"We can see everything ... The Coalition has superior satellite technology."
If you're curious about the kind of propaganda that the US is currently dropping on Iraq, you need look no further than this leaflet gallery.
... they've gone to find two turntables and a microphone. Asian Dub Foundation's Enemy of the Enemy is everything you could want in a protest album ... politically, at least. Tim Perlich writes "Enemy Of The Enemy is their furious response to the current global mayhem, with pointed attacks directed at Bush, Blair and the enemies they helped create."
Do the beats hold up? Reviews are mixed; the Adrian Sherwood mix rocks along mightily, and Radiohead's Ed O'Brien plays guitar on several tracks. Sinead O'Connor adds vocals to "1000 Mirrors", which tells the story of Tsoora Shah, accused of murdering her husband, after he had continually beaten and humiliated her for years. However, the crew is suffering from the loss of MC Deedar Zaman, and the album lacks some of the vocal consistency that previous ADF efforts show.
[Good links at the end of this article.]
Dear MoveOn member,
Our Virtual March has been an enormous success -- by some estimates, the Senate and White House received over a million phone calls, faxes, and emails today. Offices on Capitol Hill were busy with the sounds of ringing phones and conversations about the war. And media outlets from the Washington Post to the BBC covered this broad and unprecedented action.
A comment we received from a MoveOn member in Connecticut is representative:
"I called Lieberman's office, and made my statement, and then I said to the man who answered the phone, 'this must be nuts for you today' and he said, 'My day will be hell, but it is so much better than apathy. This is what democracy is all about. I think it is terrific.'
I asked him if he thought it might change the Senator's position, and he said he wasn't authorized to speak on that, but that they were overwhelmed with the number of people speaking out from Connecticut."
Members of the House of Representatives (who were not targeted) took notice: Representative Anna Eshoo from California even took the time sent us all a letter thanking us for marching. You can read it at:
http://www.moveon.org/eshooletter.jpg
For everyone in the 32 organizations that make up the Win Without War coalition, thanks for joining in something huge.
THE NEXT STEP: LOCAL ADS
Our next big push will be to highlight opposition to war in small towns across America -- neighbors talking to neighbors. We'd like to run local ads in over 100 communities all over the country. Can you help? Check out the ad and help us run it near you by going to:
http://www.moveon.org/localads?zip=10016
Here's why we've taken this approach: A recent New York Times poll revealed that 42% of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein was behind what happened September 11th. It's a shockingly high number, given that even the Bush Administration has never asserted a connection. The false linkage of Saddam Hussein and 9/11 or al Qaeda is at the base of why many people support this war, even though they're worried about its consequences.
Our advertising campaign will counter this message in over 100 small cities and towns, and explain in the words of America's top military and policy experts why war on Iraq is a bad idea. As a person who grew up in a small town, I can testify that for many folks, an ad in the local paper is much more powerful than an ad in the New York Times. With your help, we can get over a hundred of these ads running by mid-next week.
We'll need to finalize our buy by this Friday, so anything you can give TODAY would be appreciated. You can take look at the ad and where it's running, and contribute securely online at:
http://www.moveon.org/localads?zip=10016
It's rare to see local ads on national issues like this, and even rarer to see them run in coordination across the country. At least two ads will be running in every state.
Your gift now can make it happen.
These local ads are a exciting part of our grassroots PR campaign, which just keeps building. We've now posted posters in the tens of thousands and handed out an enormous number of flyers at over 1,000 locations in the US. Billboards and bus ads are running in major cities. And of course the Virtual March has been immensely successful.
Help to keep the momentum going by supporting local ads today. In small cities and towns across America, we can make the case for tough inspections, not war.
Sincerely, --Carrie, Eli, Joan, Peter, Wes, and Zack The MoveOn Team February 27th, 2003
P.S. Here are a few of the great articles written about the Virtual March. Enjoy.
WASHINGTON POST: ANTIWAR PROTESTERS FLOOD SENATE PHONE LINES by Juliet Eilperin
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6032-2003Feb26.html
Thousands of antiwar protesters flooded Senate phone lines today as part of a "Virtual March" on Washington.
The phone-in campaign was sponsored by the "Win Without War" coalition, which told Web site readers they could "join a massive march on Washington without leaving your living room."
--------
BBC: US 'VIRTUAL MARCH' OVER IRAQ
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2802531.stm
Thousands of anti-war activists have been bombarding the White House and senators with phone calls and e-mails in a virtual protest over the Iraq crisis. Backed by a number of celebrities, volunteers jammed switchboards in Washington DC in an effort to force US politicians to think again over the prospect of war in the Gulf.
--------
NEW YORK TIMES: AN ANTIWAR DEMONSTRATION THAT DOES NOT TAKE TO THE STREETS
by John Tierney
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/26/national/26CND-MARCH.html
WASHINGTON, Feb. 26 — The Mall was quiet, but the switchboard on Capitol Hill was swamped today as anti-war protesters conducted what they called the first "virtual march" on Washington. The organizers, a coalition called Win Without War, said that hundreds of thousands of people were sending messages by email, fax and telephone to the Senate and the White House.
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ROLL CALL: WAR PROTESTORS VIRTUALLY OVERWHELM SENATE OFFICES
by Nicole Duran The group, led by former Rep. Tom Andrews (D-Maine), arranged to have at least 140,000 constituents call their Senators, as well as the White House, all day with the same message: "Don’t attack Iraq." "I’m sorry, sir, but we’re just taking a tally because our phones are ringing off the hook," a patient but clearly tiring staffer in Sen. John McCain’s office told a war protestor back in the Arizona Republican’s home state. In most offices, front-desk aides had ticked off hundreds of calls on scratch sheets by midday, intending to just give the Senators a final number when the protest ends at 6 p.m.
Posted by Brian Stefans at 09:18 AM
What does the air smell like in a city under the threat of war? How do Iraqis live, work, and play?
What is the art and poetry in Baghdad like? And what do ordinary Iraqis really think about Americans?
The Center for Media, Culture & History
and the Hagop Kevorkian Center present:
Baghdad: Portrait of A City
Paul Chan
in conversation with
Samer Shehata
Friday February 28/ 3:00 PM 5:30 PM
Kevorkian Center/ 50 Washington Square South/
Screening Room
New York artist Paul Chan recently spent one month (Dec. 2002 Jan. 2003) in Baghdad as a member of the Iraq peace team, a project of Voices in the Wilderness, a Nobel Peace prize nominated group working to end the sanctions against Iraq. The goals of IPT are to rally support for resisting a war on Iraq and publicize the effects of a possible or ongoing US assault on Iraqi civilians.
Chan will show photographs and talk about his work and experiences in Baghdad. He will offer a glimpse into the cultural, political and culinary life of Iraqi citizens living under the weight of the UN sanctions and the threat of another war.
The presentation will be followed by a conversation between Paul Chan and Dr. Samer Shehata of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. Professor Shehada is a leading expert on Middle East politics who recently traveled to Iraq as part of the National Council of Churches’ (USA) delegation.
For more information on the Iraq peace team project:
http://www.iraqpeaceteam.org
For more information on Paul Chan’s work in Baghdad:
http://www.nationalphilistine.com
This event is free and open to the public. Persons with a disability who may need assistance are requested to call
The Center for Media, Culture and History at 212.998.3759 in advance.
Program subject to change.
Barbara Abrash
Associate Director
Center for Media, Culture and History
New York University
25 Waverly Place
New York, N.Y. 10003
212.998.3759; fax 212.995.4730
barbara.abrash@nyu.edu
www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/media
[I've just received in the mail the O Books anthology enough, a collection of poems and statements assembled in the wake of 9/11. I'm sticking five up without permission because I like them, but also as advertisement for the book, which is available at Small Press Distribution. I regret not being able to include a longer piece by Ibrahim Mahawi, a Palestinian-Scot, but it is three pages of prose.]
Rod Smith
TED’S HEAD
So there’s this episode of Mary Tyler Moore where Ted’s trying to get a raise & after finagling and shenaniganizing he puts one over on Lou & gets his contract changed to non-exclusive sos he can do commercials which is not cool WI Lou & the gang because Ted’s just a brainless gimp & it hurts the image of the news to have the anchorman selling tomato slicers & dogfood so Lou gets despondent because the contract can’t be rescinded but then he gets mad & calls Ted into his office & says, you know his voice, “You’re going to stop doing commercials, Ted” & Ted says “why would I do that Lou?” & Lou says ‘Because if you don’t I’ll punch your face out” & Ted says “I’ll have you arrested” & Lou says “It’ll be too late, your face will be broken, you’re not gonna get too many commercials with a broken face now are you Ted?” & Ted buckles under to force & everybody loves it that Lou’s not despondent anymore he’s back to his brustling chubby loud loveable whiskey-drinking football-loving ways. Now imagine if Ted were Lou, if Ted were the boss. You know how incredibly fucking brainless Ted is, but let’s imagine he understands & is willing to use force. That’s the situation we’re now in as Americans.
Joanne Kyger
DEEPLY IMMORAL ARROGANT AND IGNORANT
For this you get a degree in the government
of My World My Rules
Here’s some of the buzz words —
Foolhardy and Inexplicable
The current president has been called
‘a craven coward’
by the female senator from California
and it’s only May 2001!
And now still
almost a Constant Sense of Outrage
Corporate capitalist oligarchies own the war
Feel Terrified? The ‘war’
Can go where it wants, when it wants
with bizarre expansions
Endless war fear hysteria. Great
There is NEVER an end to profit. There is NEVER enough
There are no ‘acceptable losses’ when it means more ‘money’
There is no end to profit There is NEVER enough
That said again, do we enumerate the stunningly horrible
‘My Way or No Way’ direction of the Bushies
in the world
and start gnashing teeth and going ga-ga
But there’s the voice of the people’ isn’t there?
I hear articulate political observation
that hasn’t collapsed into goofy anxious patriotism
that informs and lifts the veil of secrecy
‘The state of the union is none of your business’
says the Vice
Evil Terrorism or Live Rebellion?
always just out of reach except for the kid from Mann
Terrorist weather yesterday heavy frost and snow
collateral damage to the lemons
and baby Bok Choy
But what about all the hot air produced?
At least I enumerate with outrage
At least I must articulate
At least I know what’s wrong
Read the Tao
February 27, 2002
Harryette Mullen
LAND OF THE DISCOUNT PRICE, HOME OF THE BRAND NAME
My large magnetic card flag proudly displays Old Glory
as I drive to Family Dollar for the makings of a Fourth of July picnic.
I pledge allegiance to my MasterCard
that is honored in more stores than American Express.
Oh beautiful, those spacious aisles stacked with seasonal items!
My country, ‘tis of thee, sweet land of Lipton instant tea!
I cut out a great recipe I found in the Sunday paper. A Betsy Ross
rectangular cake covered with strawberries, blueberries, and Cool Whip,
with a coupon for the Cool Whip.
On Independence Day, our all-American front porch shows our true colors
With patriotic bunting and bows, only $3.99 a yard (reg. $4.99).
Our backyard guests sit at our holiday picnic table,
thematically decorated with 10 oz. Stars and Stripes plastic tumblers,
matching table runner, paper plates and napkins from Dixie Cup.
As my hubby grills the red meat and toasts the white buns under a blue sky,
our son shows the neighbor kids his World Peacekeepers Patriot Soldier,
a twelve-inch fully poseable action figure that plays the national anthem.
Tom Raworth
OZYMANDIAS
when someone in virginia
looks at an image from a drone
over afghanistan programmed
to seek males over six feet two
where they shouldn’t be
in farming country
presses a button
and blows them to jelly blobs
you know the safe u.s. warrior
in that hi-tech exoskeleton
is not seeing beneath nightscope gaze
its bootlaces being tied together
by tiny naked hands
Fanny Howe
LITTLE WRONGS
When the cold-blooded are proved right —
judgment secure — case complete
we will first see a tangle
of close-ups — gourd and gold
and apples still rotten
rugosa roses down to three petals only
and each holocaust will be an ant-heap
All the little wrongs will come into focus
But who will be glad about this?
...
Even the bigamists
who thought they were splitting
each lie into fragments
too small to be located
might find their trail is following them
And the short-sighted whose faces
are a blur of glee
may begin to establish shapes
around pockets of light and air
in the thicket they are part of
but they won’t sense the force
that gathers those shapes
into actual consequence
until they themselves can’t go forward
And neither will the hesitant
experience their weakness
as an ability
until it gathers into a body
of uncertainties that has influence
When the one big cruelty comes down on us
out of a seeming emptiness
it will be a helium packed with the force
of freely given evasions
so if some still believe
that the cold-blooded alone are responsible
for this power
how will they show that it came from elsewhere
Nothing has increased
[There is active, if sporadically informative, reporting of arrests due to direct actions all over the country on indymedia.org. Below is just the first paragraph of an action in Chicago against an advertising agency hired by the Army. A longer story about a Direct Action in Montreal can be found here.
Chicago Indymedia - webcast news
Two Arrests at Leo Burnett "People's Inspection"
by Chris Geovanis/Chicago Indymedia
5:33pm Fri Feb 21 '03 (Modified on 9:31am Sat Feb 22 '03)
UPDATE: Two student activists, Tanuja Jagernauth and Alison Kennis, were arrested late Friday afternoon at advertising company Leo Burnett's downtown headquarters, after the women entered the building to conduct a "people's inspection" of Burnett for war profiteering related to its role in creating the U.S. militarys "Army of One" advertising campaign.
U.S. Diplomat's Letter of Resignation
by John Brady Kiesling
The following is the text of John Brady Kiesling's letter of resignation to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. Mr. Kiesling is a career diplomat who has served in United States embassies from Tel Aviv to Casablanca to Yerevan.
Dear Mr. Secretary:
I am writing you to submit my resignation from the Foreign Service of the United States and from my position as Political Counselor in U.S. Embassy Athens, effective March 7. I do so with a heavy heart. The baggage of my upbringing included a felt obligation to give something back to my country. Service as a U.S. diplomat was a dream job. I was paid to understand foreign languages and cultures, to seek out diplomats, politicians, scholars and journalists, and to persuade them that U.S. interests and theirs fundamentally coincided. My faith in my country and its values was the most powerful weapon in my diplomatic arsenal.
It is inevitable that during twenty years with the State Department I would become more sophisticated and cynical about the narrow and selfish bureaucratic motives that sometimes shaped our policies. Human nature is what it is, and I was rewarded and promoted for understanding human nature. But until this Administration it had been possible to believe that by upholding the policies of my president I was also upholding the interests of the American people and the world. I believe it no longer.
The policies we are now asked to advance are incompatible not only with American values but also with American interests. Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the international legitimacy that has been America’s most potent weapon of both offense and defense since the days of Woodrow Wilson. We have begun to dismantle the largest and most effective web of international relationships the world has ever known. Our current course will bring instability and danger, not security.
The sacrifice of global interests to domestic politics and to bureaucratic self-interest is nothing new, and it is certainly not a uniquely American problem. Still, we have not seen such systematic distortion of intelligence, such systematic manipulation of American opinion, since the war in Vietnam. The September 11 tragedy left us stronger than before, rallying around us a vast international coalition to cooperate for the first time in a systematic way against the threat of terrorism. But rather than take credit for those successes and build on them, this Administration has chosen to make terrorism a domestic political tool, enlisting a scattered and largely defeated Al Qaeda as its bureaucratic ally. We spread disproportionate terror and confusion in the public mind, arbitrarily linking the unrelated problems of terrorism and Iraq. The result, and perhaps the motive, is to justify a vast misallocation of shrinking public wealth to the military and to weaken the safeguards that protect American citizens from the heavy hand of government. September 11 did not do as much damage to the fabric of American society as we seem determined to so to ourselves. Is the Russia of the late Romanovs really our model, a selfish, superstitious empire thrashing toward self-destruction in the name of a doomed status quo?
We should ask ourselves why we have failed to persuade more of the world that a war with Iraq is necessary. We have over the past two years done too much to assert to our world partners that narrow and mercenary U.S. interests override the cherished values of our partners. Even where our aims were not in question, our consistency is at issue. The model of Afghanistan is little comfort to allies wondering on what basis we plan to rebuild the Middle East, and in whose image and interests. Have we indeed become blind, as Russia is blind in Chechnya, as Israel is blind in the Occupied Territories, to our own advice, that overwhelming military power is not the answer to terrorism? After the shambles of post-war Iraq joins the shambles in Grozny and Ramallah, it will be a brave foreigner who forms ranks with Micronesia to follow where we lead.
We have a coalition still, a good one. The loyalty of many of our friends is impressive, a tribute to American moral capital built up over a century. But our closest allies are persuaded less that war is justified than that it would be perilous to allow the U.S. to drift into complete solipsism. Loyalty should be reciprocal. Why does our President condone the swaggering and contemptuous approach to our friends and allies this Administration is fostering, including among its most senior officials. Has “oderint dum metuant” really become our motto?
I urge you to listen to America’s friends around the world. Even here in Greece, purported hotbed of European anti-Americanism, we have more and closer friends than the American newspaper reader can possibly imagine. Even when they complain about American arrogance, Greeks know that the world is a difficult and dangerous place, and they want a strong international system, with the U.S. and EU in close partnership. When our friends are afraid of us rather than for us, it is time to worry. And now they are afraid. Who will tell them convincingly that the United States is as it was, a beacon of liberty, security, and justice for the planet?
Mr. Secretary, I have enormous respect for your character and ability. You have preserved more international credibility for us than our policy deserves, and salvaged something positive from the excesses of an ideological and self-serving Administration. But your loyalty to the President goes too far. We are straining beyond its limits an international system we built with such toil and treasure, a web of laws, treaties, organizations, and shared values that sets limits on our foes far more effectively than it ever constrained America’s ability to defend its interests.
I am resigning because I have tried and failed to reconcile my conscience with my ability to represent the current U.S. Administration. I have confidence that our democratic process is ultimately self-correcting, and hope that in a small way I can contribute from outside to shaping policies that better serve the security and prosperity of the American people and the world we share.
U.S. Diplomat Resigns, Protesting 'Our Fervent Pursuit of War'
by Felicity Barringer
UNITED NATIONS, Feb. 26
A career diplomat who has served in United States embassies from Tel Aviv to Casablanca to Yerevan resigned this week in protest against the country's policies on Iraq.
The diplomat, John Brady Kiesling, the political counselor at the United States Embassy in Athens, said in his resignation letter, "Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the international legitimacy that has been America's most potent weapon of both offense and defense since the days of Woodrow Wilson."
Mr. Kiesling, 45, who has been a diplomat for about 20 years, said in a telephone interview tonight that he faxed the letter to Secretary of State Colin L, Powell on Monday after informing Thomas Miller, the ambassador in Athens, of his decision.
He said he had acted alone, but "I've been comforted by the expressions of support I've gotten afterward" from colleagues.
"No one has any illusions that the policy will be changed," he said. "Too much has been invested in the war."
Louis Fintor, a State Department spokesman, said he had no information on Mr. Kiesling's decision and it was department policy not to comment on personnel matters.
In his letter, a copy of which was provided to The New York Times by a friend of Mr. Kiesling's, the diplomat wrote Mr. Powell: "We should ask ourselves why we have failed to persuade more of the world that a war with Iraq is necessary. We have over the past two years done too much to assert to our world partners that narrow and mercenary U.S. interests override the cherished values of our partners."
His letter continued: "Even where our aims were not in question, our consistency is at issue. The model of Afghanistan is little comfort to allies wondering on what basis we plan to rebuild the Middle East, and in whose image and interests."
It is rare but not unheard-of for a diplomat, immersed in the State Department's culture of public support for policy, regardless of private feelings, to resign with this kind of public blast. From 1992 to 1994, five State Department officials quit out of frustration with the Clinton administration's Balkans policy.
Asked if his views were widely shared among his diplomatic colleagues, Mr. Kiesling said: "No one of my colleagues is comfortable with our policy. Everyone is moving ahead with it as good and loyal. The State Department is loaded with people who want to play the team game — we have a very strong premium on loyalty."
From Kuro5hin (who says geeks are apolitical?):
Ari Fleischer, White House spokesman, was laughed out of the daily briefing on Feb 25th. Members of the foreign press asked about US vote buying for its resolution before the UN Security Council on Iraq. Ari reacted in a offended manner, eliciting loud laughter from the entire press corps. Ari gets a somewhat miffed look on his face and makes a quick exit to continuing laughter and the press making snide remarks amongst themselves.
Here's the video in downloadable RealMedia.
FAIR-L
Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
Media analysis, critiques and activism
MEDIA ADVISORY: Star Witness on Iraq Said Weapons Were Destroyed:
Bombshell revelation from a defector cited by White House and press
February 27, 2003
On February 24, Newsweek broke what may be the biggest story of the Iraq crisis. In a revelation that "raises questions about whether the WMD [weapons of mass destruction] stockpiles attributed to Iraq still exist," the magazine's issue dated March 3 reported that the Iraqi weapons chief who defected from the regime in 1995 told U.N. inspectors that Iraq had destroyed its entire stockpile of chemical and biological weapons and banned missiles, as Iraq claims.
Until now, Gen. Hussein Kamel, who was killed shortly after returning to Iraq in 1996, was best known for his role in exposing Iraq's deceptions about how far its pre-Gulf War biological weapons programs had advanced. But Newsweek's John Barry-- who has covered Iraqi weapons inspections for more than a decade-- obtained the transcript of Kamel's 1995 debriefing by officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the U.N. inspections team known as UNSCOM.
Inspectors were told "that after the Gulf War, Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them," Barry wrote. All that remained were "hidden blueprints, computer disks, microfiches" and production molds. The weapons were destroyed secretly, in order to hide their existence from inspectors, in the hopes of someday resuming production after inspections had finished. The CIA and MI6 were told the same story, Barry reported, and "a military aide who defected with Kamel... backed Kamel's assertions about the destruction of WMD stocks."
But these statements were "hushed up by the U.N. inspectors" in order to "bluff Saddam into disclosing still more."
CIA spokesman Bill Harlow angrily denied the Newsweek report. "It is incorrect, bogus, wrong, untrue," Harlow told Reuters the day the report appeared (2/24/03).
But on Wednesday (2/26/03), a complete copy of the Kamel transcript-- an internal UNSCOM/IAEA document stamped "sensitive"-- was obtained by Glen Rangwala, the Cambridge University analyst who in early February revealed that Tony Blair's "intelligence dossier" was plagiarized from a student thesis. Rangwala has posted the Kamel transcript on the Web: http://casi.org.uk/info/unscom950822.pdf.
In the transcript (p. 13), Kamel says bluntly: "All weapons-- biological, chemical, missile, nuclear, were destroyed."
Who is Hussein Kamel?
Kamel is no obscure defector. A son-in-law of Saddam Hussein, his departure from Iraq carrying crates of secret documents on Iraq's past weapons programs was a major turning point in the inspections saga. In 1999, in a letter to the U.N. Security Council (1/25/99), UNSCOM reported that its entire eight years of disarmament work "must be divided into two parts, separated by the events following the departure from Iraq, in August 1995, of Lt. General Hussein Kamel."
Kamel's defection has been cited repeatedly by George W. Bush and leading administration officials as evidence that 1) Iraq has not disarmed; 2) inspections cannot disarm it; and 3) defectors such as Kamel are the most reliable source of information on Iraq's weapons.
* Bush declared in an October 7, 2002 speech: "In 1995, after several years of deceit by the Iraqi regime, the head of Iraq's military industries defected. It was then that the regime was forced to admit that it had produced more than 30,000 liters of anthrax and other deadly biological agents. The inspectors, however, concluded that Iraq had likely produced two to four times that amount. This is a massive stockpile of biological weapons that has never been accounted for, and capable of killing millions."
* Secretary of State Colin Powell's February 5 presentation to the U.N. Security Council claimed: "It took years for Iraq to finally admit that it had produced four tons of the deadly nerve agent, VX. A single drop of VX on the skin will kill in minutes. Four tons. The admission only came out after inspectors collected documentation as a result of the defection of Hussein Kamel, Saddam Hussein's late son-in-law."
* In a speech last August (8/27/02), Vice President Dick Cheney said Kamel's story "should serve as a reminder to all that we often learned more as the result of defections than we learned from the inspection regime itself."
* Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley recently wrote in the Chicago Tribune (2/16/03) that "because of information provided by Iraqi defector and former head of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs, Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel, the regime had to admit in detail how it cheated on its nuclear non-proliferation commitments."
The quotes from Bush and Powell cited above refer to anthrax and VX produced by Iraq before the 1991 Gulf War. The administration has cited various quantities of chemical and biological weapons on many other occasions-- weapons that Iraq produced but which remain unaccounted for. All of these claims refer to weapons produced before 1991.
But according to Kamel's transcript, Iraq destroyed all of these weapons in 1991.
According to Newsweek, Kamel told the same story to CIA analysts in August 1995. If that is true, all of these U.S. officials have had access to Kamel's statements that the weapons were destroyed. Their repeated citations of his testimony-- without revealing that he also said the weapons no longer exist-- suggests that the administration might be withholding critical evidence. In particular, it casts doubt on the credibility of Powell's February 5 presentation to the U.N., which was widely hailed at the time for its persuasiveness. To clear up the issue, journalists might ask that the CIA release the transcripts of its own conversations with Kamel.
Kamel's disclosures have also been crucial to the arguments made by hawkish commentators on Iraq. The defector has been cited four times on the New York Times op-ed page in the last four months in support of claims about Iraq's weapons programs--never noting his assertions about the elimination of these weapons. In a major Times op-ed calling for war with Iraq (2/21/03), Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution wrote that Kamel and other defectors "reported that outside pressure had not only failed to eradicate the nuclear program, it was bigger and more cleverly spread out and concealed than anyone had imagined it to be." The release of Kamel's transcript makes this claim appear grossly at odds with the defector's actual testimony.
