers of dollars. Yet when Central Bank Governor Mohammed Said Nabulsi sought to enforce a requirement on banks to deposit 30 percent of their foreign exchange holdings with the Central Bank as part of his efforts to prop up the currency, Petra was unable to comply.

“Mr. Nabulsi said: ‘Petra in Amman was picked clean before Chalabi took off a few steps ahead of law enforcement. Petra in Washington, D.C., called me with a demand that all depositors be paid off immediately. The U.S. Federal Reserve asked for payment in full, $300 million as required to cover all losses. I then formed six committees, each with three members, to conduct separate investigations.’

“ ‘Their findings were given to the public prosecutor’s department. Chalabi was found guilty, and all those who had investigated can attest Chalabi was not framed as he claims.’ “Mr. Nabulsi’s conclusion a the end of a 60-minute interview: ‘Chalabi was one of the most notorious crooks in the history of the Middle East.’ “

Right up Emperor George’s alley, in other words! They should get along famously!!

And of course, once we get Mr. Bush’s pet felon installed as puppet head of state in our new Iraqi colony, we’ll begin the process of rebuilding Iraq. Rebuilding Iraq. In other words, spending even more hundreds of billions of dollars to replace what we just spent hundreds of billions of dollars destroying. Boy, what a sweet racket! Let’s see – what would that look like in, say, Austin? Tax the people of Austin to buy weapons and hire a gang of thugs to go into … oh, say East Austin, and destroy the entire infrastructure and a significant piece of the populace. Then tax the people again to build it all back. Except we don’t just build it back – we hire a bunch of companies owned by powerful Austin politicos to do the work, at an undisclosed (but tidy) profit.

Let me stop here, and say I’m only using Austin as an example because it’s the city we’re living in. I am NOT saying that anyone in Austin would do anything like that. OK? It’s just an example, to “ground” the situation. But it is what’s going on at the national level. Consider, for example, just one high-ranking US official – our Dick “one heartbeat from the presidency” Cheney. Pratap Chatterjee, a journalist for the on-line magazine Corporate Watch, wrote:

“While recent news coverage has speculated on the post-war reconstruction gravy train that corporations like Halliburton stand to gain from, this latest information indicates that Halliburton is already profiting from wartime contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Cheney served as chief executive of Halliburton until he stepped down to become George W. Bush’s running mate in the 2000 presidential race. Today he still draws compensation of up to a million dollars a year from the company, although his spokesperson denies that the White House helped the company win the contract.

“The Cheney-Halliburton story is the classic military-industrial revolving door tale. As head of the Pentagon under George Bush senior, Cheney helped privatize army work on U.S. military bases to Halliburton. In 1995, after Cheney became the CEO of Halliburton, the company jumped from 73rd to 18th on the Pentagon’s list of top contractors. Cheney had brought with him a trusty Rolodex.”

Cheney still receives as much as $180,000 a year in deferred compensation from Halliburton, while the company continues to rack up contracts for oil services, construction, and military support services – the spoils of war. Cheney’s office has repeatedly misrepresented facts about his relationships with Halliburton – for example, they claimed he didn’t meet with Halliburton prior to the invasion of Iraq. Yet last October his staff did meet with Halliburton and other oil multinationals to plan the takeover of the oilfields. All of this might be legal, but is it moral? At the very least, it’s a huge conflict of interest, and at most corruption in the highest offices of the land.

Bill Hartung, senior research fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York, said, “Vice-President Dick Cheney has brought new meaning to the term ‘revolving door.’ His easy transition from the army to private industry and then to the White House has earned him millions, and Dallas-based Halliburton billions.”

Of course, Halliburton isn’t the only hog to line up at the government feed-trough. Another report from the Al-Jazeera news service:

“The controversial agency in charge of rebuilding Iraq’s shattered infrastructure has awarded a contract worth up to $680 million to a US company, Bechtel Group, Inc. Worth $34.6 million initially, but (ultimately) expected to include repair of airports, ports, and possibly work on hospitals, schools, other government buildings and irrigation systems, the contract is the biggest awarded to date by the US Agency for International Development in its Iraq portfolio.