The Kamel story is a bombshell that necessitates a thorough reevaluation of U.S. media reporting on Iraq, much of which has taken for granted that the nation retains supplies of prohibited weapons. (See FAIR Media Advisory, "Iraq's Hidden Weapons: From Allegation to Fact," http://www.fair.org/press-releases/iraq-weapons.html .) Kamel's testimony is not, of course, proof that Iraq does not have hidden stocks of chemical or biological weapons, but it does suggest a need for much more media skepticism about U.S. allegations than has previously been shown.
Unfortunately, Newsweek chose a curious way to handle its scoop: The magazine placed the story in the miscellaneous "Periscope" section with a generic headline, "The Defector's Secrets." Worse, Newsweek's online version added a subhead that seemed almost designed to undercut the importance of the story: "Before his death, a high-ranking defector said Iraq had not abandoned its WMD ambitions." So far, according to a February 27 search of the Nexis database, no major U.S. newspapers or national television news shows have picked up the Newsweek story.
***
Read the Newsweek story: http://www.msnbc.com/news/876128.asp
***
Read Glen Rangwala's analysis of the Kamel transcript: http://middleeastreference.org.uk/kamel.html
***
If you'd like to encourage media outlets to investigate this story, contact information is available on FAIR's website:
http://www.fair.org/media-contact-list.html
----------
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http://www.fair.org/
E-mail: fair@fair.org
A St. John's College Library visit by a former public defender was abruptly interrupted February 13 when city police officers arrested him about 9 p.m. at the computer terminal he was using, handcuffed him, and brought him to the Santa Fe, New Mexico, police station for questioning by Secret Service agents from Albuquerque. Andrew J. O Conner, 40, who was released about five hours later, said in the February 16 Santa Fe New Mexican, I m going to sue the Secret Service, Santa Fe Police, St. John s, and everybody involved in this whole thing.
According to O Connor, the agents accused him of making threatening remarks about President George W. Bush in an Internet chat room. Admitting he talked politics face-to-face in the library with a woman who was wearing a No war with Iraq button, O Connor recalled saying that Bush is out of control, but that I m allowed to say all that. There is this thing called freedom of speech. He also speculated that the FBI might have been observing him because of his one-time involvement in a pro-Palestinian group in Boulder, Colorado.
Earlier on the same day O Connor was questioned, officials at St. John s as well as at the College of Santa Fe and Santa Fe Community College issued warnings to students and faculty that the FBI had been alerted to the presence of suspicious people on campus within the past four weeks.
Concern about threats to individual privacy under the USA Patriot Act has prompted New Mexico legislators in both houses to propose resolutions urging state police not to help federal agents infringe on civil rights. The resolutions also encourage libraries to post prominent signage warning patrons that their library records are subject to federal scrutiny without their permission or knowledge.
http://www.ala.org/alonline/news/2003/030224.html#santafe
[This from the indefatigable Darren Wershler-Henry.]
UPDATE: It didn't take long for the "Ready" parodies to start to appear (like they used to say at SUCK, "A Fish, A Barrel, A Smoking Gun") ... you can find a few of them here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here.
[Scott Pound has been posting to the Buffalo Poetics List a running diary of his time in Turkey which I will start posting here also. If I get inspired I'll go back and pick up some of the prior ones.]
2.27.03, 13:00, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey
A former student of mine who recently graduated came back to campus to see me the other day. He was making the rounds announcing his impending marriage. Delighted for him, I said, “Congratulations! When?” He looked down at his feet for a few seconds and when he looked back up at me all the happiness had left his face. “I don’t know,” he said. “We will wait.” Standing between him and married life is 8-16 months of compulsory military service, and potentially an extended period of conflict in the region, conflict in which he may be personally involved. He thinks a U.S. invasion of Iraq would just be the beginning. He’s probably right.
Turkey’s main concern with regard to a possible war in Iraq (of many besides the economy) is the Iraqi Kurds. The Kurds in Iraq are substantial in number, presently occupy and govern their own territory, and have a large militia (70,000-130,000). In the event of a war that topples Sadam’s regime, they will be gunning for their own state.
Far from agreeing to let this happen, Turkey in fact proposes to move into Kurdish territory after the American invasion for the purpose of supplying “humanitarian aid.” Did I forget to mention that the Kurds are sitting on top of a lot of oil? Well, they are. Their Jerusalem is a city called Kirkuk, an “oil rich” place.
Needless to say, a Turkish presence in Northern Iraq would not be welcome and the leadership of the Iraqi Kurds has already promised that there would be conflict.
Peter W. Galbraith, writing in the New York Times, suggests that the Iraqi Kurds are again about to be double-crossed by the U.S.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/19/opinion/19GALB.html?ex=1047288833&ei=1&en=b6e9c0cb1dd5966e
My student and I continued to talk for a while, about the war, not his marriage. The silences between our talk grew longer and longer. Finally, he stood up, dejected, shook my hand, said goodbye and left.
"The mother tongue is propaganda"
--Marshall McLuhan (1965)
Scott Pound
Assistant Professor
Department of American Culture and Literature
Bilkent University
TR-06800 Bilkent, Ankara
TURKEY
+90 (312) 290 3115 (office)
+90 (312) 290 2791 (home)
+90 (312) 266 4081 (fax)
Thanks to MoveOn.org, it's now possible to watch the virtual march on Washington. A map of the USA displays popup windows containing the text of the faxes that people are sending to Congress, in real time. It's not too late to join the march and send a free fax. Rock.
WHAT: CANDLELIGHT MARCH FOR PEACE
WHEN: Wed., March 5, gather at 5:30PM
WHERE: Assemble at Hillary Clinton's office, 780 Third Ave. (47th & 48th)
BRING: Candles, signs and drums
Sponsored by United for Peace and Justice NYC, NYC Forum of Concerned Religious Leaders, and Not in Our Name
We rallied on February 15 -- and NOW WE WILL MARCH IN PEACE to prevent this war! Our march will be in conjunction with a national day of action, including student actions taking place on over 300 campuses around the country.
Senators Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer voted "yes" on the resolution to send our country into war on Iraq. They must be held accountable! Let's show them that New Yorkers say NO to war!
Join us for a legal candlelight march on the sidewalks of OUR city, led by community, religious, political and labor leaders. We will begin outside Hillary Clinton's office (780 Third Ave. @ 47th), proceed downtown past Chuck Schumer's office (757 Third Ave. @ 46th), and march peacefully from there to Washington Square Park for a candlelight vigil.
For more information, contact plaarman@judson.org or Chomsky17@aol.com
For more information on the March 5 student strike, see http://www.unitedforpeace.org/article.php?id=662
For more information on the March 5 national moratorium, contact religiousforum@hotmail.com or see
http://www.notinourname.net/call_for_the_moratorium.html
==============================
Plans are also underway for a big UFPJ NYC anti-war march in a few weeks. If you would like to work on either or both of these two mobilizations, come to
an organizing meeting on Thursday, Feb. 27 at 6:30PM, 330 W. 42nd Street, 8th floor.
To get involved with organizing this and other United for Peace and Justice events in New York City, join our new low-volume organizing announcements
listserve by sending a blank email to: ufpjnyc-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
To volunteer with United for Peace and Justice in NYC, send a blank email to
nycvolunteers-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
To subscribe or unsubscribe from this list, go to
http://www.unitedforpeace.org/email.php
United for Peace and Justice NYC
(646) 473-8935
==============================
you are a card-carrying member of the john birch society, the ara, and the "kill a freak for jesus" chapter in your town • you are sure that judge bork got a raw deal • you are 40 years old, and have never dated, let alone been married, because you're saving yourself for margaret thatcher • you are god • you are in the "top 1%" income bracket • you are going to be someday, somehow • you are too drunk to fish and too dumb to hunt • you are in favor of cutting taxes on investments, even though the only investments you ever made were in lottery tickets, because, someday, one of them suckers will pay off and then you'll be rich too! yee-haw! • you are sure that one day you are going to hit the jackpot and be one of them • you are glad to see things back to normal • you are still mad because "rummy" rumsfeld & dubya won't let you play with their guns • you are on medicare, need prescription drug help & still voted for the village idiot • you are going to burn in hell for hypocrisy & self-righteousness • you are convinced that the voice of god is charlton heston • you are short-sighted in decision-making • you are deep-down jealous of bill clinton's sex life! • you are angry that the cleaners lost your swastika arm band • you are lost in the middle of nowhere • "you are going to save social security, my friend, that's all hat and no cattle," mccain said of bush's plan • you are going to talk about a man's record, talk about the whole record • you are one of them • you are not alone • you are one of those who would like to merge your work with earning a living, how do you go about doing it? this is the sort of question financial planning should address • you are right now compared to those doing what you want to do • you are going to pay for travelling from here to there • you are going to burn in hell for hypocrisy & self-righteousness • you are convinced that the voice of god is charlton heston • you are short-sighted in decision-making • you are deep-down jealous of bill clinton's sex life! • you are angry that the cleaners lost your swastika arm band • you are of him • you are frying fish on the beach • you are you're the first thing i think about and that's how the morning starts it seems like everything i say and do is all about me being in love with you twenty-four seven you're the only thing that matters to me twenty-four hours girl, every day seven long days a week i'm in heaven, heaven twenty-four seven you're the only train of thought on my one-track mind going ninety miles an hour baby all the time twenty-four seven you're the only thing that matters to me twenty-four hours girl, every day seven long days a week i'm in heaven, heaven twenty-four seven i'm in heaven twenty-four seven twenty-four hours girl, every day seven long days a week i'm in heaven, heaven twenty-four seven twenty-four seven girl e-mail this lyric to a friend! 0 comments posted for this song • you are skilled in network design and engineering • you are a communications specialist, you can earn a ccip or ccie, or you can get one of several specialty certificates to show you are competent in one particular area of cisco networking • you are expected to know everything there is to know when you walk through the door on the first day • you are allowed to drive any type of car that is manufactured
(written by the internet • conceptualized and built by Darren Wershler-Henry and Bill Kennedy)
Yahoo! News - 'Virtual' War Protest Jams Congressional Phones
By Alan Elsner, National Correspondent
WASHINGTON - Hundreds of thousands of opponents of a U.S. war against Iraq called and faxed their senators and the White House on Wednesday in a "virtual march on Washington," jamming many congressional telephone lines for several hours.
Coordinated by the Win Without War Coalition, an umbrella protest group, the action aimed to direct at least one telephone call and fax to every U.S. senator every minute throughout the day. Organizers said they were far exceeding that goal.
The White House switchboard was also flooded and most callers heard a message that "all circuits are busy."
Tom Andrews, a former Democratic representative from Maine who is running the organization, said more than 500,000 people had signed up on the Internet to take part and a half a million more were also expected to participate without registering on the group's web site (Moveon.org).
"We have hundreds of thousands of calls and faxes that we know are going in. It's a first-of-its-kind protest and a tremendous success already," he said. "People are making their voices heard loud and clear -- don't invade and don't occupy Iraq."
The Web site had a running total of what it said was the number of calls placed. As of 2 p.m. the number had exceeded 250,000. The Web site was flashing the names of individual protesters above a map of the United States with quotes from e-mails sent to the headquarters and to lawmakers. Each comment included the name and hometown on the protester.
Some protesters themselves had difficulties getting through to their representatives. Molly Lanzarotta from Boston said she had to dial multiple times to get through to an answering service in the office of Democrat John Kerry, a leading presidential candidate for 2004.
Others tried for long periods but eventually gave up. Brian Fry tried to call from Cleveland but kept getting the message, "all circuits are busy." He said he would call his senators' local Ohio offices instead and try to get through to Washington again later or on the next day.
SET TIMES TO CALL
Activists were given set times to call. Chicago marketing executive Mary Rickard was supposed to call at 3:14 p.m., 3:19 p.m. and 3:24 p.m. The faxes from people who signed onto the Web site were also programd to go out at set times.
Telephone calls placed from Reuters to various senators received busy signals at all but two offices. At Florida Democrat Bob Graham's office, a spokeswoman said they had received 400 calls in the first three hours of the day, well above the norm. At Nebraska Republican Charles Hagel's office, a spokeswoman said the front desk did not seem to be any busier than usual.
Andrews said the Internet had emerged as a key tool for the anti-war movement in organizing protests and instantly reaching tens of thousands of activists.
"It allows us to be in touch instantly with activists all around the country and the world. It's a tremendous democratic tool," he said.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions more in cities around the world have taken to the streets in a series of demonstrations over the past few weeks.
However, the latest polls show a substantial but not overwhelming majority of American voters support President Bush on Iraq. Surveys suggest that around 35 to 40 percent of the electorate opposes the war.
A Time/CNN poll conducted Feb. 19-20 found 54 percent said the United States should use military action to remove Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. The number was down 5 points from two weeks before and at its lowest level since last November. Thirty eight percent said they were opposed.
Pollster Jennifer Laszlo, a Democrat who has recently conducted four focus groups, said support for the war was soft and opponents were far more intense in their views than many supporters.
"Republicans think this is America's war but Democrats more and more see it as Bush's war and they are getting more energized and more angry," Laszlo said.
[Cute story from the BBC. I'd cut and paste the whole thing to this site but there's a lot of sidebars that are worth reading, especially regarding the parody songs like "If you cannot find Osama, Bomb Iraq." If you are not familiar with this tune, the English Atheist site has a sing along version with fun graphics.]
BBC NEWS | UK | Where have all the protest songs gone?
Can anyone fill Dylan's shoes? Protest used to be about singing as much as marching. But as boy band Blue promise to record an anti-war song, why does the current movement lack a rallying anthem?
Gaining an Empire, Losing Democracy?
LOS ANGELES -- There is a subtext to what the Bushites are doing as they prepare for war in Iraq. My hypothesis is that President George W. Bush and many conservatives have come to the conclusion that the only way they can save America and get if off its present downslope is to become a regime with a greater military presence and drive toward empire. My fear is that Americans might lose their democracy in the process.
By downslope I'm referring not only to the corporate scandals, the church scandals and the FBI scandals. The country has gone kind of crazy in the eyes of conservatives. Also, kids can't read anymore. Especially for conservatives, the culture has become too sexual.
Iraq is the excuse for moving in an imperial direction. War with Iraq, as they originally conceived it, would be a quick, dramatic step that would enable them to control the Near East as a powerful base - not least because of the oil there, as well as the water supplies from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers - to build a world empire.
The Bushites also expect to bring democracy to the region and believe that in itself will help to diminish terrorism. But I expect the opposite will happen: terrorists are not impressed by democracy. They loathe it. They are fundamentalists of the most basic kind. The more successful democracy is in the Near East - not likely in my view - the more terrorism it will generate.
The only outstanding obstacle to the drive toward empire in the Bushites' minds is China. Indeed, one of the great fears in the Bush administration about America's downslope is that the "stem studies" such as science, technology and engineering are all faring poorly in U.S. universities. The number of American doctorates is going down and down. But the number of Asians obtaining doctorates in those same stem studies are increasing at a great rate.
Looking 20 years ahead, the administration perceives that there will come a time when China will have technology superior to America's. When that time comes, America might well say to China that "we can work together," we will be as the Romans to you Greeks. You will be our extraordinary, well-cultivated slaves. But don't try to dominate us. That would be your disaster. This is the scenario that some of the brightest neoconservatives are thinking about. (I use Rome as a metaphor, because metaphors are usually much closer to the truth than facts).
What has happened, of course, is that the Bushites have run into much more opposition than they thought they would from other countries and among the home population. It may well end up that we won't have a war, but a new strategy to contain Iraq and wear Saddam down. If that occurs, Bush is in terrible trouble.
My guess though, is that, like it or not, want it or not, America is going to go to war because that is the only solution Bush and his people can see.
The dire prospect that opens, therefore, is that America is going to become a mega-banana republic where the army will have more and more importance in Americans' lives. It will be an ever greater and greater overlay on the American system. And before it is all over, democracy, noble and delicate as it is, may give way. My long experience with human nature - I'm 80 years old now - suggests that it is possible that fascism, not democracy, is the natural state.
Indeed, democracy is the special condition - a condition we will be called upon to defend in the coming years. That will be enormously difficult because the combination of the corporation, the military and the complete investiture of the flag with mass spectator sports has set up a pre-fascistic atmosphere in America already.
From the AP wires: "There remains an off-ramp," the press secretary said. "The off-ramp will be taken or not taken as a result of Saddam Hussein's actions."
2/25/2003
This poem, "White Death This Exit," was first published by The Capilano Review (Vancouver, BC) in January 2002.
The commentary, by Increase Mather, following the poemis printed with permission.
- daniel bouchard
White Death This Exit
1.
Silver light posts arc over the road, white glare
beside a swift congruous river of red lights.
The moon is muffled but full. In storm,
or close to it, everyone going somewhere still.
Northbound highway is promotion and egress:
tree lines, hip roofs, glow of holiday lights
strung on houses, strung upon shrubs, candles
burn or electric candles “on” behind windows,
votives and voices, dashboard speakers.
Rational voices from national radio.
A view of office towers, advertising, the
roads that lead to steel and glass plazas.
A close storm, around Xmas, everything
will close when it strikes. Seventy
per cent of tomahawk tip oxidized
and aerated. A sort of exit. A wooden
shaft 2 ½ feet long, stone tip
sharpened at one end. Air raided.
Sortie. Mufflers wrapped of an evening.
Poison belch into “crisp” air.
Two planes of chimney meet: west side
snow-covered the north side only wet.
To blow tomahawks: to kill or cut.
He “sunk his hatchet into his brains”
tho the victim was his kin. A terrible night
the sky and the noise seeming like the cries,
the glare of flintlock by firelight. Trigger.
As thunder. Surgically bombed.
Latin, from stem of mittere, to send.
Patriot, from Andover: “war means jobs.”
Snowfall covers the jagged, busted glass.
Savage, cling, clung or stick
lintel amid brick piling
obsequious in lit corners, rub
panes scratched with a wet branch,
frozen-bristled, rigid in wind.
The natives nationalized livestock and corn.
Clams free for the raking. Slush streets a sleek
frozen surface, a sluice on Sunday, next day
the papers repeat: tougher on Iraq, tiny
frozen drift, spittle, white ragged drop, like ash.
Vaporization and dust. A black star shot
and smeared, the man’s ground body,
only the head remained, eyes shut looking up.
Endicott in Connecticut
waged a brilliant terror campaign
destroying crops of Pequots.
Bush’s band of grim men.
2.
Light refractory highway
moon muffled by cloud gap
hurtle its mist, blackness
of valley held under the surface,
blue twilight obscured
against the shade of those hills.
Thru it a seamless snaking of road,
brilliantly lit, surging or greased
in docility, treatment, a capable
reckoning violence, its sandstone
canvas uniform, photographs in wallet.
What makes a land promised?
Predestined spasms of nation
in their rhetoric, in their ears;
indelible units of folk
pre-packaged creed and wrap,
meta-tyranny, weaponry steep
flails with purpose against non-peoples,
strategizes consent, shoveled deep,
crumbling piles; resembles to a child
a reasonable iceberg to place
some plastic figurines
of classical cowboys and Indians;
contemporary Arabs and Marines.
A leader elected, steeped in oil, its politics,
education, a polity, wanting severe, civility,
the education president, schooled at Yale,
he said of King Philip “we cannot
reward an aggressor” and gathered allies,
potential allies, Xtian converts at Natick,
praying Arabs. This is Increase Mather
speaking: “it will not stand.”
Able to kill several hundred Pequots
with only a handful of losses to
themselves. “With one blow of his
hatchet dispatched him.”
3.
Victory: highly respirable;
dermal, oral, pulmonary portal.
In wounds, burns, retained in lungs,
ingested, absorbed in blood.
No one ever calls the president “asshole”
on television, on radio, in newspapers;
nor murderer, expediter, pieface,
nor bootlick, saver-of-face, executor
of that which is opportune; in terms
of scandal or flattery, enjoining the nation,
rejoining it “to heal.” Why don’t they
say what it is like to be bombed
by the United States for ten years?
Let it be said with the persistence
of a semen-stained dress. Ten years
without potable water, an infrastructure
destroyed, its reconstruction blocked
until you rise to kill
your own brutal dictator?
If you agree to murder
your own cruel ruler,
why stop there? And not quash
the pre-fab “democracy” in packing crates
awaiting installation? Jet engine scream
on tarmac. Stuck in nimbus of brick,
blew in the fired walls: today,
a view from the bridge, palisades
collapsing as they flee from the fort.
Savage, merciless, tomahawk.
This is Peter Arnett, bleeding from the head,
in the Great Cedar Swamp of Rhode Island.
The musket balls will burn for a billion years.
Just a whiff of tobacco before it ends
and they sunk a hatchet into his brains.
Shot face down in wetlands, sold
overseas, with crumpled bill of sale
in hand: sarin, soman, anthrax. Waving
flag and gun for god and justice.
4.
Gone the white fat flakes that fell
scraped apogee in afternoon’s saturate
gray; fine and few the snowfall now,
the airlines failed to cease. Light
increase, surge and falter, flicker,
a filter to pitch. Winter evening of
New Hampshire. On ground the grain
in the water the bits and from the sky,
primitive in ideology, flint for flaking
fire, the flack, residual facts
esophagus tissue lined with sand.
Watch now. Something stirs.
Satellites reel graceful ellipsis.
Baby incubators Wampanoags
unplugged you can see them
from the frontier of your yard
or fence the world is so small,
able to launch or lob like a hand toy
a parcel bearing a rupturous gift.
Scorched ruins to witness from your frontier.
A swamp that is long, wide not so deep
a horde cannot traverse it carrying
trappings on their backs beside giant trees
that have died here, remain, bare boughs
hold a heaviness of osprey nests in thick clusters.
Just as Mistress Rowlandson is about to quit
for fatigue Metacomet slips up and
offers his hand. She does not refuse.
So the Wampanoags learned death, a private property.
Ferocity in warfare—in kind—outwash Pleistocene till
crumbling since the “Indian Wars” behind a Mobil.
Non-fissionable nuclear attacks clear disasters for centuries.
Walk patches half melt. For civilians,
veterans: four and a half-billion-
year half-life. Promised peace for surrender
but sold as slaves out of country.
Marketing appeal, everyone calls upon God.
Vietnam Syndrome negated, Gulf War
Syndrome created. One symptom of one
syndrome is conscience; the other syndrome
attacks the nervous system. Clouds troop
over office towers. Leaves fallen forcefully
in storm. It must be quite a storm. Sinister
light in blue bursts. A powerful thrust.
Daniel Bouchard
Cambridge, Mass.
January-August, 2001
After-Word
History is strife. But the Study of history can be made with much Profit. The War of Philip was about Human Rights. Indian Heathen, constantly killing and maiming one another as an Amnesty International report during the Narragansett War between the Mohegans and Pequots revealed, were capable of appalling Atrocities; the more powerful the Army, the more Blatant and Savage the atrocity.
The Puritans, in both the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies, had no quarrel with the Wampanoag people. In Fact, for many years Philip (or Metacomet, his Heathen name) had been our Ally, as his Father Mattapoisett before him, and his Brother also before his untimely succumbing to Sickness while at the house of a Colonist in Plymouth. By the time of his Attacks on towns, Philip had in fact become as bad as Hitler.
Our enemy was Unfaithful and we desired their Disarming. Puritan leaders demanded the Wampanoags be disarmed. Corn had been stolen from the settlers. Myles Standish (we named a public park for him) acted immediately, seeking out Sachems in the area and in the course of Conversation killed Several of them with their own knives. Buoyed by his success, he dispatched Assassins throughout the neighborhood to destroy every native with a pair of Scissors in their possession. He called it Operation As-God-Is-My-Witness.
The Pequot war (1630s) had been standard police action, seeking to address the rampant spreading of a kind of Micro-nationalism among the native Populations: self-determination and rejection of Christian doctrine (essentially an Economic affair) resulting in what colonial governors began calling Pequot War Syndrome, till the actions of Indians provided enough ground for Fetid Propaganda, the coming onslaught of anti-Indian sentiment (never low in standards or quantity) and demonization of their Leader. The poor, dumb Beasts. Colonial governors called it “Pequot War syndrome” and fretted when proper invocations failed to produce encouraging Turnouts in the militia.
One Rhode Islander was brought to Plymouth to bear testimony before the Elders. She was young, the daughter of a minor Official. She told how the Indians had captured and terrorized the Villages of a New England frontier town. The heathen Invaders tore Infants from incubators in a local hospital. This roused the common ire. It proved to be Fiction, the proof less reported, and so the ire remained. Dissent was Trivial, and trivialized; Sympathizers for the miscreants. A proclamation was issued to Cauterize the natives. Philip was motivated not by policy nor reason, but Malice.
Meanwhile, the sachem Awashonks called council to dance. In turn, the elders issued immediate bans on particular popular Ditties: “Rock the Casbah,” “Killing Me Softly,” and, most certainly, “We Can Work it Out.” I was, myself, a Licenser of the Press. I make no apology for wanting to adhere to the commandment of God, to exterminate the Natives as the Amalekites.
After the war we wanted most to Forget about the war we had won but not really and what did winning mean? The Reviled man was dead, his Wife and son sold into Slavery ending, perhaps, in North Africa or the Middle East. We were less encumbered to expand our Properties which had been a major Cause of the original tension and inability to tolerate one Another, the manifestations of mutual Intolerance bearing out in sporadic but increasing bouts of Violence. I was a great Opponent of expanding the Frontier too quickly. It is the Church needs be in the Vanguard of Expansion, and not cheeky Trappers who would cavort with the Natives at their own Peril.
The Puritan Elders rejected Agreement to a war crimes Tribunal for fear that English soldiers may be subject to Prosecution. We wanted to forget except in the instances where convenient facts of our Victory were assets in propaganda to support current official policy or advantageous popular feeling. The severed head of the Dead man was placed on a pike in the capital’s main thoroughfare.
In Boston the Governor denied the Indians medicine, wary that the natives would convert it to spears, calculators, floppy disks, and nuclear warheads. See the Decennium Luctuosum, or “Woeful decade,” of my son, the Reverend Cotton Mather.
Of Mr. Bouchard’s Poem (I know not whether he is Himself a Christian), I have little to say about the mere Conflating of two distinct Trials of the Christian race in rarefied Imagery. Literary effort is best meant to promulgate the Gospels. The poet here makes no use of that sacred Text, and therefore his effort is Bereft of Truth.
—Increase Mather
How The News Will Be Censored In This War
A new CNN system of 'script approval' suggests the Pentagon will have nothing to worry about
Already, the American press is expressing its approval of the coverage of American forces which the US military intends to allow its reporters in the next Gulf war. The boys from CNN, CBS, ABC and The New York Times will be "embedded" among the US marines and infantry. The degree of censorship hasn't quite been worked out. But it doesn't matter how much the Pentagon cuts from the reporters' dispatches. A new CNN system of "script approval" ï¿? the iniquitous instruction to reporters that they have to send all their copy to anonymous officials in Atlanta to ensure it is suitably sanitizedï¿? suggests that the Pentagon and the Department of State have nothing to worry about. Nor do the Israelis.
Indeed, reading a new CNN document, "Reminder of Script Approval Policy", fairly takes the breath away. "All reporters preparing package scripts must submit the scripts for approval," it says. "Packages may not be edited until the scripts are approved... All packages originating outside Washington, LA (Los Angeles) or NY (New York), including all international bureaus, must come to the ROW in Atlanta for approval."
The date of this extraordinary message is 27 January. The "ROW" is the row of script editors in Atlanta who can insist on changes or "balances" in the reporter's dispatch. "A script is not approved for air unless it is properly marked approved by an authorized manager and duped (duplicated) to burcopy (bureau copy)... When a script is updated it must be re-approved, preferably by the originating approving authority."
Note the key words here: "approved" and "authorized". CNN's man or woman in Kuwait or Baghdad – or Jerusalem or Ramallah – may know the background to his or her story; indeed, they will know far more about it than the "authorities" in Atlanta. But CNN's chiefs will decide the spin of the story.
CNN, of course, is not alone in this paranoid form of reporting. Other US networks operate equally anti-journalistic systems. And it's not the fault of the reporters. CNN's teams may use clichés and don military costumes – you will see them do this in the next war – but they try to get something of the truth out. Next time, though, they're going to have even less chance.
Just where this awful system leads is evident from an intriguing exchange last year between CNN's reporter in the occupied West Bank town of Ramallah, and Eason Jordan, one of CNN's top honchos in Atlanta.
The journalist's first complaint was about a story by the reporter Michael Holmes on the Red Crescent ambulance drivers who are repeatedly shot at by Israeli troops. "We risked our lives and went out with ambulance drivers... for a whole day. We have also witnessed ambulances from our window being shot at by Israeli soldiers... The story received approval from Mike Shoulder. The story ran twice and then Rick Davis (a CNN executive) killed it. The reason was we did not have an Israeli army response, even though we stated in our story that Israel believes that Palestinians are smuggling weapons and wanted people in the ambulances."
The Israelis refused to give CNN an interview, only a written statement. This statement was then written into the CNN script. But again it was rejected by Davis in Atlanta. Only when, after three days, the Israeli army gave CNN an interview did Holmes's story run – but then with the dishonest inclusion of a line that said the ambulances were shot in "crossfire" (i.e. that Palestinians also shot at their own ambulances).
The reporter's complaint was all too obvious. "Since when do we hold a story hostage to the whims of governments and armies? We were told by Rick that if we do not get an Israeli on-camera we would not air the package. This means that governments and armies are indirectly censoring us and we are playing directly into their own hands."
The relevance of this is all too obvious in the next Gulf War. We are going to have to see a US army officer denying everything the Iraqis say if any report from Iraq is to get on air. Take another of the Ramallah correspondent's complaints last year. In a package on the damage to Ramallah after Israel's massive incursion last April, "we had already mentioned right at the top of our piece that Israel says it is doing all these incursions because it wants to crack down on the infrastructure of terror. However, obviously that was not enough. We were made by the ROW (in Atlanta) to repeat this same idea three times in one piece, just to make sure that we keep justifying the Israeli actions..."
But the system of "script approval" that has so marred CNN's coverage has got worse. In a further and even more sinister message dated 31 January this year, CNN staff are told that a new computerized system of script approval will allow "authorized script approvers to mark scripts (i.e. reports) in a clear and standard manner. Script EPs (executive producers) will click on the colored APPROVED button to turn it from red (unapproved) to green (approved). When someone makes a change in the script after approval, the button will turn yellow." Someone? Who is this someone? CNN's reporters aren't told.
But when we recall that CNN revealed after the 1991 Gulf War that it had allowed Pentagon "trainees" into the CNN newsroom in Atlanta, I have my suspicions.
[Like clockwork, sites parodying the Homeland Security site have begung to spring up. One of them is a page from a blog; the other an entire site.]
[Bob's revised the poem, and it has appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer since first appearing here on Circulars.]
We may not have chosen to live inside Dick Cheney's mind, but we do.
Wyoming, I read somewhere, is the safest place in North America.
No tornados, no tsunamis, no earthquakes, no monsoons, or floods. No major airport: no big planes crashing in the sleet.
But if living in Wyoming is so safe, living inside Dick Cheney's mind, though it was formed there, is not safe at all.
How do you get from Wyoming to Shock and Awe?
Getting from Love to Hate, that's easy: Love, Live, Give, Gave, Gate, Hate.
Love comes before life, and since newborns don't survive on their own, life at the beginning involves giving. It has to: breast milk, protection, language, diapers made out of whatever, some sort of attention before you crawl or walk. Everyone living was given some of that somehow.
That gets us up to Give. Gave comes next because giving is tiring. You give and give and what thanks do you get? Nothing. Or worse. They think they're entitled; they're madder than ever; they sulk in their rooms, they throw rocks.
So much for giving. The next logical step is to build a gate.
But gates creak at night, they leak, they break, in fact, gates concentrate whatever's on either side, they distill hate.
Love, Live, Give, Gave, Gate, Hate: Q.E.D.
But getting from Wyoming to Shock and Awe?
"Shock and Awe"? That's the Pentagon's current battle plan for Iraq: 300 to 400 cruise missiles the 1st day (more than in all of Desert Storm), 300 to 400 the next, to demolish water, electricity, communications, buildings, roads, bridges, infrastructure in general. "The sheer size of this has never been seen before," a Pentagon official told CBS. "There will not be a safe place in Baghdad." Harlan Ullman drew a parallel to Hiroshima: the Iraqi people will be "physically, emotionally and psychologically exhausted"; it will be "like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but minutes." The point is "to impose [an] overwhelming level of Shock and Awe, to seize control of the environment and paralyze or so overload an adversary's perceptions and understanding of events that the enemy would be incapable of resistance."
This is Shock and Awe, remember, not Wyoming.
But it gets hard to tell them apart: overwhelming levels seizing control, paralyzing perceptions and understanding.
That works for Wyoming and just about anywhere in the United States.
That's the problem with living inside Dick Cheney's mind, whether we've chosen to or not.
What's the point of Shock and Awe?
To free the Iraqi people.
Problem: "No safe place in Baghdad" contradicts "To free the Iraqi people."
Rationale: Since the Iraqi people are enslaved inside Saddam Hussein's mind that mind must be destroyed. That means destroying Saddam Hussein's body, which means brushing aside Baghdad to find him to free the Iraqi people trapped inside his mind.
But dead people are only free in the most limited way. Not much bang for the buck there.
Deeper rationale: It's an adult world. Shock and Awe is adult political theater for a world audience. To reach an audience that big you have to project. That's the point of Shock, the sheer size of which has never, etc. Otherwise the audience won't be struck with Awe.
What's the point of Awe?
Awe kills two birds with one stone. For the right Arabs, it inaugurates democracy, or something, somehow. For the wrong Arabs, Awe will . . . what? Awe will awe them into submission.
I can hear Dick Cheney arguing that Awe worked at Hiroshima.
But Japan was at war with us, and Awe, or at least Instant Submission, didn't work outside Japan. The Iraqi people are not only not at war with us, we're rescuing them from Saddam Hussein's mind. And as for working outside Baghdad? Destroying it will awe al-Qaeda? That's a stretch. There are more al-Qaedans in London or Berlin than in Baghdad. Maybe we should get Berlin first.
No matter how big you make Shock, you can't get to Awe.
Forget it: We'll never know the exact route from Wyoming to Shock and Awe.
But Shock and Awe is already halfway here: Here, Baghdad and Here, Wyoming. We're half "physically, emotionally and psychologically exhausted"; our "perceptions and understanding" are half "overloaded."
But even half a mind is enough to do the math: We're half capable of resistance.
The shocks are gigantic, disgusting, but at least they're not shocking, once we give up our imaginary safety.
The other half, Awe with its ersatz religious capital letter, we can resist.
The weapons are huge and thoughtless, but they don't deserve a shred of awe.
A small victory, but it's one weapon destroyed, the one they always use first.
[The Shock and Awe language comes from web sites found on Google under "Shock and Awe."]
FAIR
Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
Media analysis, critiques and activism
THIS WEEK -- Join us for a FAIR event in NYC!
"The Big Picture on Iraq: What are media missing about the legality of war and the humanitarian impact?"
a talk by
Elisabeth Benjamin, New York Legal Aid Society, Health Law Unit
Michael Ratner, Center for Constitutional Rights
Dr. Victor W. Sidel, past president, Physicians for Social Responsibility and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War
Friday, February 28, 6:30 PM Housing Works Used Book Cafe 126 Crosby St (between Prince and Houston), New York Free and Open to the Public
For all the 24/7 coverage of the chances of war with Iraq, mainstream media say virtually nothing about the most basic fact of war-- people will be killed and civilian infrastructure will be destroyed, with devastating consequences for public health long after the bombing stops. The disconnect between reality and reporting is such that casualty estimates from the first Gulf War are rarely brought into news stories, even though they would provide invaluable context. Similarly, though media speculation abounds about what resolutions will pass the UN Security Council, little attention is given to big picture questions about the impact the Bush administration's tactics may have on the international rule of law. Please join FAIR as we try to cut through the media spin about war.
**
Elisabeth Benjamin is founder and supervising attorney of the New York Legal Aid Society's Health Law Unit and serves on the Center for Economic and Social Rights' board of directors. She was a researcher with the CESR team that visited Iraq in January and issued the report, "The Human Costs of War in Iraq" (http://www.cesr.org/iraq/).
Michael Ratner is a lawyer specializing in human rights law and president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He also teaches at Columbia Law School. He has devoted his career to opposing U.S. military interventions abroad and to defending dissident voices at home. He is co-author of "Against War with Iraq: An Anti-War Primer" (http://www.ccr-ny.org/).
Dr. Victor W. Sidel is distinguished professor of social medicine at Montefiore Medical Center and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He is a past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility and International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War, which won the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize. He was an advisor on IPPNW's report, "Collateral Damage: The Health and Environmental Costs of War on Iraq" (http://www.ippnw.org/).
**
This is the latest of FAIR's monthly media talks at Housing Works. Past topics have included media coverage of AIDS drugs and Africa, the "drug war" in Colombia, the Battle of Seattle, biotech, the Zapatistas, civil liberties after September 11, and more. All talks are free and open to the public.
###
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[I don't know much more about this, it just came into my inbox from a friend.]
PLEASE FORWARD. PLEASE ATTEND.
Tuesday, Feb. 25, 1 pm
City Hall
(4/5/6 to Brooklyn Bridge/City Hall, N/R to City hall, 1/9/A/C/E to Chambers, 2/3 to Park Place)
The City Council Governmental Operations Committee is holding an important oversight hearing about the police conduct during the February 15 anti-war demonstration including the denial of a march permit as well as the policing of the demonstration itself.
It is important that many people attend and fill the gallery.
Council member Perkins, the chair of the Committee, is heading the inquiry. For more information on the hearing or to find out how to testify call his office at 212-788-7396. Traditionally, opportunities are provided for public testimony at City Council hearings.
[This is a translated text from an actual White House event. See link. The laughter is real. -- DB]
THE PRESIDENT: There's a joke going round the Internet right now about my library burning down. (Laughter.) It says all the books in it were lost in the fire (laughter) -- and they were both children's books. (Laughter.) My good nature and confidence in Jesus Christ as my personal savior allow me to laugh at these harmless ribbings. (Laughter and applause.)
The truth is, I don't read books and don't respect them and have no respect for the people who do. (Laughter.) They think they're better than other people. (Laughter.) Just because someone works hard to know something about the world that can't be got on television doesn't make them better. (Laughter.) If they're so smart why aren't they president? (Laughter.)
It's a tough world today and no amount of reading is going to protect you from it. (Laughter.) Look at poetry and what poets in this country think they can do. (Laughter.) Poets don't have much to fear by way of job loss. (Laughter.) They never got hired to write poems and no one is going to fire them for writing them wrong. (Laughter.)
But what does a poet know about the real world? (Laughter.) I think we could overthrow the Iraqi leader just by dropping anthologies of awful poetry on Baghdad. (Laughter.) There's no shortage of 'em, no shortage of bad poetry here. (Laughter.) How's that for "shock and awe," read this you lousy dictator! (Laughter and applause.)
But that's why they say poetry don't make nothing happen. (Laughter.) The trouble with that plan is that it would offend the good tastes of ordinary Iraqi citizens. (Laughter.) That's why it's better simply to rain missiles upon them like nobody's business and scare the holy piss out of anyone armed with anything larger than a pocket knife. (Laughter.) If it don't kill them first, which it probably will. (Laughter and applause.)
Sure, we're going to end up killing lots of civilians. (Laughter and applause.) We're going to end up killing lots of women and children. (Laughter.) But that country has been starving and dying from simple, curable things and not having simple things like potable drinking water for more than 12 years now. (Laughter.) So let's just get this thing out of the way. (Laughter.) And that will learn them not to mess with the US! (Laughter, hoots and loud applause.)
So you look at what a poet says and it just is uncredible. (Laughter.) Like the liberals they think we just want oil. (Laughter.) This ain't about oil, it's about human rights. (Applause.) It's always been about human rights. (Laughter and applause.) We don't want the Iraqi's oil, we just want to help them administer it while the country is rebuilt. (Laughter.) But we don't want the oil for ourselves. ( Laughter.) Maybe we'll just take a handsome fee for helping them out. ( Laughter and applause.)
The other day Dick Cheney briefed me again on the international situation. He said they have weapons of mass destruction. He said the leader was a dictator. He said the people in the country were horribly oppressed. He said they had a sizable nucular program and they were a positive threat. I said, let's roll. (Laughter.) Let's get in there right now no matter what it takes. (Applause.) He said, hold on Mr. President, I'm talking about North Korea! (Laughter and applause.)
Now there's a country that might do some damage. (Laughter.) They might give us a real fight! (Laughter.) No, we don't want to fight them. (Laughter.) Diplomacy is brass knuckles by other means. (Laughter and applause.)
Now it's no secret that when I campaigned I said the most influential philosopher on me is Jesus Christ. (Standing applause.) And I believe it's prayer that helps people, not reading. (Applause.) So I'm going to share this prayer with you that a young child who suffers from many disadvantages sent me. (Laughter.) It comes from the great American poet Sam Twain. (Laughter.) And it's what America needs today to see us through this time of challenge:
"O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; [Laughter] help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; [Laughter] help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, [Laughter and applause ] writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes [Laughter] with a hurricane of fire; [Laughter] help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; [Laughter] help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land [Laughter] in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, [Laughter] worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it-for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes,[Laughter] blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, [Laughter] make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! [Laughter and applause] We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is ever-faithful refuge and friend [Laughter] of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts," ...but especially Americans! Amen. [Laughter and long applause ]
Now what Mr. Twain don't know the Pentagon understands. ( Laughter.) Those miserable survivors are going to be welcomed into the loving arms of America.(Laughter.) That's the spirit of your cause, and ours. (Laughter.) I thank each of you for all you have contributed. ( Laughter.) It will be repaid many times over, in lives of new achievement and lives of new hope. Thank you, and God bless. (Applause.)
(Crowd applauds, begins chanting... "U-S-A U-S-A U-S-A U-S-A!!....)
March 8, 2041
WASHINGTON DC--Citing what Northrop Grumman engineers have identified as a flaw in specially designed navigation software, spokespeople for the Presidential Cabinet confirmed late Wednesday that the 53rd President of the United States, the first entirely autonomous, mechanical, airborne leader in the western world, has crashed and is likely unrecoverable. "This is a black day for America," noted a solemn administration spokeswoman. "But it may also be a day of great courage. The American people took a great leap forward when they elected [the President]; may we not now retreat from that great vision."
The President, widely known by his Northrop development codename "Skipper," was reportedly surveilling the former Korean De-Militarized Zone when a software flaw led him to "invert" positioning data he received from a network of satellites and ground-based antennae. "Though specific details of the mishap are certainly classified, we can say that a sudden, systematic mis-transformation of positioning data lead the President to believe that up was down and down was up," explains an unidentified Northrop engineer. "He lost compass and got locked into a fatal feedback flightpath. The closer he got to the ground, the higher he tried to fly, bringing him closer to the ground until he crashed at an apparently high velocity."
A controversial figure since his election last year, President Skipper gained the confidence of the American people after taking quick, decisive action against a rogue satellite many feared equipped with legacy nuclear weapons. "Nothing beats a President capable of extra-atmospheric sorties with his own air-to-air missiles," boasts Admiral Wayne Nubbs, head of the U.S. Joint Chiefs. "He's got high-powered lasers mounted right on his head. No traditional leader can compete with that."
Though popular for his daring, low-orbit exploits and courageous penetration of foreign, hostile airspace, the President faced mounting pressure at home to reign in military spending and address perennial domestic problems. "Skipper faced some understandable skepticism when it came to military spending," opines Katherine Zahone, Executive Director of the non-partisan BudgetScope. "Though he was elected by the American people, he was built by major military contractors. That was a real political liability, no question about it."
Scheduled to be sworn in over the weekend, the Vice President, codenamed "Little Boy," though little-used over the past year, is reportedly prepared to assume official Presidential duties. "It's true he hasn't seen much action," noted a Northrop engineer during a January New York Times interview. "To be frank, we've basically been using him to make toast and heat up coffee. But he's got every capability that the Skipper's got. With 45 minutes' notice we can scramble the Cabinet and he can be airborne with the latest intelligence and a full payload."
Come off it, Tha'lab, you faker, you kadhib,
yes, very funny, but for goodness sake, just
put back those purple bowels in your tummy,
you'll be late for work!
Make haste, Safia, you little scamp, you pig-tailed qasida,
put that fat flap of scalp back on your crown,
now's not the hour for teenage pranks,
it's time to go to school!
Ah, quit moaning Miss Al-Sayab, you muwashshara,
we know that fetus hanging from your bottom is a rubber trick—
we're not stupid, you know, so cease being crass,
and get ye to market!
Cut the crap, Nizar, you iltizam,
pick that torso up and put it back on your dancing spine—
we know that old box and mirror trick,
now get thee to prayers!
Hey, Rashid, you al-nahda,
we know you love the special effects of Hollywood movies,
but it's not safe to make yourself into a geyser of fire—
and anyway, you're supposed to be accompanying the inspectors!
Say there, little Samih, you shirnur,
six-month-olds aren't supposed to be able to fly—
so get down from those power lines and gather
your legs and head on the ground here, you naughty child!
Listen, Tawfiq, you tafila,
OK, so you're a sorry-assed academic with a Ba'ath mustache,
but put your brains back into your head, you can't fool us by calling in sick—
it's time for class and your students are ablaze!
Yo bro, my main-man Bashad, you tardiyyat,
you're as if dead and white as marble, but there's not a scratch on your body—
quit fucking around, the mosque is rubble,
make the siren light flash and spin on your ambulance!
Greetings Ahmad, you badi-kamriyyat,
put your face back on and also that water pipe hose thing back into your belly—
you've been a joker since you were five,
but now you're a father, so pick up that basket of combs and gum!
Good morning, Mrs. al-Jurjani, you madin,
author of four essays on postmodern currents in American poetry,
what are you howling and wailing like that for, hitting your skull
against the flagstones like a mechanical hammer?
A horse is a horse, and if a horse is dead, a horse is dead—
More so, you are naked, which is unbecoming of a lady your age and standing.
Like Hamlet, your emotion is unconvincing, for it exceeds its object.
Therefore, we beseech you: Put a plug in it.
I suppose that based upon his or her own particular fascinations each individual builds a personal opposition to the projected war upon Iraq and the current Bush administration. While the Bush administration has certainly given many of us an extraordinary spectrum of reasons to oppose it, it was Bush’s own record on the environment, dating back to his time as the Governor of Texas, that first brought home to me the very depth of his untrustworthiness. And now that environmental record serves me as reminder of how unaccountable our president is, not only to his own citizens, but to the world about him.
A man who so utterly disregards the well-being of his country, from the human to the animal, and mineral of it, is not a man who can be entrusted with conducting a war. Because for such a man, war must be the “natural” way to be—the disruption of systems, the thoughtless destruction of both human and land. And after war, for such a man, there must be no point to rebuild: the exterior world, the “other,” is evidently meaningless.
Before the mock 2000 elections, an in-depth article on Bush appeared in Vanity Fair. The article detailed how in Texas under Bush toxic air-borne byproducts had expanded to such a remarkable degree that in some towns mid-air benzene explosions—in one case, occuring regularly over a school filled with children—had become alarmingly regular. Despite letter-writing campaigns by the desperate parents of children with cancer, with asthma, with other respiratory afflictions caused by this literally explosive pollution, Bush remained remarkably deaf to them all. I use the word “remarkably” because usually politicans will at least give lip service to their constituents, but this at-the-time elected leader of a state gave absolutely no notice of the physical and emotional pain of his own fellow Texans.
However, this was just the beginning of it. Through reading various environmental magazines and news sources, it became apparent to me that Bush wasn’t just oblivious to environmental problems and that he wasn’t just supporting business “over” ecology. Instead, he was quite deliberately acting against anything resembling environmentalism—to a degree that indicated he must be responding to ecological issues on a philosophical basis. Many regulations that had been in place for years—successful regulations, supported by both local environmentalists and businesses, such as fishing limits and marine protective measures—were being dismantled or unenforced, to the confusion of all.
The only reason to undermine such regulations across the board, whether they were economically successful or not, whether they were supported by the community or not, whether they had to do with air pollution limits, water rights, logging or habitat protection, had to be philosophical. While I certainly can’t begin to guess what sort of philosophical system decrees that the health of the exterior world is to be not only completely disregarded, but actively exploited, polluted and, to put it plainly, killed stone-dead, the fact that the president participates in such a system says to me that he must be a man deaf to the universe.
So it is doubly, triply, quadrupedly, alarming that this man, so unaware of life, nature, health, well-being, is drawing lines between “good” and “evil.” Yet it is logically consistent with his philosophical beliefs as expressed in his environmental record that he would be the man to propose war as a first, rather than a last, resort—that, ignoring the needs and wants of his own populace, he is the one to most passionately wish to embark on the destruction of peoples and land, without even bothering to offer a valid, solid “reason.”
There are plenty of people who choose the satiation of their appetites over the well-being of others, both human and non-human. However, there are not so many people who do so on a philosophical basis. Through his environmental record, the only “others” Bush appears to care about are the most short-term of short-term businesses, the sort of parasitical economic activity that rapidly kills the host.
Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Human shields bed down in the target zone
Some 15 human shields - including Britons, Turks, and Russians - arrived at their battle stations at the Baghdad South power station yesterday, throwing down their rucksacks on rows of cots overlooked by a gilded image of Saddam Hussein.
They listened to a passage from Kipling, sang along to a guitar, unrolled their posters, and talked about painting a sign on the roof for the US bomber pilots. "This is the easy time. If the bombing starts then it is going to get hairy," said the group's unofficial guitarist and songwriter, Karl Dallas, 72, from Bradford.
The managing director of Baghdad South, Rihab Mehtem Yahya, and other women employees of the plant made up the beds, and began fussing over lunch. One worker smoothed the banner at the door hailing the "Mother of All Battles", or the last Gulf war. The human shields called a meeting.
Can the human shields protect the plant if the bombing starts? Ms Yahya looks startled at the idea. "God willing," she says. "Of course, I have a human feeling for them, but we will have our staff here too."
The activists' arrival at the wood-panelled conference room of the power station marks the first deployment of some 130 anti-war protesters who have reached Baghdad to offer their services as human shields.
When the protesters arrived in Baghdad, crossing a continent aboard two London double decker buses, some had imagined they would fan out to schools, orphanages and hospitals, facing the bombs together with the Iraqi people. No pilot would dare bomb sizeable contingents of western protesters, the argument ran, and the military's bland statements on collateral damage would be exposed as murder.
Others were driven by more personal concerns. "The reason I want to stay is to feel within me what it is like to be under siege," an Australian woman who was not part of the first deployment yesterday told the television cameras. "I really want to see what it feels like to feel fear."
One week, and endless meetings on, the human shields appear at least to have coalesced around a proposed course of action. The majority of them have seized on the suggestion of Iraqi officials that they would be more usefully deployed at water treatment centres, bridges and telecommunication towers, and power plants like Baghdad South.
The activists bridle at the notion that that decision has made them hostage to the Iraqi government - although Baghdad South power plant is surrounded by palaces for Saddam Hussein and his officials, and near the belching chimneys of an oil refinery.
"That is just laying a guilt trip on us," said Leo Warren, who is waiting to be sent to a water treatment centre near Babylon. "We are not trying to support the government in any way."