“(Bechtel) beat off a fellow American rival, Fluor, to the contract. Fluor said it was disappointed it was outbid on the infrastructure contract but expected to get work in other areas where it had expertise, such as restoring Iraq’s oil and gas industry. ‘It’s safe to say that what you’re seeing in dollar amounts to date is just the beginning,’ said Fluor spokesman Jerry Holloway.”

One final thing before we leave our coverage of this abomination of destruction in Iraq. Does anyone out there remember the phrase “weapons of mass destruction?” Oh, come on – surely you remember back before we started our war of aggression and terrorism against Iraq that the excuse of the week, one week, was that “Iraq has weapons of mass destruction!” Remember Colin Powell’s dog and pony show before the Security Council, when he showed proof after proof of that – except that it turned out that every one of his so-called “proofs” was a calculated and deliberate lie? Remember all the debates? “Well, if they have WMDs (it even got its own acronym!) then won’t they use them on our invading troops? And if they don’t, then what are we invading for in the first place?”

Our government is so used to watching us swallow every lie they put out, with barely a grimace as it rips out throats to bloody shreds, that they’re plowing forward with this one, too. In spite of the fact that it’s such an obvious lie, they figure we’ll swallow it just as mindlessly as we’ve chug-a-lugged all the ones that have gone before. “Of course we found WMDs! See? Look at that mobile chemical weapons laboratory we found in the desert!” Never mind that there wasn’t a trace of actual chemicals in the vehicle complex – not even a molecule of chemical weapons was found in it. “Or … look – over there! See the missiles, all primed to launch nuclear weapons at us?” Uhh … sorry; but those missiles have been rusting ever since Oil War I, and the only radiation in the area is the normal background radiation that covers the planet.

Where is the outrage? Why aren’t the people up in arms against this government arrogance and deceit? We’re going to talk about this during the main part of the show, and I again want to urge you to call in and tell me what you think has happened to the outrage that a free and sane society would be feeling at this level of government hubris and mendacity. (Pause.) Oh, go look them up!

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But what about Palestine during all this? Did it suddenly go peaceful? Hardly! While the United States was spending billions of dollars proving all over again that it is still the world’s number one international terrorist nation, Israel was – and is – still in there, claiming the undisputed number two spot. Here’s an on-the-ground report from Starhawk:

“In Rafah another activist from the International Solidarity Movement was shot. Tom Hundall was shot in the head by a sniper from an Israeli guard tower on the Egyptian border of the Gaza strip. The guard towers surround Gaza, which has become a kind of open-air prison overlaid on an idyllic land of sun and sea and orange groves. Here and there a few olive groves remain, or a flock of sheep and goats graze an empty lot. Farmers bring produce to market in donkey carts, and old women bake bread in clay ovens. An ancient order survives under an overlay of concrete, dust and rubble, menaced by bulldozers, sniper towers, tanks that shoot at night, acres of razor wire and no-man’s land now being further extended to border a thirty-foot high concrete wall which marches across the landscape, cutting Rafah irrevocably off from Egypt.

“The wall is presumably for ‘security’ – to prevent suicide bombers and weapons from entering Israel. But in reality, the wall is the next move in the Israeli policy of confiscation and control. In the West Bank, the route of the wall strolls out from the Green Line that marks the pre-1967 boundary, rambles all over the countryside, and steals more than half of the remaining land from the Palestinians. Cities such as Nablus and Jenin will be encircled and enclosed in isolated Bantustans.