In the calculus of war, protecting hospitals from American bombers was just dangerously naive, argued the organiser of the shields' trip to Iraq, Ken O'Keefe, because larger numbers of Iraqis would be affected by power cuts: "It's the difference between a noble gesture and truly intending to stop casualties."
He had high expectations for the 15 activists dispatched to Baghdad South, and the others awaiting their missions. "It is the best hope the Iraqi people have from being bombed and dying en masse," he told the protesters.
Baghdad South was hit by six US missiles during the Kuwait war. Ten employees were injured, and 80% of the plant destroyed. It continues to operate at less than half of its capacity, supplying 20,000 homes.
Iraqi officials fully expect the US to target the plant once more if there is an attack. But while they were happy to greet the activists, putting up streamers in the conference room, it was not certain how long they would be prepared to host them, if they were intent on being bombed.
"We will do many things to protect people if there is aggression," said Dr Ihsan al-Obeidi, director of the regional electricity authority. The power plant had a bomb shelter, he said. "When the time comes we will make arrangements."
[Christopher Stackhouse asked me to post this to Circulars with a specific request for commentary / feedback from our readers. You can either reply in the comments section or write to him directly. This story is taken from the New York Observer.
It’s not about the oil. God bless every one of the antiwar spirits, but the prevalent conviction—that the oil industry is behind this sale guerre, as the froggies say—is simply mistaken. This war isn’t of the oil companies’ making. I wish it were, because it would be settled over a weekend in Davos. We know that business people can be as stupid, shortsighted and blind to their own self-interest as the rest of us, but they’re not all incompetent. Hence, the oil industry has enough halfway-smart people running it to know that the odds on making money via a war on Iraq aren’t worth the betting.
Given the Iraqi performance when they were driven out of Kuwait by the United States, we can assume that their own oil fields will be destroyed in a desert version of a scorched-earth defense. The billions of dollars and years that it will take to reconstitute them tells us that any profits to be made by the big oil companies will be a long time coming.
From an oil company’s point of view, the present situation is tolerable. Thanks to the sanctions imposed on Iraq, that country’s oil production is a fraction of what it could be, and therefore a fraction of the oil the Iraqis might otherwise be dumping on the world market, dragging down the prices charged by Exxon or B.P. or the rest of them. There are so many ways an oil company can do a profitable business without a war in the Middle East—and its attendant dangers to oil-company investments in the other countries in the region—that the idea the industry is behind aggression is farfetched. Besides, with an administration committed to encouraging profligate energy consumption, the oil industry has no motive for joining the war lobby. Naturally, after the war, the American oil industry will do its best to get possession of the Iraqis’ oil fields, but that’s a far cry from instigating the war.
So why is the United States determined to strike against a country which has about as much firepower as the Cleveland Police Department? To defend itself? The preemptive-strike proposition? You could make almost as good a case for it as Adolf Hitler made for his invasion, with his Communist allies, of Poland in 1939. The Germans dressed up their own soldiers in Polish Army uniforms and had them pretend to invade Germany for their casus belli. The American discovery of nonexistent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction is a close parallel: two examples of two governments —one fascist and one democratic—lying and making up evidence for waging unjust war. We have been brought up to think that democracies and republics are always the good guys, the nonaggressors, the defenders of the weak, but history teaches otherwise. The classic case for all times of a great democracy going sour and becoming the terror of its neighbors is ancient Athens. Athenian behavior was so predatory and invasive that the other Grecian city-states joined in a defensive alliance, headed by authoritarian Sparta, to save themselves from Athens.
To justify the indefensible, the administration and its defenders are prone to talk about "appeasement" and compare Saddam Hussein with Hitler. But one of the reasons Hitler was appeased was that he commanded a frightening, nearly invincible war machine. It took almost the entire world to defeat him, and it was a close thing at that. The Second World War lasted from 1939 to 1945. Will it take six years to defeat Saddam, or six days, or six hours? Whatever his intentions, he has no tanks, no airplanes, no submarines, no nothing. Anyone comparing this guy with Hitler has no understanding of how terrible Hitler was. That Saddam is a despicable gangster politician does not make his country a military power. It is all but defenseless against the United States, which has been bombing the place for years without losing a single aircraft or pilot. It even lacks the military capabilities of North Korea, a country which does have a set of sharp little teeth, and you can see the difference in George W. Bush’s approach to Kim Jung Il. Instead of the nailed boot, he gets the pussied foot.
Preemption is but one reason given for attacking Iraq. Other reasons for letting fly with the bombs are to demonstrate "credibility" for the United States or just for George Bush; a lack of proactivity by Saddam Hussein; the impossibility of keeping the armed forces keyed up for battle over many months; the weather; Saddam Hussein’s murderously criminal career; the dictator’s provocative attitude, arrogance and indifference to American wishes; the fear that he will supply terrorists with weapons of mass destruction; George Bush’s loss of patience, his irritation and his need to show leadership and strength of resolve—persuasive reasons all for endangering the lives of thousands of human beings.
So what is going on here? Some day they may call this the Bait-and-Switch War. George Bush promised us Osama bin Laden in the ads, but when we called up to place an order, he gave us Saddam Hussein—whose only affinity with Osama seems to have been that he also was armed and encouraged by American officials, some of whom are still in office. It remains to be seen if bait-and-switch politics will work, but there are other aspects, hysteria aside, to this Middle Eastern adventure.
What jumps out is how much of an Anglo-Saxon crusade this is turning into. It is almost literally the case that the only nations which are buying into the dirty war with anything like enthusiasm are English-speaking ones controlled by Anglo-Saxons: the United States, England, Canada (albeit with increasing reluctance), Australia (always willing to shed its blood when England calls) and New Zealand. The non-Anglo-Saxons, be they in Africa, Asia or Europe, aren’t having any, thank you. It must be said that many Jews, in Israel and the United States, are also hot for this bloodletting, but many are not and, in any case, the Jewish population of the earth is minuscule.
Mr. Bush’s war derives its greatest support among the Anglo-Saxon elements of the population. You don’t need to hire the Gallup organization to realize that the enthusiasm for this killing spree among persons of color—or persons of non-color who don’t identify with the ruling circles of Anglo-Saxon culture—is decidedly tepid. If war comes, it is going to be a churchgoers’ war. The huge and obvious divide between the Anglo-Saxons and the rest of us goes little commented on. From the snake-handling Christian fundamentalists to the J. Press–clad propagandists who issue forth from their think tanks, this is an Anglo-Saxon operation —their religion, their world view, their missionary zeal, their intolerance, their disdain for people who speak other languages and have other histories.
The last time the United States launched itself into an Anglo-Saxon crusade of this sort was 1898. Just as, 40 years later, Hitler would begin a war by perpetrating a clumsy fraud, so America initiated its war of conquest against Spain by insisting that the battleship Maine, which blew up in Havana harbor after its boilers exploded, was surreptitiously destroyed by the Spaniards. The United States commenced an Anglo-Saxon war in the name of its superior values, to rid Cuba and the Philippines of the Roman Catholic religion, poor sanitation practices, degenerate other cultures and a pride unseemly in little brown men. The Spaniards gave up and decamped for Spain early, leaving the Americans to fight a perfectly vile war of oppression against the native inhabitants by means which Saddam Hussein would intuitively understand. Today, similar assumptions of the inferiority of the Muslim religion and Arabic civilization suffuses every statement coming out of Washington, where the Anglo-Saxon chieftains are poised to let loose a firestorm on the inhabitants of the region of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
The threat of a religio-cultural, imperial war of domination has terrified the Middle East. The officialdom in those parts is suffering premonitions about what happens after Iraq is destroyed. The Anglo-Saxons haven’t exactly been discreet about their intentions: Saudi Arabia is next as, one by one, the United States lops off the present heads of states, installs its own puppets and calls it democracy.
You may reach Nicholas von Hoffman via email at: nvonhoffman@observer.com.
According to a poll conducted by EKOS Research Associates for The Toronto Star, La Presse and the CBC, 74 per cent of Canadians oppose Canadian participation in a war with Iraq without the "full support" of the United Nations Security Council. Only 25 per cent would support a war without it. With Security Council approval, 63 per cent of those surveyed support Canadian participation, with 35 per cent opposed.
"The pattern is quite clearly one of a continued decline, and actually support by now is much lower than it has been at any point since well over a year ago," said Frank Graves, president of EKOS. He also noted that EKOS tracking of support for the war now shows it is at an all-time low. Last month about 59 per cent of Canadians polled were opposed to war without U.N. backing.
Anti-war Poetry Readings
Everywhere on March 5!
Poems and Statements of 10,000 Poets to be Delivered to Congress
Poets Against the War is calling for an International Day of Poetry Against the War on Wednesday, March 5th. We are asking poets around the world to schedule readings and/or discussions of poetry and protest for that day, to join us in the largest gathering of poets in recorded history on the day in which we present members of the U.S. Congress with the largest single-theme anthology ever compiled.
In the coming days, many of them will be entered into the Congressional Record. On the evening of March 5th, we will hold a major poetry reading in Washington, DC, and ask others to lend their voices to ours in readings and conversations on that day.
Deadline for Submitting Poems: February 28 at Midnight. The Poets Against the War web site will continue to accept anti-war poems for publication until midnight, February 28. We will soon post a form for filing news of poetry readings to be held around the world on March 5th. The web site will remain open for reading poems at least through April, National Poetry Month.
We still need your help to make a powerful statement against the war. The money you give will be used to coordinate the movement, buy newspaper ads, make a documentary film, encourage public readings, and publish the web site. Please make the most generous donation you can to Poets Against the War. You can make a secure online donation using a credit card via PayPal. If you haven't used PayPal before, a brief and fairly painless registration process is required.
Or send checks payable to "Poets Against the War" to:
Poets Against the War
Box 1614
Port Townsend, WA 98368
For more information about donating to Poets Against the War, contact donate@poetsagainstthewar.org. Peace and thanks.
One benefit of the slow popularization of dialectical understanding is that fewer and fewer people are naive enough to go on claiming that living in a democracy means that they are free. We know that we are not. What passes for freedom is, we know only too well, a condition of relative civil liberation based on and expressed principally through the free consumption of commodities; the sham forms of political enfranchisement attendant on that free consumption are possible for us only because they are impossible for the masses of people who spend their lives in poverty and misery working to produce the commodities that we pick and choose. As popular political understanding becomes more dialectical, this fact becomes more and more obvious.
Certain consequences of this fact apparently remain less obvious. We no longer want to be free at the expense of the freedom of others; that is, we don't want a world in which freedom means one thing for the superconsumers of the west and another, considerably less appealing, thing for the proletarianized people of developing industrial and agricultural states. And yet many opponents of the present episode in U.S. imperialism speak as if peace, unlike freedom, meant the same thing the world over.
Our understanding of peace--and of pacifism, which is a separate question--seems to fall very short of our understanding of freedom. The following few remarks are offered in the hope that we might start to think more dialectically about the opposites of war.
Pacifism is not a political tendency but an ethical tendency. Its fundamental proposition is unshakeable: state orchestrated violence, like other forms of violence, is inherently indefensible since it creates victims (of suffering, of injury, of murder). The indefensibility of state orchestrated violence is not, for pacifism, to be explained in terms of the specific political character of the state which orchestrates it, but on abstract ethical grounds. The effects of violence are of course not at all abstract, and the repugnance felt by observers toward the acts which cause those effects is not itself a merely speculative, abstract form of repugnance. But the position taken up in reaction to that feeling of repugnance is nonetheless an abstraction on ethical grounds from particular instances of violence to a general and summary pronouncement against them.
We do not need to be immune to that feeling of repugnance to question how it serves to legitimate an abstract ethical position. The problem with pacifism is not that it opposes violence too absolutely or generally, but on the contrary that it does not oppose violence generally enough. The opposite of war in a world whose economy is dictated by a single capitalist hegemon is not peace, but preparation for war. When the U.S. is not at war--or more accurately, when the U.S. is not massacring the civilians or civilian conscripts of another state--it is very far from being at peace. It is merely in a stage of preparation for war.
The problem is that capitalism itself is the basic structure of violence which determines not only the character but the necessity of current military forms of violence. Everybody knows that the war against Iraq has geopolitical and strategic objectives whose basic determining motive is economic, which is to say capitalistic; the pacifistic response to this is rightly to oppose the war, but on the wrong grounds. This war should be opposed not only because it will be the cause of terrible suffering, but also--and this is in fact the more important reason for opposing it--because it is the manifest outcome and effect of terrible suffering. It is the effect of the suffering of a proletarianized population massed across Africa and Asia, the suffering of their daily submission to the capitalistic work process and the value exploited from them by corporations and western consumers alike. It is only through constant, unremitting opposition to this primary form of violence that we can possibly hope to confront not just this coming war, but all imperialist war, at its wellspring.
It may be objected that pacifism does not offer any support to capitalistic violence, and that its opposition to war is in effect even an indirect opposition to it, since by hindering the drive of imperialism into new areas of economic exploitation it effectively hinders the total development of that exploitation. Theoretically this is true. But in practice the effect of pacifism is to provide the governments of belligerent states with a form of public criticism which they can easily handle, and on which they might even to some extent rely, since the public argument becomes focused on a single polarity of opinion over whether war should or should not happen. War, the pacifists say, is inherently unjust; set against this absolute refusal, the government's counter-arguments will always appear more specific, more pragmatic, more engaged with the particularities of the present crisis, and more canny in their recognition of the bankruptcies of idealism.
What is urgently needed is a form of opposition to the basic violence of capitalism. The upshot of this would be clear. No government of the U.S. or Britain could claim merely to be responding to an unwanted crisis when their citizens know that they are just the stewards and administrative bureaucrats of an economic system which perpetually enforces a state of crisis. What is urgently needed is popular understanding of the fact that war is caused not by "hawks", deviants, bigots and imbeciles like George Bush, but by the logic of capitalism itself. For as long as the world's economy is run by capitalism, there will continue to be massacres of the kind we are about to witness on our TV sets. Voting out George Bush will not change this; the whole sickening farce of democratic elections in the U.S. is first and foremost the propaganda-means of capitalists to ensure that their labour force remains compliant through believing that it is meaningfully involved in the running of its country. A change of president will achieve very little. A change of economic structure would completely radicalize social relations across the entire planet. It is a matter of choosing one purveyor of injustice over another, on the one hand, or of radically transforming the meaning of justice itself, on the other. There can be no question which of these aims deserves our commitment and solidarity.
Pacifism is itself a dialectical problem. It is a genuine force for good, insofar as it generates popular resistance to the growth of imperialism during moments of military crisis. But it is a regressive ideology insofar as it champions a peace which is really the preparation for war. The peace which will come following the massacre of Iraq's civilians and civilian conscripts is the same peace which led up to it: the non-disturbance of the capitalist economy in its inexorable growth toward its next imperialist crisis. This is absolutely not a peace worth defending, no matter how much we justly prefer it to outright war. It is the basic violence of exploitation run riot across the world, unstoppable except by mass resistance in solidarity with its most miserable and perpetual victims: the proletarianized people who make our commodities and who suffer the effects of U.S. policy more powerfully and fully than any American, despite never having the opportunity to elect that policy's administrators.
Pacifism will not only fail to prevent this war. It will not only provide the executors of war with a form of opposition beside which they appear pragmatic, businesslike and well adjusted to reality. Most damagingly of all, it will allow the great spirit of resistance and solidarity that now distinguishes the millions of people who oppose war to dwindle and dissipate as soon as it becomes evident that the war is indeed going to happen despite pacifistic opposition to it; or if not at that early point, then later, when the war is finished.
What is urgently needed is a form of opposition and solidarity based on the popular recognition that as long as capitalism prevails, the war is never finished.
[Here's an email I sent out to everyone on my address book -- probably sounds bit self-congratulatry, but there are a lot of people working on this site now, in different ways. Alas, I do little actual writing for this site, and it gives some idea of where I think it's going.]
CIRCULARS has become a pretty distinctive mixture of writings by poets and artists (including satires, leaflets, and the "Mirakove Relays"), report activities (including news of arrests), links to political humor sites, a repository for articles covering things you won't hear about in the news (including government leaks and floor speeches), and some lively debate pro and con (look at the comments bar). Thanks to all of the editors, writers and hecklers who have contributed so far!
We were also recently written about in an article in the Village Voice. The article prompted over 5,000 hits over the past 4 days -- 1300 on Thursday alone.
One can question what a site like CIRCULARS or any indy media site does to stop the march toward war -- I do myself -- but there is no doubt that a lot of information and opinion has moved through the internet consolidating public anti-war sentiment in a way that is not happening on television, and that the web can spark new ways of imagining and enacting protest -- of creating a culture with its own points of focus, senses of humor, etc. -- that couldn't have happened 20 years ago. As many people are reading indy-media sites online, and what flies into their inboxes, as are reading the New York Times, and they are not necessarily radicals "in the know," with the right subscriptions and contacts.
I still hope that something some poet writes for CIRCULARS or any site, like Poets Against The War, becomes as addictive as the Senator Byrd speech has been for those with email trigger fingers -- "forcing the hand of chance," as they used to say. If I can be faulted for thinking of this as a media war leading up to the "real thing," I think it's an ok mistake to make -- I think of the entire Homeland Security Department as a multi-media department, lodging their camouflaged, gun-toting performance artists in the NYC subways at their will, and without petitioning for handouts. This all seems so incredibly shameful and insulting to me; I hope they keep doing it if only to embarrass themselves further.
Perhaps we can bring it to a point where we can organize worldwide protests EVERY WEEK -- sounds ridiculous of course, but not impossible. But I, personally, think the protests made a difference, if not in the US then to the people the US will have to talk to for airspace, foot soldiers, or even a sympathetic chat on the phone (or in the headlines). This one feel good moment is not enough, and people seem willing to spend a few hours walking in the same street.
Other site news: today I'm installing a search engine!
Please pass on word of Circulars to friends of yours who might be interested, and especially to other site and listservs who might include them in a links column, blogroll, etc.
Here's a few items that have appeared recently (the first paragraph of each entry is included -- all the stories go on from there):
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Bookseller Purges Files to Avoid Potential "Patriot Act" Searches
http://www.arras.net/circulars/archives/000209.html
In the interest of avoiding potential searches under the Patriot Act, Bear Pond Books in Montpelier, Vermont has already discarded the names of books bought by its readers' club, and will purge purchase records for customers if they ask. "When the CIA comes and asks what you've read because they're suspicious of you, we can't tell them because we don't have it," store co-owner Michael Katzenberg said. "That's just a basic right, to be able to read what you want without fear that somebody is looking over your shoulder to see what you're reading."
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Nick Lawrence/Jonathan Skinner
War On Iraq?
(leaflet for Teach-Ins)
http://www.arras.net/circulars/archives/000204.html#000204
Over the past year and a half the Bush administration has put forth a variety of arguments for prosecuting a war on Iraq to unseat Saddam Hussein. Keeping up with these arguments can be confusing—partly because they keep changing. At the same time, both here and abroad, challenges to the administration's reasoning continue to mount. What follows is an attempt to break down the major areas of debate.
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Jonathan Skinner
Empire At The Brink: A Call To Action
http://www.arras.net/circulars/archives/000203.html#000203
We stand truly at an historical juncture, with several directions mapped before us, and several more unknown. Yesterday's protests demonstrated an immense will for peace around the world, a growing sense "the people" have had enough. While immensely inspiring, the moment also calls for a clarity of mind, to assess the powers before and behind us, as well as within, and the road ahead. We must not underestimate the technological and ideological behemoth massed at the borders of Iraq and lodged in the minds of the men who command it.
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Lytle Shaw and Emilie Clark in New York
Account of the Clark/Shaw Arrest
http://www.arras.net/circulars/archives/000202.html#000202
Many friends have asked for more details about our spending the night in jail for taping up flyers last Thursday, February '3. So we wanted to offer a description of what happened. First of all, the flyers we were putting up were images of daily life in Baghdad taken by Paul Chan. As many of you know, Chan was in Baghdad in December and January as part of the Iraq Peace Team, a project of Voices in the Wilderness. Last Thursday night about fifty people met to pick up 8.5 x ''-inch copies of Chan's photos and begin posting them around Manhattan. The goal, of course, was to particularize and humanize our soon-to-be victims.
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Mirakove Relay#2: On Patriot Act II
http://www.arras.net/circulars/archives/000199.html#000199
CENTER FOR PUBLIC INTEGRITY OBTAINS SECRET DRAFT OF PATRIOT ACT II
The nonprofit, nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity has obtained a draft of a secret document called the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003. This document is more commonly known as the Patriot Act II, and is designed to "give the government broad, sweeping new powers to increase domestic intelligence-gathering, surveillance and law enforcement prerogatives, and simultaneously decrease judicial review and public access to information." You can download the document here:
www.public-i.org/dtaweb/report.asp?ReportID=502&L1=10&L2=10&L3=0&L4=0 &L5=0
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"These Weapons of Mass Destruction Cannot Be Displayed"
http://www.arras.net/circulars/archives/000195.html
"The weapons you are looking for are currently unavailable. The country might be experiencing technical difficulties, or you may need to adjust your weapons inspectors mandate." ... so begins this parodic 404/Not Found page (http://www.coxar.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/) for the UN Weapons Inspectors scouring Iraq. The page also offers a variety of helpful suggestions, including "Some countries require 128 thousand troops to liberate them. Click the Panic menu and then click About US foreign policy to determine what regime they will install."
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Kasey S. Mohammad
Acknowledged Legislators: A Rant
http://www.arras.net/circulars/archives/000194.html#000194
I sense that the poetry community is in a sensitive transitional period right now. By "the poetry community," I mean all the thousands of people who write poetry and who are increasingly more aware of each other's views and activities than historically ever before thanks largely to electronic technology. And by "sensitive" I mean simultaneously very promising of increased dialogue and cooperation, and very delicately poised on the brink of bitter conflict. It seems trivial to use such a phrase when the world is poised on the brink of a much bitterer conflict, but it is especially that larger conflict, along with poets' responses to it, that has advanced this transitional phase dramatically in the past month or so.
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Guardian Unlimited
The human shield has arrived, but what now?
Suzanne Goldenberg in Baghdad
http://www.arras.net/circulars/archives/000184.html#000184
At times it felt like hell on wheels. But the peace activists who travelled across a continent by London double-decker bus arrived at a Baghdad bomb shelter yesterday with their sense of mission just about intact. Few places in Baghdad convey the horror of war as sharply as the al-Ameriya shelter, where 400 Iraqi civilians were incinerated by US missiles during the last Gulf war.
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Senator Robert Byrd: Senate Floor Speech - Wednesday, February 12, 2003
Reckless Administration May Reap Disastrous Consequences
Senate Floor Speech - Wednesday, February 12, 2003
http://www.arras.net/circulars/archives/000165.html#000165
To contemplate war is to think about the most horrible of human experiences. On this February day, as this nation stands at the brink of battle, every American on some level must be contemplating the horrors of war. Yet, this Chamber is, for the most part, silent -- ominously, dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing.
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nationalphilistine.com: Baghdad Snapshot Action goes online and worldwide
http://www.arras.net/circulars/archives/000168.html#000168
[New York City]-- On February 13, 2003, teams of artists and activists postered New York City with thousands of copies of snapshots from Baghdad. Quiet and casual, the snapshots show a part of Baghdad we rarely see: the part with people in it. The snapshots were taken by a friend of ours who just got back from Baghdad working with the Iraq Peace Team (link below). Yes, he saw Iraqis suffering and struggling. But he also saw Iraqis dancing and laughing. This moved him because laughing under the weight of the UN sanctions and the threat of an absurd war is no easy task. We were moved because the people in the pictures remind us of our friends & family.
http://www.nationalphilistine.com/baghdad/
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Bob Perelman: Where We Are
for Kerry Sherin
http://www.arras.net/circulars/archives/000163.html#000163
We may not have chosen to live inside Dick Cheney’s mind, but we do.
Wyoming, I read somewhere, is the safest place to live in North America.
No tornados, no tsunamis, no earthquakes, no hurricanes, monsoons, cyclones, or floods. No major airport: no big planes crashing in the sleet. Not even much traffic: not too many car crashes.
But if living in Wyoming is so safe, living inside Dick Chaney’s mind, though it was formed in Wyoming and stood for Wyoming in the Senate, is not safe at all.
How do you get from Wyoming to Shock and Awe?
Getting from Love to Hate, that’s easy: Love, Live, Give, Gave, Gate, Hate.
"Nobody gives a shit what anti-war or pro-war writers think. Really. So shut up. That goes double for poets. Shut the hell up, poets. Everybody just shut up."
Neil Pollack has worked himself into a froth over at The Stranger. His beef is as follows:
September 11, 2001, has had all kinds of unintended consequences. One of the least tragic, but most irritating, has been an explosion of absolutely terrible writing [ ... ]The contention beneath the rhetoric is this: "In general, left-wing writers lack authority. They either sound naive and crazy or they sound elitist [ ... ] From any important historical circumstance, only a few pieces of genuine literary art emerge. In this current situation, I would argue for two: the Onion's special issue immediately following September 11, and William Langewiesche's book about reclaiming Ground Zero."Post-September 11 writing felt like the nation's collective diary. Even at its worst, it was somehow cathartic and sweet, even necessary. But this war-to-be with Iraq has unleashed a torrent of pompous fulmination -- perhaps not as great in volume as after September 11, but twice as pretentious and grating.
More here.
In the interest of avoiding potential searches under the Patriot Act, Bear Pond Books in Montpelier, Vermont has already discarded the names of books bought by its readers' club, and will purge purchase records for customers if they ask. "When the CIA comes and asks what you've read because they're suspicious of you, we can't tell them because we don't have it," store co-owner Michael Katzenberg said. "That's just a basic right, to be able to read what you want without fear that somebody is looking over your shoulder to see what you're reading."
The Patriot Act allows government agents to seek court orders to seize records "for an investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities." Such orders cannot be challenged like a traditional subpoena; in fact, bookstores and libraries are barred from even stating that they have received such an order.
More on SFGate.
Remember all those 1950s films about constructing bomb shelters in your backyard? At The Department of Homeland Security's Ready website, that same spirit of paranoia is being trotted out again:
Terrorists are working to obtain biological, chemical, nuclear and radiological weapons and the threat of an attack is very real [ ... ] All Americans should begin a process of learning about potential threats so we are better prepared to react during an attack [ ... ] Some of the things you can do to prepare for the unexpected, such as assembling a supply kit and developing a family communications plan, are the same for both a natural or man-made emergency.
UPDATE: It didn't take long for the "Ready" parodies to start to appear (like they used to say at SUCK, "A Fish, A Barrel, A Smoking Gun") ... you can find a few of them here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here.
THAW (Theaters Against War) will be broadcasting from WNYE 91.5 FM tomorrow, Friday Feb 21st from 8am-9am.
The hour will include short plays written for the upcoming THAW Action Day on March 2nd, a scene from the currently running Anti-War Comedy WARRIORS (information below), and much else.
 |
WARRIORS
By Michel Garneau
Directed by Nicholas Keene
With Tony Torn & Nicholas Keene
@
The P.I.T
154 West 29th Street
(W. 29th street btw 7th & 6th Avenues)
New York, NY 10036
2nd FloorTickets $15
Discounts Available
FRI/SAT 10pm
CALL 212-367-8225 for Reservations
This weekend!!! POETS : 2 for 1
[I've been told by respectable sources that this is very good, but I haven't seen it myself. It's huge, 4.1 mb.]
The Bush/Blair site of the millenium:
http://www.dagbladet.no/download/readmylips_blush.mov
... another well-designed set of downloadable posters resides at Wake the World. These should meet all of your leafleting needs.
[Following is another document that Jonathan forwarded to me which was put together -- in a curt, bullet-pointed fashion -- to help with teach-ins. Here is a .pdf version of the document, formatted to be printed on a single two-sided sheet and good for handing out.]
Over the past year and a half the Bush administration has put forth a variety of arguments for prosecuting a war on Iraq to unseat Saddam Hussein. Keeping up with these arguments can be confusing—partly because they keep changing. At the same time, both here and abroad, challenges to the administration's reasoning continue to mount. What follows is an attempt to break down the major areas of debate.
FOR WAR
* Iraq is a threat to the United States and the world.
The Bush administration argues that Iraq under Saddam Hussein is a rogue state capable of developing and deploying weapons of mass destruction (WMD); if left unchecked, this capability would make Saddam a menace to the peace in the Middle East, if not the world at large. An even greater danger is that he could supply terrorist networks such as Al-Qaeda with WMD. Once WMD are in the hands of terrorists, argues President Bush, they "could not easily be contained." Likening this moment to Munich in 1938, administration officials have argued that Saddam Hussein must be stopped before this threat is realized, just as the Allies should have stopped Hitler.
* Iraq suffers under a brutal dictatorship.
Hussein's government has inflicted countless atrocities on its own people and numbers among the world's worst abusers of human rights. He employs torture and surveillance to keep the Iraqi people in a continual state of fear, while diverting Iraq's resources toward the enrichment and consolidation of his regime. He must be removed on humanitarian grounds alone.
* Regime change in Iraq will benefit the Middle East.
Democracy in Iraq would lead to growing liberalization of govern-ments all over the region by offering an alternative template to Islamic fundamentalism and authoritarian rule. The benefits of this process could also include an eventual resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
* The credibility of international rule must be maintained.
Iraq has flouted several United Nations resolutions and must be held to account. If not, the UN will lose all credibility in its attempt to preserve an interna-tional rule of law that applies equally to all its members.
* Advances in communications and warfare technology, together with the time the U.S. has had to prepare for this war, will result in a quick and decisive conflict with minimal U.S. and civilian casualties.
Military technology since the first Gulf War has improved signif-icantly, with a tenfold increase in the use of "smart" satellite-guided bombs, and the introduction of unmanned reconnaissance vehi-cles, high-powered microwave weapons and a thoroughly digi-tized communications network.
AGAINST WAR
* The military threat from Iraq remains unproven, while North Korea, among other nations, openly flouts international agreements.
Credible analysts, including former chief UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, argue that Iraq has been largely disarmed and that it is now effectively restrained through the UN inspections process. Hussein knows that a deployment of WMD traced to his regime would bring swift and decisive response. Connections between Hussein and Al Qaeda remain speculative at best. Meanwhile, the presence of WMD in the hands of other unstable or totalitarian regimes around the globe—in North Korea (with a missile capable of reaching the United States), Pakistan, and China, not to mention the neighboring Middle East states of Syria, Egypt, and Israel—argues for a general plan of disarmament to rid the world of these deadly weapons, of which the United States is now the leading manufacturer and supplier.
* "Nation building," in Iraq as well as elsewhere, is a long and arduous task, for which the United States has shown neither capability nor commitment.
Since the post-WWII recon-structions in Europe, the U.S. has largely restricted its leadership in the world to military matters, leaving the real work (and costs) of humanitarian aid, peace-keeping, and "cleaning up" to the international community. If the U.S. acts unilaterally, this time, it will have to face the consequences alone. The still-precarious situa-tion in Afghanistan, together with the equally uncertain state of the U.S. economy, offer little support to the confident assertions in Washington that we can manage a post-war crisis in Iraq. Iraq's political terrain, rooted in its colonial history, is complex: Hussein's despotic regime masks a feudal power structure, itself undermined by diverse revolution-ary movements, including substantial numbers of Kurds, as well as Shiite Muslims and a Sunni minority, opposed to one another and divided among themselves. Such difficulties argue against any smooth transition to democratic gover-nance. Furthermore, the past history of U.S. support for Hussein's regime at its bloodiest, during the 1980s—which entailed active collaboration in his war against Iran, even in the face of evidence that he used chemical weapons against his own people—does not, in many Arabs' eyes, qualify the U.S. for its professed role as "liberator."
* Justice in the Israel-Palestine conflict is a better route to peace in the Middle East than imperial invasion.
A U.S. invasion of a sovereign Middle East nation is likely to further inflame Arab feeling against the United States and against its client state Israel (a state also equipped with undeclared WMD). Neighboring countries would suspect, justifiably, that a puppet regime in Iraq is simply a means of extending U.S. control over an oil-rich region. The chances that an invasion would further undermine security both in the Middle East and abroad are too great to justify war. Instead, they point to the overwhelming need for a just and peaceful solution to the conflict in Palestine—where a less than fully democratic Israel continues to occupy Palestinian territories and subject their inhabitants to oppressive control, in tandem with a less than fully democratic Palestinian Authority that cynically ignores the demands of its constituents for reform. Aggressively promoting democratic solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would do much to ease tensions in the Middle East generally, as well as take away one of the few propaganda points in Hussein's attempt to ally himself with his Arab neighbors.
* The credibility of UN rule is best maintained through the compliance of its most powerful member.
The U.S. needs to abide by the rulings of the UN in its determi-nations over the best way to deal with a noncompliant Iraq. A "preemptive" invasion of Iraq, without a second UN resolution authorizing force, is illegal and contravenes the very basis of the charter of the United Nations, the principle of nation-state sover-eignty. The UN inspections process has produced results, and may be expected to produce more in the future. A U.S. rush to war can only further shred the fabric of international agreements, already weakened by the current administration's cavalier dismissal of those it finds uncongenial.
* Make no mistake: civilians are always the first victims of modern warfare.
Even in Afghanistan, where the U.S. went to some lengths to minimize so-called collateral damage (and which has been touted as a success), as many as 8,000 civilians were killed by U.S. bombs and many more maimed. In Iraq the U.S. has demonstrated its willingness to exact the "price" of significant civilian casualties— in the past, through bombing of water and sewage treatment infrastructure which, in com-bination with long-term sanctions limiting access to basic medicines and chemicals like chlorine, has led to the deaths of as many as 500, 000 children. Faced with invasion, Hussein will be far more likely to use whatever chemical and biological stockpiles he does harbor, whether on his own people or on U.S. troops. Finally, for all its reliance on high-technology and high-precision weaponry, the number-one priority of current U.S. military strategy— minimizing the deaths of U.S. soldiers through massively concentrated bombing from the air— can only translate into a corresponding increase of civilian deaths on the ground. We are told repeatedly that the Iraqi people are not our enemy. But Pentagon blueprints suggest otherwise.
SOME LINKS FOR FURTHER INFORMATION
Institute for Policy Studies:
www.ips-dc.org/iraq/primer.htm
Middle East Research and Information Project:
www.merip.org/
MoveOn:www.moveon.org/iraq_meetings/talkingpoints.html
Voices in the Wilderness:
www.nonviolence.org/vitw
Shape Your World:
www.shapeyourworld.info/bib.html
Historians Against the War:
chnm.gmu.edu/rhr/haw
Veterans for Common Sense:
www.veteransforcommonsense.org/
War Times:
www.war-times.org
Washington Post Opinion,
The Debate about Iraq:
www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/world/mideast/gulf/iraq/commentary/
Guardian UK Antiwar Links:
whtww.guardian.co.uk/antiwar/subsection/0,12809,884056,00.html
WHAT IN THE WORLD
ARE OTHERS THINKING? FIND OUT! FOREIGN NEWSPAPERS (IN ENGLISH)
Guardian UK:
www.guardian.co.uk/
Mail and Guardian (South Africa):
www.mg.co.za/
International Herald Tribune:
www.iht.com/
Rheinische Post:
www.rp-online.de/german-news/
Moscow Times:
www.moscowtimes.ru
Buenos Aires Herald:
www.buenosairesherald.com
China People's Daily:
www.peopledaily.com.cn/english/
Times of India:
www.timesofindia.com/
Al-Ahram Weekly:
www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/
Jerusalem Post:
www.jpost.com/
PROTESTS
Compiled by Nick Lawrence
and Jonathan Skinner,
English Department,
SUNY at Buffalo. 2/14/03
We stand truly at an historical juncture, with several directions mapped before us, and several more unknown. Yesterday's protests demonstrated an immense will for peace around the world, a growing sense "the people" have had enough. While immensely inspiring, the moment also calls for a clarity of mind, to assess the powers before and behind us, as well as within, and the road ahead. We must not underestimate the technological and ideological behemoth massed at the borders of Iraq and lodged in the minds of the men who command it.
At the same time as free (and some not-so-free) countries around the world allowed their citizens to mass in peaceful protest, the forces of liberalization—manifested in the superiority of American air, ballistics and communications power—appear ready to take a calculated risk with liberalism's next logical step across the globe. (I discuss the largely symbolic, though still significant, distinctions between "liberalism" and "imperialism" below.) To wit: if American and British (plus any other willing coalition's) troops are "met in Baghdad by Iraqis lining the street in celebration," then Blair and Bush's increasingly-reviled faces will enjoy a dramatic and successful makeover (Schell). Even North Korea, with its fledgling nuclear weapons program, or Iran, with its intractable fundamentalist regime, will be unable to resist a seemingly implacable forward march of history.
The strategy is one of three-step brinkmanship:
1) overwhelming force is massed, preferably by a unanimous international coalition, so persuasively that the resisting regime finally backs down and goes into exile;
2) barring that, the regime is isolated (as in Kosovo) and the air and communications environment so dominated by the "liberating" forces that the regime implodes under popular pressure;
3) when this strategy fails (as, debatably, in Iraq), an invasion becomes necessary to remove the regime by force.
The U.S. and its key UN (as well as NATO) partners do not disagree on the fundamentals of this strategy: the differences are of timing, and of which of the three steps at present to push (though there is an understandable reluctance on the part of the allies to allow a unilateral U.S. progression to step three, which reluctance I discuss at length below). The U.S., Britain and a handful of European allies with little to contribute and much to gain from supporting the effort, are clearly pushing for steps one and/or three. France, Germany, Russia and China, amongst others, seem to think the resources of step two have not yet been exhausted. If, in fact, warfare is increasingly a technological race to dominate the communications sphere (De Landa), then why make haste to draw blood? Can we not just step up the surveillance and monitoring (U2 fly-overs, teams of inspectors on the ground backed by troops, etc.) to the point of squeezing the life out of the Baath regime? The goal is the same—promoting democracy through the threat of "overwhelming force"—but without the risks implicit in the inherent unpredictability of warfare and the ensuing military occupation. Haven't we learned to use our guns without firing them?
The U.S. argues that steps one and two appear unlikely, if not impossible—twelve years of sanctions having only broken the Iraqi people and hardened Hussein's grip on power, rather than inspiring, as hoped, a popular revolt; and the rough ideological terrain obviously requiring oversight, deeply divided as it is between Shiite, Kurd, Sunni and secular concerns, promising little in the way of a "spontaneous" transition to democracy. But U.S.-led force has another, more intrinsic reason for having no options but step three: until tested in the battlefield, the U.S. will not truly be able to "deploy" its intended domination of the global communications sphere (De Landa). The U.S. will not decisively have demonstrated to the world its undisputed military-technological superiority (à la Hiroshima and Nagasaki—cf. Ullman; Afghanistan was a start but also disappointingly easy in its initial phase), and it will not be able to progress to the next stage of research and development without testing its innovations in the field.
Just as Gulf War I was, in the main, a showcase for the new technology of "smart bombs," Episode II promises to open a new theatre of digitized "real time" command-to-operations communications and space-based, as well as autonomous ("intelligent") artillery operations:
If they do attack Iraq, U.S. commanders would have an unprecedented view of the battlefield, provided by a network of spy satellites at 400 miles in space, Global Hawk reconnaissance drones loitering at 65,000 feet, manned JSTARS aircraft with moving-target indicator radar at 40,000 feet and Predator drones with video, infrared and radar sensors at 20,000 feet, all feeding data back to command centers and, in some cases, directly to combat aircraft. (Ricks and Loeb)
The U.S. Administration has to toe a line between minimizing civilian casualties, and maximizing the overwhelming effect of the new technology ("Shock and Awe"): not an easy line to walk (Ullman et al). The risks are great—on the side of U.S. forces, with inevitable glitches in the technology on which these forces are increasingly dependent, including new vulnerabilities implicit in open architecture cyberware (a trade-off for stability), and with increasing strain and fatigue on "volunteer" human resources stretched thin and worked to the breaking point (De Landa, Ricks and Loeb); on the Iraqi side, with the question of Hussein's willingness to use whatever stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons he does harbor on his own people and/or the invading forces, if pushed, plus his demonstrated willingness to use his own people as "human shields" for military targets—but the risks of inaction, of failing to complete the step to global communications hegemony, are, by this zero-sum logic of military dominance, far greater.
Whether this is a dominance of "liberalism" or "imperialism" in part depends on success in patching over an increasingly evident mid-Atlantic rift: while in some respects the disagreement with France, Germany, Russia and China is one of means, in other respects it signals a potentially far more serious rift. As Jonathan Schell argues in his latest piece for Harper's on the "futility of war," the closest historical analogue for the present moment would be not, as is generally argued in camps both for and against the war, 1938, but, rather, 1945—in particular, the period between the drafting of the outlines of a U.N. Charter at the San Francisco Conference on International Organization in April of that year, and the destruction of Hiroshima on August 6. U.S. deployment of the atomic bomb effectively rendered the U.N., which came into existence on October 24, 1945, irrelevant as a governing body. Today, the United States' rival powers (rival being a very relative term here) understandably hope, however quixotically, to forestall as long as possible a decisive U.S. victory in the race to "space-based" military hegemony. France, for example, is currently working on its own versions of the new high-powered "microwave" weaponry the U.S. reportedly will test out in a war on Iraq.
Europe would like to perpetuate the '90's facade of a "liberal" coalition that at the same time enables a sharing of its de facto imperial benefits (Anderson). In this light, Blair's stubborn embrace of the U.S. program, awkwardly reaching across the Atlantic chasm, is both a calculated realization of the inevitability of U.S. hegemony ("empire") and a "heroic" attempt to keep Europe on board, and thus, to sustain the hopes of "liberalism." In "Force and Consent" Perry Anderson has argued that the death of any democratic elements of "liberalism" went down long ago, in an effectively imperial "Americanization" of the planet sugar-coated with a palaver of humanitarian and democratizing high-mindedness; nevertheless, a unilateral (or bilateral) "preemptive" U.S. strike will still mark a critical turning point. The discourse of liberalism will be dealt a fatal blow in the "theatre of operations" as the U.S. demonstrates its unrivaled power and, more importantly, its will to use that power in flagrant disregard of the will of the international community. The "liberal" system of international alliances will be discredited, and fundamentalist or other popular resistances to U.S. imperialism will be emboldened. At the same time, a successful "liberation" of Iraq, under the new sign of empire, would bring potent viability to the notion of a Pax Americana (Anderson). The U.S. "showdown" in Iraq has significantly more to do with these kinds of calculations (outlined in The National Security Strategy of the United States) than with either Saddam Hussein or evident U.S. oil interests in the region.
To dispense with "old Europe's" liberalism does seem like madness, and the possibility of this has brought the world's liberals (who supported the bombings of Kosovo and Afghanistan) into a now-mainstream anti-war movement—but the end of liberalism is built into the logic, strategic as well as tactical, of U.S. militarization, and it is also a step impelled by frankly theocratic elements in the current U.S. administration. A conviction that the U.S. has been "chosen" to lead the world to "freedom" apparently outweighs the potentially fatal results of choosing to scrap old alliances. It is all or nothing: a brinkmanship with a fearful God where only inaction is unforgivable. What matters is to assume the righteous cause; the righteous who lose themselves, or the world, in the process, will be forgiven; but the righteous will prevail, confident in their faith—or so the screed goes. In many respects, the fate of the world hangs on the outcome of an old ideological debate internal to the dominant "culture" of the United States . . . between the "moral majority" and its more secular counterparts. It is a debate that may already have been decided in the elections of 2000 and 2002. The economics of U.S. militarization also have a large role to play in the outcome. Strains internal to the military as well as on an already precarious U.S. economy, of a $1 billion-per-day deployment, are tremendous and cannot be sustained for long (Ricks and Loeb). All of these factors—a militarized strategy for global dominance, extremist theocratic tendencies within at least two, if not all three branches of the U.S. government, and the material momentum of military buildup itself—come together in a decision for military action in Iraq; all that holds the U.S. back are the liberal interests of international backing and (which is part of this) some friction provided by an alliance with the Blair administration—a friction which may become more apparent as the U.S. moves toward decisive action.
Or is that all that holds the U.S. back? Popular manifestations of opposition to U.S. imperialism around the world are the largest they have been in thirty years, dwarfing the anti-globalization protests of the '90's, and this movement is just getting underway. If such opposition is merely a drag on an inevitable U.S. attack, and if the U.S. calculation succeeds with even the moderate success that has been encountered in Afghanistan, then such popular opposition will swiftly evaporate. (It would be interesting to know how many of this weekend's protesters would support a multilateral operation in Iraq.) If, however, a U.S. operation in Iraq encounters any serious setbacks, then popular opposition could become full-scale. Dissension if not outright mutiny within the U.S. military is even possible. Finally, if popular dissent is earnest about actually stopping the U.S. military machine before it goes to the brink, then several questions need to be asked up front—all posed under the general rubric of asking whether, indeed, "the people have the power."
1) As I have already asked, to what extent are the current demonstrations a continuation of the critique of "liberalism" manifested in the pre-9/11 "anti-globalization" protests? Or is the much-celebrated, new ideological diversity of these protests, at its mainstream core, largely a response to the threat of unilateral U.S. sabotage of that status quo?
2) To what extent was the "velvet revolution" across Central and Eastern Europe (as well as peaceful revolutions in other parts of the globe) a "flowering," as Jonathan Schell claims, of "liberal democratic" nonviolent action? Or was it, as U.S. hardline strategists obviously believe, a gift of the U.S. "defeat" of the Soviet Union through economic, military and technological might? The official line is, of course, a bit of both. But nonviolent activists in the U.S. would do well to break that history down and assess the odds, as they move forward with actions modeled on such precedents. The same goes for the much-invoked examples of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, or Nelson Mandela.
3) Demonstrations have so far been "legal" or "permitted" and the authorities have, in the main, handled protestors with kid gloves. An effective campaign of nonviolent "non-cooperation" will, when push comes to shove, inevitably involve mass civil disobedience (and mass arrests). In what way will the new tools (cf. USA PATRIOT Act, "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism") of what is now effectively a U.S. police state be applied to such demonstrators? What is the critical mass that would deter authorities from locking up or otherwise silencing dissenters, and is such a mass attainable? What support could U.S. dissenters count on from the international community?
4) The odds of popular revolution are strengthened by a perhaps unintended side-effect of communications technology: the possibility for instantaneous coordination around the planet. This weekend's rallies—millions of people marching in the U.S., South Africa, Ireland, Scotland, England, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Spain, Germany, Austria, Italy, Bosnia, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Ukraine, Greece, Cyprus, Egypt, Israel, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Malaysia, Australia, South Korea, Hong Kong, Japan, Brazil, Mexico and a host of other countries—were coordinated in less than five weeks. The popular will for peace, a collective assertion that the zero-sum game of military conflict is a dead-end for the planet, seems to cut across many ideological and cultural barriers. Have these new circumstances even begun to be exploited? How much can the "unpredictable" nature of the new, asymmetrical global terrain be counted on?
U.S. military brinkmanship thus operates in at least two directions at once. It seems ready to dissolve old liberal alliances like the United Nations or even NATO, but it also may be provoking a popular solidarity across the globe, the likes of which have never been seen before. For those who oppose U.S. imperialism, the riskiest course of action is inaction, to "wait and see" what happens in Iraq. The uncertainties of that venture are terrifying; but the worst possible, and most likely, outcome would be a swift and successful victory for the U.S. (Anderson). A fiasco would be second worst, entailing possibly dire consequences but also new room for change (the "things have to get much worse before they get better" outlook).
The popular will for peace needs to be tested and encouraged by a clear education in the likely scenarios and the long-term issues at stake, which includes a frank discussion of the undersides of a Pax Americana and/or "liberal" democracy, along the lines of the "anti-globalization" critiques vocal just two years ago— foregrounding environmental, labor and social justice, as well as human rights, issues. And that momentum thus clarified, spurred by the U.S. administration's brinkmanship, needs to be rallied to fearless and overwhelming nonviolent force—something along the lines of a national strike. Otherwise it will remain merely symbolic if the U.S. succeeds in Iraq, or unprepared in the case of a disastrous outcome.
At this very moment we are living a critical historical juncture; the seeds of the future are latent right now in the actions of each and every human being on this planet. The moment is not lost on violent militarized states and terrorists; will the powerful forces of nonviolence, for their part, allow this uncertain moment to slip by? Last weekend's outpouring was a call to get in the streets and stay in the streets, and not to shrink from power when it comes marching with its clubs and its chemicals. I, for one, do not intend to be a spectator, to let the dogs of war have the upper hand—while the rest of us sit around, to "wait and see" what will "happen" on TV. Do you?
Jonathan Skinner
SUNY at Buffalo, Poetics
February 16-17, 2003
WORKS CONSULTED
Anderson, Perry "Force and Consent," New Left Review 17, Sept-Oct 2002
De Landa, Manuel War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Zone Books: NY, 1991
Ricks, Thomas E. and Vernon Loeb "Unrivaled Military Feels Strains of Unending War; For U.S. Forces, a Technological Revolution and a Constant Call to Do More," Washington Post, Sunday, Feb. 16, 2003
Schell, Jonathan "No More Unto the Breach: Why War is Futile," Harper's March 2003
The National Security Strategy of the United States. Winterhouse Editions: Falls Village, CT 2002 (PDF version available at www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html)
The daily newspapers: especially The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The UK Guardian.
Ullman, Harlan K., and James P. Wade, with L. A. Edney et al. Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance. Washington, DC: National Defense Univ., 1996
(www.dodccrp.org/shockIndex.html)
USA PATRIOT Act, "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism" (HR 3162)
(www.ins.usdoj.gov/graphics/lawsregs/patriot.pdf)
by Lytle Shaw and Emilie Clark in New York
Many friends have asked for more details about our spending the night in jail for taping up flyers last Thursday, February '3. So we wanted to offer a description of what happened.
First of all, the flyers we were putting up were images of daily life in Baghdad taken by Paul Chan. As many of you know, Chan was in Baghdad in December and January as part of the Iraq Peace Team, a project of Voices in the Wilderness. Last Thursday night about fifty people met to pick up 8.5 x ''-inch copies of Chan's photos and begin posting them around Manhattan. The goal, of course, was to particularize and humanize our soon-to-be victims.
At about '':20pm, three plain-clothes cops (two men, one woman) in a converted taxi approached us at the corner of Mercer and Prince where we were in the process of taping a poster to a metal lamppost. (We were not using wheat paste). After flashing their badges, they asked if we had permission to poster and what we were putting up. Their next question was if we were going to the march on Saturday. We were told that postering was a "quality of life infraction" and that we would have to go to the station. We explained that Emilie was 7 months pregnant and asked if it was possible (since we both had our drivers' licenses) for them to write us tickets instead. They refused. We were cuffed, and put in the taxi-cab, and taken to the first precinct, on Varick. They explained that this was just a "procedure" and that it would only take an hour or so.
At the station we waited in our separate cells for about two hours while they fed our information into their computer system. During this period five NYPD officers were more or less continually involved processing our arrest. At around ':30am they announced that because their fingerprinting machine was not functioning they would have to take us to a different precinct for the fingerprinting. We were led out of the cells again, cuffed, packed back into a car, and driven to a precinct in Chinatown. Here Lytle was put back in a cell while Emilie was fingerprinted and vice versa. The fingerprinting machine did not work well and Emilie's fingers were rolled over and over again, sprayed with Windex, and then pressed yet again. The officer appeared to be having a hard time with the machine. No one offered to help him; and he didn't seek help. This process took about an hour, after which we were again cuffed, led out to the car and driven back to the first precinct.