( “Bantustans” were established in 1962 by apartheid South Africa as a way to isolate the indigenous tribes into separate reserves that South Africa called “nations,” though no other country recognized them. To quote the Infoplease web encyclopedia, “None of the reserves were viable nations; they were made up of broken tracts of poor-quality land, riddled with erosion and incapable of supporting their large designated populations. With no industry, opportunities for employment were few. Urban wage earners attempted to contribute to the support of their families in the reserves, but the level of black wages was so low that this was barely feasible. In 1994 the Bantustans were abolished and the territories were reabsorbed into the nation of South Africa.”) Back to the report:

“In the Qualquilya area, the first phase of wall construction took fifty per cent of the villagers’ farmland and nineteen wells that provided a third of the area’s water. Mas’Ha stands to lose over ninety per cent of its farmland. A nation of gardeners and farmers will become a nation of prisoners – the wall the visible, irrevocable finalization of a policy that already restricts movement with hundreds of checkpoints, splits families, makes daily life an almost impossible gauntlet of delays and humiliations.

“The wall will put an end to any hope of a two-state solution. Once it is complete, no viable Palestinian state can exist. Palestinians and their supporters have feared that the Israelis will forcibly remove or ‘transfer’ the Palestinians out of the West Bank. Instead, the policy now seems to be to surround, isolate, and enclose the Palestinian population into a giant prison colony of a greater Israel.

“In the Gaza strip, this policy is already well advanced. Sniper towers and guard stations are everywhere. Tanks patrol the border areas at night, and soldiers shoot, sometimes randomly and sometimes deliberately, down city streets, into houses, at crowds of children.

“To build the wall, in both Gaza and the West Bank, the Israelis bulldoze olive trees and homes that stand in the way. Three weeks ago, twenty-three year old Rachel Corrie was deliberately run over by a bulldozer while trying to prevent home demolitions. The Israelis have not seriously investigated her death, nor held the soldiers responsible accountable. As far as we know, they have not been disciplined or punished in any way. Instead, deliberate murder of internationals seems to have become policy.

And, in a second report from Mas’Ha, she writes:

“Mas’Ha is a village on the line of the new so-called ‘security wall’, where a peace camp has been set up at the request of the local people, mostly farmers who are faced with the confiscation of ninety-eight per cent of their land.

“Mas’Ha, on one of the main roads into Israel proper, once had a thriving trade, until the Israelis closed the road. The farmers grow olives and figs and grapes and wheat – but now the land has been confiscated for the building of the wall, with no compensation offered. In places the wall is a thirty-foot high concrete barrier, complete with guard towers. Elsewhere it is an electrified fence in deep ditch surrounded by a swathe of bare, scraped ground, flanked by roads to be continually patrolled by soldiers. It will soon separate the village from the neighboring (Jewish) settlement of Elcanah, with which it has always had peaceful relations. No armed resistance, no suicide bombers, have ever come from Mas’Ha. …

“I can’t ever again say ‘next year in Jerusalem.’ I can no longer believe in the promise of a land which requires the building of concrete walls and guard towers and ongoing murder to defend it. Far better that we should abandon the old stones of Jerusalem than to practice torture in older to claim it.

“But I would like to believe in the promise of Mas’Ha, in the example of a people who, faced with utter destruction of everything they need and hold dear, opened their hearts to the children of the enemy and asked for help. I would like to believe in the Israel reflected in the eyes of those who answer that call. That somehow, on this chasm between the conquerors and those who resist being finally conquered, the bridges and connections and meetings are happening that can tear down the walls of separation.

“By next year, the camp at Mas’Ha will most likely be gone. Already the contractors who work for the Israeli military have begun blasting a chasm that will soon cut the olive groves off from the village. An international campaign to stop the building of the wall has begun – but the reality is that they have the capacity to build it faster than we can organize to stop it. And yet I say it again, as an act of pure faith: Next year in Mas’Ha.”

Hope. Hope, in the middle of chaos, of destruction, of the murder of innocents. If I’d been doing this report on a typewriter, there’d be tear stains on the paper right about here. Where is our hope? Where is the hope in the face of rogue governments like the Bush junta knowingly and willfully performing acts of terrorism on an innocent civilian population, all along spouting the painfully obvious lie that “We’re going in to save them.” Or … to preserve American freedom. Or … to keep them from using their WMDs on their neighbors. Or … or … or.

Call me – tell me: where is our outrage? Where is our hope?