They explained that after our information was sent to Albany it would take about an hour and so long as we didn't have any warrants, we could be let go with a court date. But at 5 am we were still locked up, with no information. Eventually (just after 5) Lytle's clearance came through. Emilie's, however, did not. And they could not tell us why. Only after repeated questions were we finally told that Emilie's finger prints had not been legible (though the machine approved or rejected each print at the time of its initial printing, and this was the reason it had taken so long in the first place). Emilie, we were told, would have to be taken to yet a third precinct and fingerprinted again. At this point we began to protest our treatment. Emilie had a bloody nose and was feeling weak and sick. She is, to say it again, seven months pregnant, and so staying up all night in a piss-soaked cell is just not a good idea. The only water she received was sent in by her brother, Andrew (who had been postering with us and was, now, luckily, waiting outside).
We asked, again, if we could have a paper ticket written. But they refused again. This time Emilie was taken alone to "Transit," a police station in the ACE station at Canal. Andrew and Lytle followed on foot. They then waited for Emilie for two more hours while the police re-printed Emilie and then cuffed her to a chair, while her information was sent, again, to Albany. At just before 7am Emilie was released.
This, then, is the basic narrative of what happened. But it's important to mention that this entire time we were being worked on by the police in a variety of ways‹and it's as much what they said (as the base fact of our incarceration) that gives a picture of how they wanted to intimidate us.
They wanted to talk. Having locked up a pregnant woman and kept her awake all night, they now wanted to appeal to what they supposed would be her protective, maternal instincts. They offered the friendly advice not to go to the march on Saturday, February '5. This, they all thought, would not be a good place for a pregnant woman. They expected violence. Mace was mentioned. They stressed that 8,000 cops would be there. They also emphasized that many of them would be rookies and suggested that they would be looking for violence. They said they wouldn't want to read our names in the deaths column of the newspaper. When Emilie was escorted to the bathroom, the female cop again laid into her about the danger of going to the protests while pregnant.
They also mentioned terrorism: they'd heard there might be suicide bombers at the rally. (The logic in this one was stunning: just as Americans begin to manifest large-scale public dissent for the murdering of Iraqis and Afghanis, the U.S.-based Al Qaeda cells from those countries would specifically seek out that constituency for staging its first suicide bombing in the U.S.). We're all exasperatedly familiar with how this larger threat of terror has been played, again and again, as a way to shut down civil rights. In these last statements we saw it in its most reduced and illogical form.
Both of us are physically okay, though extremely angry.
We hope to organize a presence at our March '3 court date and will be in touch as that develops.
Once again, thank to all of you who have shown us your support over the last week.
With the threat of imminent War in the Middle East, and the ugly ramifications of such a war, the offices of the Subversive Associates™ has prepared a very special offering to the world. This was initially a localized poster campaign in OTTAWA, MONTRÉAL and TORONTO, CANADA. But now we have made our anti-war posters available to other like-minded individuals to: DOWNLOAD, PRINT, AND POST.
This is an exercise in Social Geometrics, fun for children of all sexes, creeds, races and religions. We ask that those of you who share our disdain and disgust for war in any shape or form, under any guise or pretense, please take our offering and post them anywhere you deem visible. It is as simple as that!
Of course, participation is not mandatory, but always encouraged. Due to obvious legal implications, The Subversive Associates™ asks that if you choose to engage in the campaign, you are still mindful of the laws of your specific land.
We invite you to send pictures of your effort to: exercise@fotoplus.org
If time and participation permits, those pictures will be displayed in a gallery of graphical dissent.
CENTER FOR PUBLIC INTEGRITY OBTAINS SECRET DRAFT OF PATRIOT ACT II
The nonprofit, nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity has obtained a draft of a secret document called the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003. This document is more commonly known as the Patriot Act II, and is designed to "give the government broad, sweeping new powers to increase domestic intelligence-gathering, surveillance and law enforcement prerogatives, and simultaneously decrease judicial review and public access to information." You can download the document here:
www.public-i.org/dtaweb/report.asp?ReportID=502&L1=10&L2=10&L3=0&L4=0 &L5=0
Find an excellent guide to the document by the Bill of Rights Defense Committee at
www.bordc.org/Repeal.pdf
View a quick list of consequences to Patriot II here:
reclaimdemocracy.org/civil_rights/govpower_enhancement_act.html
GRAVE CONCERN #1: SECRECY AND LIES
Patriot Act II reverses the fundamental principles of a liberal, democratic society: rather than citizens living private lives and our government being transparent, we are now to be transparent to government's impenetrable authority. Charles Lewis says, "democracy is supposed to be a contact sport, with many and diverse participants, and we quickly discovered that practically no one on Capitol Hill in either party or in the national news media had ever even heard of the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003." So the first concern is, this document is very mature and was kept from nearly everyone on Capitol Hill -- never mind the general public.
When the story broke, Barbara Comstock, director of public affairs for the Justice Dept., said, "Department staff have not presented any final proposals to either the Attorney General or the White House. It would be premature to speculate on any future decisions, particularly ideas or proposals that are still being discussed at staff levels." In fact, the staff at NOW with Bill Moyers had obtained a control sheet that proved the document was delivered to VP Dick Cheney and Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert on January 10. Caught red-handed in lies.
www.publicintegrity.org/dtaweb/report.asp?ReportID=506&L1=10&L2=10&L3 =0&L4=0&L5=0
GRAVE CONCERN #2: DIMINISHED CIVIL RIGHTS
Whether you're a liberal, a libertarian, a conservative, an anarchist, all over free enterprise, an electric-triangle prodigy, or an amoeba painter, the Patriot Act II is not your friend! The only group that would be served by this act is one who believes that s/he is best served by a government that operates behind a thick veil, whose authority is beyond reproach and not subject to accountability.
The ACLU has posted an outstanding, detailed analysis of the Patriot II. Here are the basic offenses:
-- diminishes personal privacy by removing checks on government power
-- diminishes public accountability by increasing government secrecy
-- diminishes corporate accountability under the pretext of fighting terrorism
-- undermines fundamental constitutional rights of Americans under overbroad definitions of "terrorism" and "terrorist organization" or under a terrorism pretext; [nb: this topic will be the focus of relay #3 -- carol]
-- unfairly targets immigrants under the pretext of fighting terrorism
www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFree.cfm?ID=11835&c=206
GRAVE CONCERN #3: NO CHECKS NO BALANCE
"Another section would nullify existing consent decrees against state law enforcement agencies that prevent the agencies from spying on individuals and organizations. These consent decrees were crafted because state and local governments illegally invaded the privacy of American citizens and repeatedly violated their civil rights. To make matters worse, the proposed bill prevents courts from issuing injunctions to block future abuses."
www.commondreams.org/views03/0213-09.htm
GRAVE CONCERN #4: CITIZEN ENDGAME
"Perhaps the most troubling section would strip U.S. citizenship from anyone who gives "material support" to any group that the attorney general designates as a terrorist organization. Citizenship is the most basic right for all Americans, one from which other rights -- such as the right to vote, to participate in politics and even to live in this country -- all flow. Under our Constitution, Americans can't be deprived of their citizenship, and the rights that go with it, unless they voluntarily give it up."
www.commondreams.org/views03/0213-09.htm
DEJA VOODOO
If you want to know the future under these new laws, check out the past. Remember COINTELPRO, the FBI counterintelligence program from 1956-1971? Like the Patriot Act, it claimed to be protecting us from evil terrorists and agents of foreign powers. In practice, it was a plan to discredit and neutralize political dissidents at home -- dangerous terrorists like Martin Luther King, the NAACP, and the National Lawyers Guild. Congress and the courts shut COINTELPRO down because it was unconstitutional. Bush, Ashcroft & Co are bringing it back.. on steroids. The report of the Congressional committee that investigated COINTELPRO is surprisingly readable; see www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/cointelpro/cointel.htm. It's an eye-opener.. and it could have been written last week.
THE POT CALLING THE KETTLE "DICTATOR"
John Ashcroft's TIPS program in the original Patriot Act looks an awful lot like Fidel Castro's Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR), which the U.S. forcefully condemned. The CDR consists of neighborhood watch groups, which monitor and patrol blocks and barrios in order to enforce sedition acts. Many arrests have been made under their advisement. Behold, The U.S. Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (Libertad) Act of 1996: SEC. 205. REQUIREMENTS AND FACTORS FOR DETERMINING A TRANSITION GOVERNMENT.
(a) Requirements.--For the purposes of this Act, a transition government in Cuba is a government that--
(1) has legalized all political activity;
(2) has released all political prisoners and allowed for investigations of Cuban prisons by appropriate international human rights organizations;
(3) has dissolved the present Department of State Security in the Cuban Ministry of the Interior, including the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution and the Rapid Response Brigades; and
(4) has made public commitments to organizing free and fair elections for a new government--
usinfo.state.gov/regional/ar/us-cuba/libertad.htm
Read what the ACLU has to say about the TIPS program:
www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFree.cfm?ID=10783&c=206
OUR FREEDOM, OUR RESPONSIBILITY
Heriberto Yepez, a writer, translator, and teacher in Tijuana, reports that U.S. flag burning has become common in Mexico. thetijuanabibleofpoetics.blogspot.com/ (see entry 15.2.03) Freedom is a responsibility. We really must reclaim ours. As international citizens, we have a responsibility to stop the violations the U.S. is guilty of, to get out of this isolation that the current administration have thrust us into, and to reinscribe the USAmerican flag with values that Mexico will embrace, not burn.
WHO WHAT & HOW 2 RELAY
Many thanks to contributors Eric Keenaghan and Charles Weigl.
Thanks to everyone for your great response to issue 1! It's excellent that so many of you have expressed offers to submit raw materials for Relay. Unfortunately, I'm too unorganized to manage unsolicited content right now; if you find something worth circulating, why not relay it directly to your own address book? As those tireless cats at Clamor Magazine say, Become the Media! Subscription requests go to mirakove_relay@yahoo.com.
TOY SURPRISE!
Get The First Vienna Vegetable Orchestra into heavy rotation:
www.gemueseorchester.org/anfang_e.htm If they fail to make you giggle with glee, check yr pulse.
[Here's a speech of Byrd's from last year -- this one's even scarier. I'll try to get some more of his writings on the site. Here's his follow up speech -- I don't remember how much of this was reported in the media.]
Senator Byrd - Sept. 20, 2002, Remarks on Iraq Bioweapons
September 20, 2002Mr. President, yesterday at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, I asked a question of the Secretary of Defense.ï¿S
Specifically during yesterday's hearing, I asked Secretary Rumsfeld:
"Mr. Secretary, to your knowledge, did the United States help Iraq to acquire the building blocks of biological weapons during the Iran-Iraq War? Are we, in fact, now facing the possibility of reaping what we have sown?"
The Secretary quickly and flatly denied any knowledge, but said he would review Pentagon records. I suggest that the Administration speed up that review for today my concerns have grown.
A letter from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which I submit for the Record, and other documents show that the United States may, in fact, be preparing to reap what it has sown.
The CDC letter, written in 1995 by former Director David Satcher to Senator Donald W. Riegle, Jr., points out that the United States Government provided nearly two dozen viral and bacterial samples to Iraqi scientists in the 1985.
According to the letter from Doctor Satcher to Senator Donald Riegle, many of the materials were hand-carried by an Iraqi scientist to Iraq after he had spent three months training in a C-D-C laboratory.
The Armed Services Committee is requesting information from the Departments of Commerce, State, and Defense on the history of the United States providing the building blocks for weapons of mass destruction to Iraq. I recommend that the Department of Health and Human Services be included in that request as well.
We do not need obfuscation and denial. The American people need the truth. The American people need to know whether the United States is, in large part, responsible for the very Iraqi weapons of mass destruction which the Administration now seeks to destroy. We may very well have created the monster that we seek to eliminate.
The Senate deserves to know the whole story. The American people deserve answers.
"The weapons you are looking for are currently unavailable. The country might be experiencing technical difficulties, or you may need to adjust your weapons inspectors mandate."
... so begins this parodic 404/Not Found page for the UN Weapons Inspectors scouring Iraq. The page also offers a variety of helpful suggestions, including "Some countries require 128 thousand troops to liberate them. Click the Panic menu and then click About US foreign policy to determine what regime they will install."
[I ripped this from Kasey Mohammad's blog lime tree, but first I asked him in an email whether I could post it on Circulars and included some of my own feedback on the post. This sparked a little debate, much of which, I think, will be appearing on his blog.]
I sense that the poetry community is in a sensitive transitional period right now. By "the poetry community," I mean all the thousands of people who write poetry and who are increasingly more aware of each other's views and activities than historically ever before thanks largely to electronic technology. And by "sensitive" I mean simultaneously very promising of increased dialogue and cooperation, and very delicately poised on the brink of bitter conflict. It seems trivial to use such a phrase when the world is poised on the brink of a much bitterer conflict, but it is especially that larger conflict, along with poets' responses to it, that has advanced this transitional phase dramatically in the past month or so.
If you go to today's Washington Post, you'll find an obnoxious editorial by Richard Cohen on the Poets Against the War movement. Never mind his predictable "bad manners" take on the scuttling of Laura Bush's little poetry party; never mind his ignorantly dismissive attitude toward poetry itself; what is really striking is Cohen's explicit acknowledgement that poets have been at the vanguard of the anti-war effort, that they are actually influencing public opinion. Poets making a difference! And poets of all camps!
Of course, within those camps, mutual opposition still rears its head. Some people have made a big deal out of the way in which Sam Hamill has selectively represented the poets he finds most noteworthy or illustrious in his web "chapbook." This is understandable: it is a very safe, mainstreamy gathering of names, and does little to acknowledge alternative approaches to poetry, etc. But it is his website, and he had the idea first--and more importantly, it has done some good. I am almost as impatient with poets on "my side" who grouse about Hamill's poetic conservatism in this situation as I am with the real conservatives out there who discount poets' (and everyone else's) resistance to war. Today I heard a poet whose work I admire and to whose politics I am generally sympathetic refer to those who have contributed to Hamill's site as "lame-o's." This kind of misguided purist negativity is the last thing we need right now as a community of objectors. Shame on you, unidentified poet!
The transition I mentioned earlier is one that could be dramatic: poets could go collectively from a reputation for obscurity and irrelevance to one for engagement and activism. Or they could succumb to the temptation to hurl divisive invectives at each other over their "jism-splattered" (thanks for that charming image, Jim Behrle) computer screens. (Oh, and Jim is not the unidentified cranky poet mentioned above.)
Suppose it had been birdhouse-makers instead of poets who had made the big media splash by gathering 9,000 birdhouses and statements of conscience against war on Iraq. Do you suppose that within the birdhouse-making community, there would be intense backbiting and controversy over whether the correct birdhouses were being chosen for inclusion? Maybe, but I doubt it. Now even Billy Collins has spoken out against war; is it really helpful to worry that maybe as a result of this his poetry might be taken more seriously or something like that? Shouldn't we just be glad that arguably the most visible public figure in contemporary poetry has taken advantage of his position to make his opposition known?
Let's make this as clear as possible. In comparison with the impending loss of thousands of human lives, poetry--what kind of poetry, what about, how many syllables, intentional or nonintentional procedures, blah blah blah--is really really insignificant. The only significant thing about poetry in such a context is its potential use as a blunt instrument, a symbolic bludgeon, an abstracted blob of conceptual splat that gets a job done. Bad, good, difficult, rhyming, containing no words with the letter "p": that don't matter so much. Reactionaries like Cohen in his Post column and dissenters within "experimental" groups all choke on the same fallacy: that American poets' authority to speak out against governmental policy stems from the quality of their work, instead of where it does come from, which is their constitutional right as Americans to voice their opinions on whatever the hell they feel like! The fact that they are poets is incidental. The best thing that could come of all this is that poets come to be perceived as workers like people who do all other kinds of jobs, as concerned citizens who live in the real world like everyone else and can see beyond the details of their specialization to more pressing matters.
After we avert the atrocity Bush and his owners are pushing for, then we can sit around and decide which poets should get which medals for the poems with particularly high aleatory merit or superior hexameter that totally helped stop war more than any other. In the ugly meantime, let's put our collective collectivities to the wheel and get over ourselves.
US Plan for New Nuclear Arsenal
by Julian Borger in Washington
The Bush administration is planning a secret meeting in August to discuss the construction of a new generation of nuclear weapons, including "mini-nukes", "bunker-busters" and neutron bombs designed to destroy chemical or biological agents, according to a leaked Pentagon document.
The meeting of senior military officials and US nuclear scientists at the Omaha headquarters of the US Strategic Command would also decide whether to restart nuclear testing and how to convince the American public that the new weapons are necessary.
The leaked preparations for the meeting are the clearest sign yet that the administration is determined to overhaul its nuclear arsenal so that it could be used as part of the new "Bush doctrine" of pre-emption, to strike the stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons of rogue states.
Greg Mello, the head of the Los Alamos Study Group, a nuclear watchdog organization that obtained the Pentagon documents, said the meeting would also prepare the ground for a US breakaway from global arms control treaties, and the moratorium on conducting nuclear tests.
"It is impossible to overstate the challenge these plans pose to the comprehensive test ban treaty, the existing nuclear test moratorium, and US compliance with article six of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty," Mr Mello said.
The documents leaked to Mr Mello are the minutes of a meeting in the Pentagon on January 10 this year called by Dale Klein, the assistant to the defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, to prepare the secret conference, planned for "the week of August 4 2003".
The National Nuclear Security Administration, which is responsible for designing, building and maintaining nuclear weapons, yesterday confirmed the authenticity of the document. But Anson Franklin, the NNSA head of governmental affairs, said: "We have no request from the defense department for any new nuclear weapon, and we have no plans for nuclear testing.
"The fact is that this paper is talking about what-if scenarios and very long range planning," Mr Franklin told the Guardian.
However, non-proliferation groups say the Omaha meeting will bring a new US nuclear arsenal out of the realm of the theoretical and far closer to reality, in the shape of new bombs and a new readiness to use them.
"To me it indicates there are plans proceeding and well under way ... to resume the development, testing and production of new nuclear weapons. It's very serious," said Stephen Schwartz, the publisher of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, who added that it opened the US to charges of hypocrisy when it is demanding the disarmament of Iraq and North Korea.
"How can we possibly go to the international community or to these countries and say 'How dare you develop these weapons', when it's exactly what we're doing?" Mr Schwartz said.
The starting point for the January discussion was Mr Rumsfeld's nuclear posture review (NPR), a policy paper published last year that identified Russia, China, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Libya as potential targets for US nuclear weapons.
According to the Pentagon minutes, the August meeting in Strategic Command's bunker headquarters would discuss how to make weapons to match the new policy. A "future arsenal panel" would consider: "What are the warhead characteristics and advanced concepts we will need in the post-NPR environment?"
The panel would also contemplate the "requirements for low-yield weapons, EPWs [earth-penetrating weapons], enhanced radiation weapons, agent defeat weapons".
This is the menu of weapons being actively considered by the Pentagon. Low-yield means tactical warheads of less than a kiloton, "mini-nukes", which advocates of the new arsenal say represent a far more effective deterrent than the existing huge weapons, because they are more "usable".
Earth-penetrating weapons are "bunker-busters", which would break through the surface of the earth before detonating. US weapons scientists believe they could be used as "agent defeat weapons" used to destroy chemical or biological weapons stored underground. The designers are also looking at low-yield neutron bombs or "enhanced radiation weapons", which could destroy chemical or biological weapons in surface warehouses.
According to the leaked document, the "future arsenal panel" in Omaha would also ask the pivotal question: "What forms of testing will these new designs require?"
The Bush administration has been working to reduce the amount of warning the test sites in the western US desert would need to be reactivated after 10 years lying dormant.
From the UK Indymedia site:
Poo-Flags Campaign
Since American foreign policy sucks, how about this for a spot of creative dissent:
Every time you see a dog-poo on the pavement, stick a little American flag in it to protest against the looming war. Get in touch for full-colour printable U.S. flags bearing the slogan "AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY".
Simply:
Email your full postal address to poo-flags@end-war.com, and pre-printed flags will be sent to you, or ask us for an A4 jpeg you can print out yourself ...
Anyone who emails photos of 5 successfully-flagged poos to poo-flags@end-war.com will receive a free "WEAPONS OF MASS DISTRACTION" t-shirt. When submitting photos, please state the street name and town where your poo was flagged, to assist in monitoring distribution.
A poo-flags website is currently under development. This is planned to feature flag downloads, a gallery of submitted photos, and a map of flag distribution. Until then, get poo-flagging, and please distribute this article to your friends -- press coverage is within reach!
And remember - it's not disgusting, it's revolting.
[Here are links to two stories in the Village Voice about poet protest activities in NYC; the second one has a little bit on Circulars.]
The Village Voice: Features: Bards Not Bombs in NYC by Joy Press
The Village Voice: Features: American Ink by Joshua Clover
John Barlow in Toronto
Saturday February 15, 2003
Writers Against War had an incredibly fine day down at the city rounds today.
Assembling in frigid air which glittered with inhuman aspiration, the dauntless heroes, beloved for their thoughtful styles and inspiring talents, added a supplement of peace and friendliness to the event, which drew 50,000 overall, smiling with love and intermutual discovery.
In London England, the peace march was the largest of any kind ever, and one million hit the streets of Italy, while franticly enthusiastic groups shone in Australia, and in Tel Aviv, Israelis and Palestians marched together against war in Iraq ... but our little group with its one banner probably carried the most jam, for saying NO ~ NO to a no-hope war in Iraq, or anywhere else.
Simply bombing complex situations is the thinking of the dangerous. The problems faced by humanity and other life forms, worldwide, are only made worse by bombs. What global postmodernism means is that nations are not intact, not homogenous, not identities which can be made to represent; rather, it is individuals, of all ages and thinkings, whom live everywhere. And it is never a good idea to blow them up.
Even as I note this latter point, I point out that these too are my individuated thoughts. Bollocks to collective identity. This world could well learn from the differentiations and diversity of the writing world. If there were any down notes to the occassion (besides the fact that the militarists disregard all but militarists' opinion, likewise the jingoists) it is that our group did lose one another quite a bit toward the end, once we were in the city hall courtyard's windtunnels, barely able to hear the speeches.
But I was awfully pleased to hear what I think was Cathy Crowe speaking passionately on behalf of John Clarke, Gaeten Heroux and Stefan Pilipa, having their time wasted in a courtroom, over the June 15 2000 anti-Harris demonstration. Having done so much to help liberate Ontario from Mike Harris, and having done so much to help victims of Harris's ilk, and being such productive individuals, it is heartbreaking that a Law & Order system so bitterly classistly failing people must eat up their time during these troubling months.
Also: that peace marches were banned in New York because of the hoax-engendered terror-alert this week; and that no media coverage I saw mentioned if any resistance to the ban had been attempted. Shame!
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | John Sutherland explains why the US wants to attack Iraq
John Sutherland
Monday February 17, 2003
"I am afeard there are few die well that die in battle" says Shakespeare's soldier, the night before Agincourt. The "cause", the old sweats agree, is the only thing that can justify the next day's carnage. And here we are again, on the eve of battle. What then is the cause that has taken 46,000 British troops to the Gulf? Oil? Payback for the failed hit on dad? Homeland defence?
Add weapons-testing to the causa belli. Samurai knights, one is told, were permitted to try the cutting edge of their sword on the neck of any luckless (and soon headless) passing peasant.
The battlefield will be the testing ground for the US samurai. No more rhesus monkeys or pigs but real, live Iraqis.
In Afghanistan, the big new toy was the thermobaric bomb - the 15,000lb Daisycutter. It ploughed underground to release a "tsunami of air pressure". Your lungs were suddenly where your nose used to be. The bomb had been used twice in Gulf war one without success. Bunkers were obstinately unbusted. In 2001 it was profusely dropped on the Tora Bora cave complex. But, as Osama's recent bulletin told us, his warriors simply dug little holes elsewhere and escaped, their daisies uncut.
The newer, smarter weapon to be battlefield-tested in Gulf war two will be that fantasy of every sci-fi writer, a death-ray. The HPM (high-power microwave) bomb is the first viable product from America's top-secret Dew (directed energy weapon) programme. It is described as 100 lightning bolts, focused into a single pulse of radiation equivalent to two billion watts. Wow! The HPM bomb fries any electronic equipment within its impact area: computers, motors, radar. It all conks out, leaving the enemy defenceless.
The bomb is mechanically simple, robust, compact and - most important of all - ready to lock and load. "Vircator" (sounds Latin, but it is just short for Virtual Cathode Oscillator) has been fitted to small AGM-86 cruise missiles, carried by the cluster on B52s.
Currently, Vircator's destructive radius is a puny 300ft (they are working on that). But, if aimed precisely, it can penetrate underground without needing to blast its way into Saddam's bunkers. Well-earthed wire mesh built into the concrete fabric affords protection - but cunning radiation will eel its way through ventilation shafts, cracks, wires, radio antennae. You can burrow, but you can't hide.
The HPM arsenal has had highest priority in the run up to the war. It is, as the Pentagon coyly puts it, "the top item in our boutique of capabilities". And, in the past few weeks, it has been sold to the American public as a weapon of mass non-destruction - the Mother Teresa of bombs. "What's good about it," the Pentagon says, "is that it doesn't harm people." Regurgitating PR releases, the American press has hailed HPM as a humane "wonder weapon".
The only danger, apparently, is to those with pacemakers or on life-support systems. Since Saddam buries his nastiest labs under hospitals, that thesis may well be tested - having a pacemaker explode in your chest just might be classified as "harm".
Although not primarily an anti-personnel device, those who have been exposed to HPM report that its effect is agonising. The radiation penetrates below the skin, boiling nerve cells. It can blind. It induces uncontrollable panic (early research into HPM was as a crowd control agent).
Will the HPM bomb be employed as a "precision" weapon? Or as part of the declared "shock and awe" strategy to terrify the general population? Will it be used to destroy what infrastructure the last war left working? Will Iraqi civilians serve as guinea pigs? No one knows what the long-term effect of microwave exposure is. And, frankly, no one this side of the Tigris and Euphrates gives a damn. Peasant, bare your neck!
Suzanne Goldenberg in Baghdad
Monday February 17, 2003
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | The human shield has arrived, but what now?
At times it felt like hell on wheels. But the peace activists who travelled across a continent by London double-decker bus arrived at a Baghdad bomb shelter yesterday with their sense of mission just about intact.
Few places in Baghdad convey the horror of war as sharply as the al-Ameriya shelter, where 400 Iraqi civilians were incinerated by US missiles during the last Gulf war.
The visit to the shelter yesterday was one of the first duties of the newly arrived human shields, who joined a lively camp of the anti-war movement in Baghdad.
There can be no doubting their passion but the activists' epic voyage did not encourage clarity of vision.
There were breakdowns - a third bus painted black and labelled Enemy Combatant was abandoned in Milan - drop-outs, logistical snags, infighting, a leadership coup, and the usual frictions that can be expected among strangers sharing the same cramped quarters, and not entirely sure of their purpose.
Beyond paying £300 for their passage, the 30 or so protesters, from Britain, the US, Australia, Scandinavia and elsewhere had little in common. Several were just along for the ride: journalists hoping to be smuggled into Baghdad as activists.
For Grace Trevett, an artist from Stroud in Gloucestershire, the journey began in April last year when she took part in a peace rally in the US. Others signed on just before the buses left London. "I feel shame on the Bush government and the Blair government making it necessary for people to do this to be heard," Ms Trevett said.
For three weeks, the focus was all on the journey across Europe, Turkey and Syria to Iraq. "It felt like the closer we got the more dangerous it became, and the stronger the realisation that there is life here," Ms Trevett said.
The bus, advertising the website humanshields.org and with a rear panel showing pictures of the Beatles, finally reached Baghdad on Saturday night - too late for Iraq's anti-war demonstrations. The travellers had been awake for two days.
Arrival had its own complications. When the activists crossed over the Iraqi border at the weekend, they were greeted by a rent-a-mob chanting Saddam Hussein's praises - raising doubts about whether the activists were providing support for the regime.
It was also not exactly clear yesterday what the activists would do in Baghdad.
"It is a great challenge and worry what to do," said Godfrey Meynell, 68, a retired civil servant and by far the oldest activist. "There is no real point in the whole thing except if we are causing doubts in the mind of those preparing for war."
Some protesters were planning a speedy return. Some were clearly comfortable with their role as human shields deployed at potential bombing targets in Iraq.
Others bridled at the term, saying it obscured the real purpose of the journey: to put a human face on the Iraqi civilians who will be killed.
"For me it was never an issue of going to Baghdad, and saving the people," said Ms Trevett. "It was very much coming in to see what we can do."
On Monday, March 3rd, 2003, the first-ever world-wide theatrical event for peace will happen in a city near you. Don't miss this unique opportunity to stand up for peace in your community, and provide a humorous entry into a healthy dialogue about current affairs. Attend or help plan a reading of Lysistrata, Aristophanes' anti-war comedy, to protest the rush to war on Iraq. Many of the readings will benefit non-profit organizations working for peace and humanitarian aid in Iraq.
Tomorrow morning, Monday, February 17, 2003, you will find a quarter-page ad from Poets Against the War on the Op Ed page of the New York Times. This ad was paid for by the many of you who sent contributions, and we thank you for allowing our collective voice to be heard. The ad is endorsed by two dozen of America's most influential and best-known poets, and it is signed in all our names, "Thousands of poets, one voice."
We continue to accept submissions of anti-war poems and statements. Please check the website for updates, for the latest information about readings and to enjoy the amazing anthology which is the heart and soul of Poets Against the War. You can now search the collection by poet's name, poem title and poet's location.
We continue to accept donations, as well. In addition to the New York Times ad, our future plans include coordinating a series of regional poetry readings in cities around the U.S., so that we may continue to bring attention to our cause. We are also producing a documentary about the Poets Against the War phenomenon and the readings that occurred in 160 cities on February 12, International Poetry Against the War Day. And I am currently editing a book of poems and statements selected from the website that will be published by The Nation in April.
Please click this link to donate to Poets Against the War, or you can send a check to: Poets Against the War, Box 1614, Port Townsend, WA 98368.
The many volunteers at PAW--designers, editors, developers, and support staff--all join me in expressing our profound gratitude to you for your moral and financial support, your wonderful letters of encouragement and, most especially, your poems. As we sort and post your work to the website, we are, all of us, very moved by what we read, moved sometimes to tears, moved more than we can say.
Peace,
Sam Hamill for Poets Against the War.
February 17, 2003
(NEW YORK CITY)- Artist Emilie Clark and writer Lytle Shaw were arrested for posting pictures of people from Baghdad in Soho late Thursday night. Both have been released. A court date has been set to prosecute the two for showing New York City the people who will die in a possible war against Iraq.
Clark and Shaw were members of the Baghdad Snapshot Action Crew. Based in New York City, the crew of 75 artists and activists began posting simple flyers with pictures of ordinary Iraqi citizens around New York City, in anticipation and solidarity of the February 15th anti-war rally.
The pictures were taken by artist Paul Chan, who recently returned from Baghdad as a member of the Iraq Peace Team, a project of the Chicago based, Nobel Peace Prize nominated activist group, Voices in the Wilderness.
Clark and Shaw were taping the letter sized flyer on a lamppost at the corner of Mercer and Prince Streets when three undercover policemen arrested them. They were charged with criminal misdemeanors. Shaw was released after five and a half hours. Clark spent seven hours in jail before her release. Clark is pregnant with her first son, and is expecting this Spring.
The arrests were a clear attempt by the police to intimidate New Yorkers to stay away from the protest. "If there wasn't a march on Saturday we wouldn't have been arrested.," Shaw said. While in custody, police harassed Clark and Shaw with talk about how dangerous the rally will be. "They kept saying how mace was going to be used on all the protesters," Clark said. "And then they said they had heard suicide bombers might attack the rally."
What was most disturbing to Shaw was how the cops tried to justify their actions against the two. "They tried to appeal to us sentimentally," Shaw said, "as though the repression they were enacting was really in our best interest."
"They wanted to send a message that we should stay home because it [the protest] was dangerous, and they didn't want to see us hurt."
The court date is set for March 13.
###
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
http://www.nationalphilistine.comBaghdad Snapshot Action Crew
http://unitedforpeace.orgFebruary 15 anti-war rally organizers
http://iraqpeaceteam.orgIraq Peace Team website
[A petition signed by 1600+ at the time of posting; from Ammiel Alcalay.]
No to war on Iraq .... No to dictatorship Petition
[I ripped this from Heriberto Yepez's blog, The Tijuana Bible of Poetics.]
I've having problems writing in English these days.
I think a great number of Mexicans are becoming basically anti-American State and if this new series of wars is conducted further, the United States needs to know this is going to damage greatly the relationship between our two cultures.
This war has no reason. This war is part of the system to make America richer, and dominant over the rest of the world. Bush is no more good than Saddam. He's just your Bin Laden.
The American government looks like a serial killer to us.
I come from a great series of cultures, an even though we have been sleeping for some time now, we are now awake. And even this stupid blog is part of a campaign from our culture to try to communicate before language has no meaning left.
Is this war going to really happen? And then what other war is the United States government going to create next?
You're cloning yourselves all over the world. It appears like the United States wants to erase the Other, and wants to take resources from other cultures to continue your way of life. Your government and our corrupt politicians are uniting to turning Mexico, for example, into a slum. How could you helped our interior enemies to destroy Mexico? This cannot continue.
The alliance between these two corrupt governments is turning the Mexican people into enemies of both, and now sees them as one force whose purpose is to destroy our freedom.
The American government and American companies are making money out of our future. The signs of a social disaster are everywhere. And a big part of the problem is the role of the U.S. in our economical, social and political life.
The U.S. is part of the present threat against our language and existence. We are starting a revolt against our government because we want to put an end to our racism and social injustice (40% of Mexicans live in extreme poverty because 90% of the wealth is property of less than 10% of the population, the TV system is erasing the real issues, and is part of the government, drug dealing is widespread and is, of course, part of the government). We need to transform ourselves to fix the political life of our culture—and that involves the United States, because this government is corrupting even more our political life and is making us poorer and poorer.
And now we see how the American government is going into one more of its international lies, at the same time that is ruining our economy. The Irak war (the sequal!) is part of the same pattern that promotes the transformation of Mexico and Latin America into the employees of American interests.
The United States has been the leader of implementing a nuclear orden, a continuous war. The United States, because of that, is solely responsabile of stopping this blindness. First this new war, and then the total order your politicians and companies run.
You are headed to a disaster. This kind of world cannot go on more than two or three decades more. Change before your population is subject of all kinds of attacks, from terrorism to world wide hate.
This is one of the most dark times of American History. Get out of it.
Do you know, for example, that burning American flags is becoming an increasing activity in Mexican life? Each day that goes by Antiamericanism grows in Mexico. I'm sure this is not something which your media let's you know, but this is happening here.
The feeling in Mexico is 9/11 happened because the U.S. States asked it for. Spreading violence and inequality all over the world brings you this kind of karma. Every time I meet with my students, friends or talk with any people, the U.S. is strongly criticized.
We don't like violence. So, why do you believe so much in violence? What's the fun of it?
This has been happening all over the 20th Century, but now it has reached a point, in which the Mexican national project is collapsing. This is a moment in which Mexican history is about to change drastically. Different groups are preparing to go to war against poverty, and popular culture is imagining a third quest for justice, after the first two in 1810 and 1910. Too many things have happened in the last decades and now the country is a daily state of discontent.
The U.S. is criticized strongly here, radically. First the government, for behaving like a butcher, and then regular Americans, who appear to be powerless or lacking any desire to see what your country represents in the world.
You appear to have no respect for espirituality and others. You appear to be the leaders of destroying the Earth.
I would not say this to you, if I didn't know for sure this is not just me talking, but a whole culture. This is what is being discussed here. You.
You need to realize you must stop your government. It is destroying not only our cultures but also your own culture. You are a country with a great number of cultures, and you have created great things (like your different literatures and musics) but now you're turning into this monster which even your neighbors fear and are now preparing to resist.
You may say, "What is this young Mexic@n intellectual talking about? This e-dude must be crazy, exaggerating, have nothing to do". But believe me, your government and your silence is damaging the way we see, feel and think about the United States. Mexico is becoming basically anti-American.
You must take responsability for stopping Bush, the CIA and the companies that are runing the war. You're risking to live Vietnam again.
But this time all the world is going to be Vietnam.
The last time three American intellectuals (friends of mine) came to Tijuana, I was afraid we could encounter anti-American reactions. And it kind of happen. We were sitting in a dowtown bar, drinking a beer, and then a man came, directed his talk to my friends, and used the bottles to explain us in the table how he felt the U.S. is opressing Mexico and other countries, and then he asked if we had any work for him because he had no job thanks to both governments.
It was a completely miserable situation. Here I was sitting with American writers I admire, and here I was also hearing a Mexican poor man, with no future. Two worlds in a strange encounter. None of us knowing what to say or do.
Just last night somebody remembered to me, that the Indian uprising in Chiapas started the same day that Nafta oficially began working. It was the first war against the Mexican-U.S. goverments alliance. It was a war against what president Carlos Salinas represented: the poverty and opression of the Indian population in Mexico, the continuation of the PRI (which was the party who ruled Mexico, thanks to violence and fraud, for the last seventy years) and the strenghtening of the American influence in our daily life.
The Mexican 1910 Revolution started in a similar way. For similar causes.
And now after the PRI was beaten in an election we all prevented from becoming another electoral fraud, this new party arrived, PAN. We got out of the PRI perfect dictatorship (as it was called some years ago by Vargas Llosa, one of the most important writers in Latin America) but entered into this new way of functioning, less visibly corrupt but far more effective in widening the difference among the classes.
PAN is a party from the right wing. And guess what? The head of our first "democratic goverment" is a former president of Coca Cola.
(Literally. This is not a joke).
Mexico headed by a Coca Cola ex-president? This is simple humillating to what our culture means. Mexicans are people who dedicate a great part of their energy to understand our relationship with language, knowledge, the place we live in, and now, suddenly a bunch of crooks are humillating us with this Coca Cola clown?
This will not stand. Americans need to understand you cannot do this to Mexico. We are going to reconstruct the relationship with ourselves, because it has been damaged greatly due to our corruption and Mexicans selling our country to the highest client. We are going to take care of ourselves, but you need to stop your companies and politicians. They are going to fail.
So do what you have to do before they throw you into this non-sensical situation they are creating. Your culture is strong, it doesn't need this kind of generals, senators, ceo's and fools damaging it.
The Mexican population is thinking how to act on the threat of us becoming Americanized.
Even though our media and our government don't appear to be anti-American State, regular people are becoming that in great great numbers. We used to be the country represented by maize, but know we buy corn from the U.S.
Mexico is realizing following the American way is destroying our culture.
I am telling you this because you need to know this is happening in the South. A couple of days ago, the most important newspaper (leftstist and anti-PAN-PRI) from Mexico City reported the poets stance against the war (click here). Guess why this makes front news in Mexico?
It looks to us as if the people of the United States, its politicians, intellectuals, don't care enough about the killings and injustice your government is spreading. An any news about resistence inside the U.S. is welcome.
To the Mexican mind, an American (a "gringo") is somebody who is a macho, doesn't understand his relationship with this planet, and wants to make more money, and would do anything to accomplish this, even organizing wars or trying to control other countries. This is the image your sending.
I'm convinced this is a moment you're going to regret if you don't act. This is a moment similar to that before and during the nazi regime. People knew what was being done to the jews, but many of them didn't do anything to stop the nazi government. You're government is behaving like a serial killer, like a sniper (the sniper from Washington), you're government is the leading terrorist State, don't you see how this is turning the world against you?
Do you want to become a culture who is going to be blame for the murder of many thousands, even millions of people, in two or three decades or even in a few years?
And all of this is why, when I have try to write in English these days, something happens in my hands. A discomfort.
Brooklyn, 2/16/03: Yesterday, New York City was a hall of mirrors.
Brooklyn, 2/16/03: Yesterday, New York City was a hall of mirrors. Riding the subway was like navigating bumper cars--trains going in the opposite direction of where they were supposed to be headed, the N train running on the V line for no apparent reason, the east bound Brooklyn L train headed west, skipping stops, stopping all together and with no warning telling people to get off and transfer to the train across the platform, which when it finally arrived was headed in the opposite direction of where it was supposed to be going, proceeding three stops, stopping again and instructing people to either walk across the platform and transfer, or stay on the same train if they wanted to get back to where they started from (with no instructions as to how they were supposed to get where they were actually going).
The first stop in Brooklyn was a sea of confusion--most of the people there did not know how or why they had spontaneously manifest in Brooklyn when they thought they were headed for the West Village. This chaos apparently started around 11:30 am--exactly at the time when people were attempting to gather for the anti-war protest. Why the MTA (Mass Transit Authority) would purposely scramble their trains to prevent people from getting to the protest is baffling. Perhaps it was just a coincidence--"construction" as the drivers said--but since when does construction in an otherwise efficient city effect every single train simultaneously?
And the mass confusion caused by the MTA was mirrored by the police—as if it was all a part of some bizarre master plan orchestrated by some conniving jack-in-the-box politicians and police commissioners. They blocked the streets for (as I understand) 30 blocks, preventing anyone from walking East along the side-streets to get to the main rally on First Avenue. If you were lucky enough to be on First Avenue already, you could walk West. But once you crossed Second Avenue, there was no turning back. People who crossed the line and then wanted to turn around were forbidden from entering. It was like walking through liquid mirrors that solidified back into glass once you passed through them.
These bizarre East-block barricades extended up to 5th Avenue. "Why are the streets blocked," we asked the officers as we crossed the avenues, headed west. Sternly: "Because there has been vandalism and complaints from residents." With a humble smile: "Honestly I don’t know." Snootily: "Because all these people wandering around are a disaster waiting to happen."
All the people wandering around was truly a remarkable sight. A "disaster waiting to happen" that was caused explicitly by the police. Because they were forbidden from walking to the rally, large groups of people with their anti-war signs paraded up and down 2nd Ave, 3rd Ave, Lexington Avenue, even 5th Avenue, forming their own marches. It was beautiful. Passers-by trying to shop were confused, befuddled, annoyed. The police were barraged by a litany of questions: "You mean I can’t even get to the park?" "You mean I can’t even get to a restaurant on 3rd Avenue where I am supposed to meet a friend?" "You mean I can’t get to Bloomingdales!!?" "You mean I can’t get to a rally which is legal!!!?"
It was inevitable that this would lead to dramatic action. According to this morning’s Daily News, "It grew especially heated several times between 1 and 3 p.m. on Second and Third avenues, when officers prevented arriving protesters from walking east to join the majority of the crowd. Police officials later said demonstrators refused to walk north where they were allowing protesters to enter First Avenue." To walk north in order to walk east, they would have had to have walked over 15 blocks. It was 10 degrees outside. Right, ok. No problem. Finally the agitated protestors broke through the barrier. The police used their horses to shove people on the sidewalk. A couple horses suffered injuries. MTA busses were used to escort people who had been arrested. A friend who witnessed this said they put people on one bus at a time, in order to separate them from other protestors.
How did this connection between the MTA and the Police come into effect? Since when is it public transportation’s business to work with the police to curb people’s rights to assemble? It was clear that the police were making up their own rules. It was clear to anyone roaming the streets yesterday, trying to walk east to attend a legal protest, trying to ride the subway in any logical direction, trying to manoeuvre the streets--that our "freedom to assemble" is, like other constitutional rights, vanishing before our eyes. Pooof. When directions are scrambled, streets blocked off, our own internal maps of our city are distorted. The message they were trying to get across was clear—you people have no power.
Of course, although they may have succeeded in confusing people, they failed miserably to contain us. Walking the streets yesterday it was clear how many people came out to oppose to the war--no matter how the officials try and fudge the actual number of protestors, people were out in droves. The police underestimated the crowds (I guess they were baffled that Code Orange didn’t succeed in terrifying us to make the trek to Home Depot for duct tape, like those people in the very-susceptible-to-be-attacked suburbs). At 1:45, two hours after the rally started, Chief of Department Joseph Esposito declared a Level 4 mobilisation, the force's largest emergency deployment. This cost the department $5 million in overtime—a cost that easily could have been curtailed had simply allowed a marching permit.
Most significantly, the protest here was happening simultaneously 100 times over around the globe. We could see ourselves reflected in Rome, London, Copenhagen, San Francisco. We were numerous, and today breath a sigh of relief. The papers report this morning that the U.S. and Britain are re-drafting their UN resolutions against Iraq. Of course, this sigh (a moment of hope) will inevitably turn back to anger and disbelief in the coming weeks as our hawk administration proceeds war-head strong in their illogical and asinine plans to inflict chaos and mayhem in the Middle East. And no doubt, we’ll be back on the streets again--this time a little bit more knowledgeable about what tricks the city is capable of.
Demonstrators passing the Colosseum in Rome. (New York Times)
Please join me in registering for a Virtual March on Washington on February 26th. We are asking Congress to stop the Bush administration's rush to war, and to Let the Inspections Work. Time is running out.
With your help, on February 26th, every Senate office will receive a call EVERY MINUTE from a constituent, as they receive a simulataneous crush of faxes and email. In New York and Los Angeles, "anti-war rooms" will highlight the progress of the day for national media. Local media will visit the "anti-war room" online, to monitor this constituent march throughout the day.
With your help, every Senate office switchboard will be lit up all day with our anti-war messages. This will be a powerful reminder of the bread and depth of opposition to a war in Iraq.
Just go to:
http://www.moveon.org/winwithoutwar/
Please join me and sign up today. This has never been done before. Let's be part of it. (courtesy Laura Elrick)
Splinter groups?
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L15418068
Indy Media DC is now featuring audio / video / reportage of the recent anti-war poetry reading in the nation's capitol. You will find many practical examples of the multiplicity of potential aesthetic responses to U.S. foreign "policy" here:
http://dc.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=50807&group=webcast
Circulars is looking for reports from protests tomorrow and Sunday from where ever you may be. Especially useful are summaries of some of the speeches since many of us are not going to be anywhere near the podium. Photographs are also really cool. Just send to the email address at the right.
Btw, I've changed the design a bit so that it behaves a wee better with Netscape -- it was a real mess before, but even now is very hard to read. The original template of this site was lifted from Movabletype.org, a blog site, and they just don't seem to have cared to make the templates Netscape compatible.
I also wanted to make the header smaller to push the stories up, but I took the liberty of making the rotatating thing to the left slightly bigger and centered over the column, just cause I like the way it looks (click on it and see how it changes.) I took it from the site levitated.net -- I'll put a credit under soon.
Some of you will notice that "Poets for the War" have made some contributions to the comments section. I've been asked to delete them but I think I'm going to keep them on since I don't want anyone to think it's a given that poets are against the war -- in fact, I see this as a reminder that the anti-war argument must always be refreshed.
You'll also notice that there are some different names posting now. I've added numerous people with author privileges though I expect that my own presence will continue to dominate here simply because I'm a web-guy and check in more often. I hope, though, that the community takes more advantage of this site somehow, either through authoring or commenting.
See (some of you) tomorrow... Brian
Antiwar Rallies: How Effective are They at Swaying Opinion?
by Kim Campbell
Antiwar activists like to tell the story about how Richard Nixon used to claim he didn't pay attention to how many people showed up for war protests during the Vietnam War. He was too busy watching football, was the official word.
But later it came out that Mr. Nixon did care how many people took to the streets, and even likely changed war policy thanks to the size of marches in the late 1960s.
As another weekend of coordinated antiwar efforts gets under way, one of the tools of the activist trade - the demonstration - will be on display.
Protests often leave an imprint on the public - and make their way into the history books. But coming up with the next Boston Tea Party is tricky. How effective a big demonstration is depends on the memorability of its message and who is paying attention.
In the current campaign against a war with Iraq, large rallies are a valuable publicity tool for antiwar groups whose attempts to woo undecided Americans are frequently drowned out by a government that argues that it may be necessary to go to war. Given the disparity of antiwar groups and how some have tried to promote agendas that go beyond Iraq, swaying ordinary Americans on the issue isn't always easy.
"You get an opportunity to project an image on the 6 o'clock news that will go into the homes of mainstream Americans, many of whom are uncomfortable with this war. And so you don't want to blow it," says Tom Andrews, national director of Win Without War, a coalition of 29 civic and religious groups.
Over the weekend, protests will be held in New York, San Francisco, and cities across the US and the world. They follow major rallies held in October and January on both US coasts that totaled hundreds of thousands of people.
Unlike during the Vietnam era, or even a decade ago for the Gulf War, activists today can use the Internet to coordinate volunteers and disseminate information to the public about where and when to meet.
That gives access to more everyday Americans who might not otherwise know about such activities. At last month's rally in Washington, many first-time protesters showed up, some even with their children. Over the hubbub of conversation, a few spoke of how they viewed demonstrations as the only outlet for offering their opinion about the war.
Activists want people like that to go back to their communities and share what it was like with others to invigorate participation. They say word of mouth can be a more effective way of getting new recruits than through simply watching images on TV of crowds of strangers and speakers whose tone may not reflect their own.
As Mr. Andrews suggests, organizers have to be careful about how they present themselves when all of America is watching.
Last month in Washington, speakers selected by that rally's organizer, International ANSWER, addressed a wide range of topics, including American Indian rights and the release of imprisoned activist Mumia Abu-Jamal, who killed a police officer in 1981. Critics say that diluted the message and left many observers with the impression that the antiwar movement lacks cohesion (an idea brought home in a recent "Saturday Night Live" sketch.)
Some of the average Americans in attendance were also put off. One high-schooler wrote an essay in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette recently observing that the protest had a wide range of attendees but that its leaders "were so extreme and blatantly anti-American that it might have pushed me to the other camp if I had arrived undecided."
Not all groups organizing protests present their agenda in the same way, but they do say that multiple issues are likely to be raised at rallies because there are so many concerns linked to fighting terrorism and Iraq: impositions on civil liberties, detaining immigrants, preemptive attacks.
"Right now, every major demonstration that will take place around the war will cover a lot of issues, and it's a challenge to keep a focus on Iraq," says Bob Wing, a spokesman for United for Peace & Justice, main sponsor of Saturday's New York rally.
The goal is to generate support from a broad range of Americans, which in turn influences politicians. Many political leaders claim they don't pay attention to the protests and their numbers - much the same way they say they are uninfluenced by polls. But some say they do notice.
"Demonstrations are important," says Sen. Barbara Boxer (D) of California. "It's one way the American people show their strength. In the war in Vietnam, that made a big difference."
What politicians look for, says Andrews, a democrat from Maine who served in the House of Representatives from 1990 to 1994, is to see how broad a range of demonstrators show up and how well organized they are.
They'll have another opportunity to evaluate that this weekend, when antiwar groups try to get the attention of the public. History suggests they will have to stay focused to be successful.
"I was in many marches during the Vietnam War," says Reginald Zelnik, a history professor at the University of California at Berkeley. "Some of them were just great, and some of them suffered from the same problem I think these last ones have. I think the jury is still out as to what direction these [weekend] ones will take."
• Staff writer Gail Russell Chaddock contributed to this story.
Copyright © 2003 The Christian Science Monitor
CIA 'Sabotaged Inspections and Hid Weapons Details'
by Andrew Buncombe in Washington
Senior democrats have accused the CIA of sabotaging weapons inspections in Iraq by refusing to co-operate fully with the UN and withholding crucial information about Saddam Hussein's arsenal.
Led by Senator Carl Levin, the Democrats accused the CIA of making an assessment that the inspections were unlikely to be a success and then ensuring they would not be. They have accused the CIA director of lying about what information on the suspected location of weapons of mass destruction had been passed on.
The row is of heightened significance given the Bush administration's preparations to argue later today before the UN Security Council that the inspections have run their course and it is now time to move to military action.
France, Russia, Germany and other members of the Security Council are likely to back a counter-proposal to increase the number of inspectors, providing them, if necessary, with the support of armed UN soldiers, as a means of avoiding a military strike.
The accusation of US sabotage emerged from a series of Senate hearings on Capitol Hill. On Tuesday, George Tenet, the CIA director, told the armed services committee panel that the agency had provided the UN inspectors with all the information it had on "high" and "moderate" interest locations inside Iraq – those sites where there was a possibility of finding banned weapons. But Mr Tenet later told a different panel that he had been mistaken and that there were in fact "a handful" of locations the UN inspectors may not have known about.
Senator Levin, from Michigan, responded by saying the CIA director had not been telling the truth. Citing a number of classified letters he had obtained from the agency, he said it was clear the CIA had not shared information with the inspectors about a "large number of sites of significant value".
He said the CIA had told him additional information would be passed to the inspectors within the next few days.
Mr Levin pushed Mr Tenet on whether he thought the inspections had any value. The CIA director replied: "Unless [President Saddam] provides the data to build on, provides the access, provides the unfettered access that he's supposed to, provides us with surveillance capability, there is little chance you're going to find weapons of mass destruction under the rubric he's created inside the country ... The inspectors have been put in a very difficult position by his behavior.
Mr Levin said later he believed the CIA had, in effect, taken the decision to undermine the inspections. "When they've taken the position that inspections are useless, they are bound to fail," he told The Washington Post. "We have undermined the inspectors."
Mr Levin has raised his concerns with the White House. In a letter to President Bush, the senator asked that America provide the inspectors with as much information as available.
He wrote: "The American people want the inspections to proceed, want the United States to share the information we have with the UN inspectors and want us to obtain United Nations support before military action is used against Iraq."
© 2003 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
A WARM WELCOME TO NEW YORK CITY
February 15th Legal Support
People's Law Collective(PLC) -- Association of Legal Aid Attorneys(ALAA) -- National Lawyers Guild ~NYC~ Mass Defense Committee (NLG)
We have a large number of identified (NLG = green hats, green badges ALAA = green armbands, PLC= red armbands) lawyers and legal observers on hand to try to ensure that the New York City Police Department, Federal Bureau of Investigation, or any law enforcement agency choosing to join us today respects your lawful and peaceful events. Be fear-free in letting your voices be heard against this unjust war.
KNOW YOUR RIGHTS - STREET LAW AND PRACTICE
General Law
- Do not have any item on your person that could be considered a weapon; even a small knife. Obviously ditto for illegal drugs as well.
- The NYPD has banned wooden posts (i.e. for banners). Sticks will be confiscated and you could risk arrest, but cardboard tubes have been allowed.
- The NYPD has in the past has charged protesters possessing Markers and Paint with possession of Graffiti Instruments.
The infamous mask ordinance (i.e. 3 or more in a mask or hood) was ruled unconstitutional in November 2002.
At Risk of Arrest?
- If you are at risk of arrest, you may wish to pass your valuables and irreplaceable items (like date and address book) to one who is not. Things do disappear in "the system."
- If you are at risk of arrest, please inform a legal observer of any medications you will need when in jail. You may be there 1-2 days.
- If you are at risk of arrest, eat a hearty meal. Prison food isn't.
Police Confrontation / Arrest Scenarios
- If you are not being arrested and a Police Officer approaches you and asks for ID or information, you do not have to identify yourself or provide any information unless you're driving at the time.
- If you are being arrested, you may not be read your rights, the
Police only have to tell you that you are under arrest - they only have to read you a "Miranda" warning when questioning you.
- Upon arrest do not say anything to the police other than "I am going to remain silent, I want to speak to a lawyer." Demand your lawyer immediately if you are being questioned or are at all confused about what the cops are saying. SILENCE=SAFE.
- If a Police Officer demands to search your bag or person (and you are not under arrest) say clearly "I do NOT Consent to this Search" (Wording is important). Do not interfere with the search.
- Megaphones are not legally permitted without prior NYPD approval - marchers with megaphones have in the past been arrested- this is especially used as an excuse to arrest folks, especially targeted folks like "Black Bloc members", people of color, etc.
- If you go "limp" when arrested you'll likely be charged with
resisting arrest. This is a misdemeanor.
- If arrested without Identification, or if you refuse to cooperate
after arrest, you may count on being put "through the system" - photo'ed, printed etc. This takes 12-36 hours; count on longer if many are arrested .
- If Arrested - a Legal Aid attorney will do the Arraignment. Later an NLG volunteer attorney may step in if necessary.
- QUESTION? - ASK A LEGAL OBSERVER
If arrested call: 212- 679-6018 (NLG)
or 917 807-0658 (PLC)
If you see people being arrested get their names and call 212-679-6018 (NLG)
or 917-807-0658 (PLC)
Please keep these numbers handy, write them on your arms and pass them on to your legal support people.
DISCLAIMER: The advice given here is meant as a general statement of the law, and should not substitute your spending a pile of money on a real flesh and blood lawyer.
Legal support for the February 15th demonstration against the war is organized by the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys, the People's Law Collective and the National Lawyers Guild NYC Chapter Mass Defense Committee.
http://www.nationalphilistine.com/baghdad/
[New York City]-- On February 13, 2003, teams of artists and activists postered New York City with thousands of copies of snapshots from Baghdad. Quiet and casual, the snapshots show a part of Baghdad we rarely see: the part with people in it.
The snapshots were taken by a friend of ours who just got back from Baghdad working with the Iraq Peace Team (link below). Yes, he saw Iraqis suffering and struggling. But he also saw Iraqis dancing and laughing. This moved him because laughing under the weight of the UN sanctions and the threat of an absurd war is no easy task. We were moved because the people in the pictures remind us of our friends & family.
Thousands of snapshot posters now pepper Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. We want to show New York the people who will get both liberty and death in one fatal stroke if this war begins. We want you to show them in your city. The entire snapshot collection is online as pdfs. Print them out and poster them anywhere and everywhere.
http://www.nationalphilistine.com/baghdad/
For more info:
New York 2 Baghdad Crew
Baghdad Snapshot Action Spots, in no particular order: Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, San Fran, Philadelphia, Princeton, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Paris, Warsaw, Omaha, (your city here)
Other links:
http://unitedforpeace.orgJoin the movement
http://iraqpeaceteam.orgHelp them in Baghdad
[This came flying into my inbox this morning -- see Weinberger's earlier commentary in the archives. Not quite sure if this is going to spark a flame war -- the kind of thing I don't want on Circulars -- but nonetheless, it pertains to the way poets are engaging in the anti-war effort and is thus important.]
Why is the "Poems Not Fit for the White House" event at Lincoln Center a benefit (with $100 orchestra seats) for Not In Our Name (NION)?
NION was founded a few months ago by leaders of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). The RCP is a nut-group that defends Pol Pot, the Shining Path in Peru, the Chinese occupation of Tibet and the massacre in Tiananmen Square. NION is their attempt-- as has been done in the past by various Lyndon LaRouche spinoffs-- to insert themselves into more mainstream opposition politics.
NION has been instrumental in organizing antiwar demonstrations, but otherwise only exists to propagate the NION statement and the "Pledge of Resistance," which is meant to be recited (at considerable length) in unison by large groups.
The NION statement has a few strange sentences, but generally confines itself to opinions held by most with antiwar and anti-Bush sentiments. It was signed by many honorable people, and was notable as the first widespread newspaper petition. Whether this petition should continue to be propagated is another question.
I do not share the opinion held by lefties such as Todd Gitlin, Michael Berube, and David Corn that the presence of NION, ANSWER, and other bizarre groups as organizing forces delegitimizes the antiwar movement (though it certainly provides plenty of ammo for the right). The organizational skills and dedication of their followers are often initially necessary, until they recede into the mosaic of hundreds of other grassroots organizations. They do not delegitimize the movement; what is disturbing is that the movement legitimizes them.
All forms of non-violent antiwar anti-Bush protest from all sectors, and all antiwar poetry events are, without question, worthwhile. Personally, I happen to believe that the hundreds of smaller antiwar poetry readings and the free circulation of poems and statements on the internet are more effective than an expensive and glitzy event at Lincoln Center.
But if this event is to be held, why should it benefit the perpetuation of a dubious fringe group and not Unicef or Oxfam or Doctors Without Borders or a hundred other organizations that are actually out there helping the victims of US policy?
Or if, as Michael Palmer has suggested, newspaper advertisements and humanitarian aid are separate issues or causes, why shouldn't the proceeds from the event go to advertisements of a statement written by the invited poets themselves? Why should they continue to allow Not In Our Name to speak in their name?
by Derrick Z. Jackson
I DO NOT really blame those poets who could not restrain themselves from telegraphing their intention to turn Laura Bush's poetry symposium at the White House into a rally against war in Iraq. Many poets equate restraint to anthrax. Still, I wish they had played it cool. Bush canceled or, more accurately, censored the event, which would have been held today, when she learned that hundreds of poets were writing antiwar pieces for an open letter to be given to her at her event.
Bush's press secretary said, ''While Mrs. Bush respects and believes in the right of all Americans to express their opinions, she, too, has opinions and believes that it would be inappropriate to turn what is intended to be a literary event into a political forum.''
The end result is that poets will be reading their angry words either before the proverbial choir in cozy coffee shops or in the cold, railing outside the locked walls of power. The funny thing is - although this is impossible for many poets to consider - this was one of those situations where the poets should have taken the attitude, ''Be careful of what you ask for; you just might hear it. ''
The symposium was supposed to celebrate the works of Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Langston Hughes. Nearly a year ago the first lady held an event to salute the writers of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and '30s, which included Hughes. Bush even quoted Hughes's poem, ''Freedom,'' which said, in part, ''Some folks think by burning churches, they burn Freedom.... But Freedom stands up and laughs in their faces and says, `No, not so! No!'''
Had the poets been thinking a little more subversively, they could have burned the figurative roof off the White House with more Hughes. One work of Hughes that the first lady surely is not reading at bedtime to her husband during the buildup in Iraq is ''Message to the President.'' Probably written during World War II, Hughes wrote: ''In your fireside chats on the radio/ I hear you telling the world/ What you want them to know/ And your speeches in general/ Sound mighty fine,/ But there's one thing, Mr. President,/ That worries my mind./ I hear you talking about freedom/ For the Finn,/ The Jew,/ And the Czechoslovak -/ But you never seem to mention/ Us folks who're black! .../ That's why as citizens Mr. President,/ We have a right to demand/ The next time you make a speech,/ Take an all-out stand .../ No more segregation in the USA./ And when you mention the Finns,/ And the Jew,/ And the Czechoslovak,/ Don't forget the fourteen million/ Here who're black./ Such a speech, Mr. President, for me/ Would put a whole lot more meaning/ In Democracy.''
Hughes wrote deftly about the peril of propaganda in ''Mother in Wartime.'' That poem said: ''As if it were some noble thing,/ She spoke of sons at war/ As if freedom's cause/ Were pled anew at some heroic bar,/ As if the weapons used today/ Killed with great elan,/ As if Technicolor banners flew/ To honor modern man -/ Believing everything she read/ In the daily news,/ (no in-between to choose)/ She thought that only/ One side won,/ Not that both / Might lose.''
He also asked Americans to always question their sense of righteousness about war in ''War.'' ''Death is the broom/ I take in my hands/ To sweep the world/ Clean./ I sweep and I sweep/ Then mop and I mop./ I dip my broom in blood,/ My mop in blood -/ And blame you for this,/ Because you are there, / Enemy./ It's hard to blame me,/ Because I am here -/ So I kill you./ And you kill me./ My name,/ Like your name,/ Is war.''
Whoever the poets would have chosen to finish their presentation to the first lady could have ended with ''What I Think.'' In that, Hughes wrote, ''The guys who own/ The biggest guns/ Are the lucky ones/ These days./ being hip/ To your marksmanship/ Is what pays./ on the other hand/ There's some demand/ For a world plan./ Some folks wish/ The human race might/ Try to do right -/Instead of just fight./ But others still feel/ That any old heel/ Has a right/ To laissez faire/ Anywhere,/ And that's Empire's right./As for me,/ I can't agree,/ To my nose, colonies stink./ People ought to be FREE/ And have liberty -/ That's what I think.''
See how much fun - and political - it might have been, even on the first lady's terms?
[This one didn't make the Times; I got it from commondreams.org.]
Reckless Administration May Reap Disastrous Consequences
Senate Floor Speech - Wednesday, February 12, 2003
To contemplate war is to think about the most horrible of human experiences. On this February day, as this nation stands at the brink of battle, every American on some level must be contemplating the horrors of war.
Yet, this Chamber is, for the most part, silent -- ominously, dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing.
We stand passively mute in the United States Senate, paralyzed by our own uncertainty, seemingly stunned by the sheer turmoil of events. Only on the editorial pages of our newspapers is there much substantive discussion of the prudence or imprudence of engaging in this particular war.
And this is no small conflagration we contemplate. This is no simple attempt to defang a villain. No. This coming battle, if it materializes, represents a turning point in U.S. foreign policy and possibly a turning point in the recent history of the world.
This nation is about to embark upon the first test of a revolutionary doctrine applied in an extraordinary way at an unfortunate time. The doctrine of preemption -- the idea that the United States or any other nation can legitimately attack a nation that is not imminently threatening but may be threatening in the future -- is a radical new twist on the traditional idea of self defense. It appears to be in contravention of international law and the UN Charter. And it is being tested at a time of world-wide terrorism, making many countries around the globe wonder if they will soon be on our -- or some other nation's -- hit list. High level Administration figures recently refused to take nuclear weapons off of the table when discussing a possible attack against Iraq. What could be more destabilizing and unwise than this type of uncertainty, particularly in a world where globalism has tied the vital economic and security interests of many nations so closely together? There are huge cracks emerging in our time-honored alliances, and U.S. intentions are suddenly subject to damaging worldwide speculation. Anti-Americanism based on mistrust, misinformation, suspicion, and alarming rhetoric from U.S. leaders is fracturing the once solid alliance against global terrorism which existed after September 11.
Here at home, people are warned of imminent terrorist attacks with little guidance as to when or where such attacks might occur. Family members are being called to active military duty, with no idea of the duration of their stay or what horrors they may face. Communities are being left with less than adequate police and fire protection. Other essential services are also short-staffed. The mood of the nation is grim. The economy is stumbling. Fuel prices are rising and may soon spike higher.
This Administration, now in power for a little over two years, must be judged on its record. I believe that that record is dismal.
In that scant two years, this Administration has squandered a large projected surplus of some $5.6 trillion over the next decade and taken us to projected deficits as far as the eye can see. This Administration's domestic policy has put many of our states in dire financial condition, under funding scores of essential programs for our people. This Administration has fostered policies which have slowed economic growth. This Administration has ignored urgent matters such as the crisis in health care for our elderly. This Administration has been slow to provide adequate funding for homeland security. This Administration has been reluctant to better protect our long and porous borders.
In foreign policy, this Administration has failed to find Osama bin Laden. In fact, just yesterday we heard from him again marshaling his forces and urging them to kill. This Administration has split traditional alliances, possibly crippling, for all time, International order-keeping entities like the United Nations and NATO. This Administration has called into question the traditional worldwide perception of the United States as well-intentioned, peacekeeper. This Administration has turned the patient art of diplomacy into threats, labeling, and name calling of the sort that reflects quite poorly on the intelligence and sensitivity of our leaders, and which will have consequences for years to come.
Calling heads of state pygmies, labeling whole countries as evil, denigrating powerful European allies as irrelevant -- these types of crude insensitivities can do our great nation no good. We may have massive military might, but we cannot fight a global war on terrorism alone. We need the cooperation and friendship of our time-honored allies as well as the newer found friends whom we can attract with our wealth. Our awesome military machine will do us little good if we suffer another devastating attack on our homeland which severely damages our economy. Our military manpower is already stretched thin and we will need the augmenting support of those nations who can supply troop strength, not just sign letters cheering us on.
The war in Afghanistan has cost us $37 billion so far, yet there is evidence that terrorism may already be starting to regain its hold in that region. We have not found bin Laden, and unless we secure the peace in Afghanistan, the dark dens of terrorism may yet again flourish in that remote and devastated land.
Pakistan as well is at risk of destabilizing forces. This Administration has not finished the first war against terrorism and yet it is eager to embark on another conflict with perils much greater than those in Afghanistan. Is our attention span that short? Have we not learned that after winning the war one must always secure the peace?
And yet we hear little about the aftermath of war in Iraq. In the absence of plans, speculation abroad is rife. Will we seize Iraq's oil fields, becoming an occupying power which controls the price and supply of that nation's oil for the foreseeable future? To whom do we propose to hand the reigns of power after Saddam Hussein?
Will our war inflame the Muslim world resulting in devastating attacks on Israel? Will Israel retaliate with its own nuclear arsenal? Will the Jordanian and Saudi Arabian governments be toppled by radicals, bolstered by Iran which has much closer ties to terrorism than Iraq?
Could a disruption of the world's oil supply lead to a world-wide recession? Has our senselessly bellicose language and our callous disregard of the interests and opinions of other nations increased the global race to join the nuclear club and made proliferation an even more lucrative practice for nations which need the income?
In only the space of two short years this reckless and arrogant Administration has initiated policies which may reap disastrous consequences for years.
One can understand the anger and shock of any President after the savage attacks of September 11. One can appreciate the frustration of having only a shadow to chase and an amorphous, fleeting enemy on which it is nearly impossible to exact retribution.
But to turn one's frustration and anger into the kind of extremely destabilizing and dangerous foreign policy debacle that the world is currently witnessing is inexcusable from any Administration charged with the awesome power and responsibility of guiding the destiny of the greatest superpower on the planet. Frankly many of the pronouncements made by this Administration are outrageous. There is no other word.
Yet this chamber is hauntingly silent. On what is possibly the eve of horrific infliction of death and destruction on the population of the nation of Iraq -- a population, I might add, of which over 50% is under age 15 -- this chamber is silent. On what is possibly only days before we send thousands of our own citizens to face unimagined horrors of chemical and biological warfare -- this chamber is silent. On the eve of what could possibly be a vicious terrorist attack in retaliation for our attack on Iraq, it is business as usual in the United States Senate.
We are truly "sleepwalking through history." In my heart of hearts I pray that this great nation and its good and trusting citizens are not in for a rudest of awakenings.
To engage in war is always to pick a wild card. And war must always be a last resort, not a first choice. I truly must question the judgment of any President who can say that a massive unprovoked military attack on a nation which is over 50% children is "in the highest moral traditions of our country". This war is not necessary at this time. Pressure appears to be having a good result in Iraq. Our mistake was to put ourselves in a corner so quickly. Our challenge is to now find a graceful way out of a box of our own making. Perhaps there is still a way if we allow more time.
[I'm sure you've seen this one before, but I came across it again last night and it literally sent chills down my spine.]
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
for Kerry Sherin
We may not have chosen to live inside Dick Cheney’s mind, but we do.
Wyoming, I read somewhere, is the safest place to live in North America.
No tornados, no tsunamis, no earthquakes, no hurricanes, monsoons, cyclones, or floods. No major airport: no big planes crashing in the sleet. Not even much traffic: not too many car crashes.
But if living in Wyoming is so safe, living inside Dick Chaney’s mind, though it was formed in Wyoming and stood for Wyoming in the Senate, is not safe at all.
How do you get from Wyoming to Shock and Awe?
Getting from Love to Hate, that’s easy: Love, Live, Give, Gave, Gate, Hate.
Love comes before life, and since newborns don’t survive on their own, life at the beginning involves giving. It can’t not: breast milk, protection, language, diapers made out of whatever, some sort of attention before you crawl or walk. Everyone living got some of that somehow.
That gets us up to Give. Gave comes next because giving is tiring. You give and give and what thanks do you get? Nothing. Or worse. They think they’re entitled; they’re madder than ever: They sulk in their rooms, they’re sarcastic, they throw rocks.
So much for giving. I gave at the office and, since they think they’re entitled and are madder than ever, the next logical step is to build a gate, which will keep things quiet at least.
But as we know, gates creak at night, they leak, they break, in fact, gates concentrate whatever’s on either side, they distill hate.
Love, Live, Give, Gave, Gate, Hate: Q.E.D.
But getting from Love to Hate only sheds a little light on getting from Wyoming to Shock and Awe.
Shock and Awe? “Shock and Awe” is the Pentagon’s current battle plan for Iraq: 300 to 400 cruise missiles the 1st day (more than in all of Desert Storm), 300 to 400 the next, to demolish water, electricity, communications, government buildings, roads, bridges, infrastructure in general; 6000 satellite guidance kits to convert so-called “dumb bombs” into so-called “smart bombs,” etc. “The sheer size of this has never been seen before,” a Pentagon official told CBS. “There will not be a safe place in Baghdad.” Harlan Ullman drew a direct parallel to Hiroshima: the Iraqi people will be “physically, emotionally and psychologically exhausted”; it will be “rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but minutes.” A 1996 report elaborates: the point is “to impose [an] overwhelming level of Shock and Awe. . . . [to] seize control of the environment and paralyze or so overload an adversary’s perceptions and understanding of events that the enemy would be incapable of resistance.”
This is Shock and Awe, remember, not Wyoming.
But by the end it gets a little hard to tell them apart: overwhelming levels seizing control of the environment, paralyzing perceptions and understanding of events.
That works for Wyoming and just about anywhere in the United States.
That’s the problem with living inside Dick Cheney’s mind, whether we’ve chosen to or not.
What’s the point of Shock and Awe?
To free the Iraqi people.
Problem:
“No safe place in Baghdad” contradicts “To free the Iraqi people.”
Rationale:
Since the Iraqi people are enslaved inside Saddam Hussein’s mind that mind must be destroyed. That means destroying Saddam Hussein’s body wherever it is in Baghdad, which means brushing aside Baghdad to find him to free the Iraqi people trapped inside
his mind.
But dead people are only free in the most limited way. Not much bang for the buck there, really.
Deeper rationale:
Forget “free,” “love,” “give”: it’s an adult world. Shock and Awe is adult political theater for a world audience. To reach an audience that big you have to project. That’s the point of Shock, the sheer size of which has never, etc. Otherwise the audience won’t be struck with Awe.
What’s the point of Awe?
Awe kills two birds with one stone. For good Arabs, it inaugurates democracy, somehow. For no-good Arabs, Awe will . . . what? Awe will awe them into submission. Then things will be quiet outside the gate.
I can hear Dick Chaney arguing that Awe worked at Hiroshima.
But Japan was at war with us, and Awe, or at least Instant Submission, didn’t work outside Japan. The Iraqi people are not only not at war with us, we’re rescuing them from Saddam Hussein’s mind. And as for working outside Baghdad? Destroying it will awe Al-Qaeda? That’s a stretch. There are more Al-Qaedans in London or Berlin than in Baghdad. Maybe we should get Berlin first.
No matter how big you make Shock, you can’t get to Awe.
Even with a placid audience like the U.S. electorate, you can’t get there.
Forget it, we’ll never know the exact route from Wyoming to Shock and Awe.
Some combination of Gate, Hate, Oil, Worship of Force and Getting Reelected mixed together in Dick Cheney’s mind got us halfway there; and Shock and Awe is already halfway here: Here, Baghdad and Here, Wyoming. We’re half “physically, emotionally and psychologically exhausted”; our “perceptions and understanding of events” are half “overloaded.”
But even half a mind is enough to do the math: we’re half capable of resistance.
The shocks are huge, disgusting, realer than any hell, but at least they’re not shocking, once we give up our imaginary safety.
The other half, Awe with its ersatz religious capital letter, we can resist right now, completely.
The bombs are awful, all the worse because of the thoughtlessness that aims them, but they don’t deserve a shred of awe from us.
Not a huge victory, but it does mean one weapon is destroyed, the one they always use first.
[The Shock and Awe language comes from various web sites found on Google under “Shock and Awe”: The McLaughlin Group; World Socialist Web Site, etc]
Wired News: A Chilly Response to 'Patriot II'
By Ryan Singel
Unlike its hastily passed predecessor, the Justice Department's wide-ranging follow-up to the Patriot Act of 2001 is already facing intense scrutiny, just days after a civil rights group posted a leaked version of the legislation on its website.
The legislation, nicknamed Patriot II, would broadly expand the government's surveillance and detention powers. Among other measures, it calls for the creation of a terrorist DNA database and allows the attorney general to revoke citizenship of those who provide "material support" to terrorist groups.
Privacy advocates said the bill "gutted the Fourth Amendment," while prominent Democratic senators, including Patrick Leahy, ranking Democratic member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, immediately chastised the administration for its secrecy.
Despite assurances to lawmakers that no bill was in the works, the Justice Department internally circulated a confidential 120-page summary and text of the Domestic Security and Enhancement Act in early January.
The non-partisan Center for Public Integrity published a leaked copy of the bill on Friday.
"As recently as just last week, Justice Department officials have denied to ... the Judiciary Committee that they were drafting another anti-terrorism package," said Leahy in a written statement. "There is bipartisan concern ... about the administration's lack of responsiveness to congressional oversight."
"I have serious concerns ... and hope the Senate will give this bill more scrutiny than the first USA Patriot Act," said Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold, the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act. He said he, too, had been misled about the bill's existence.
The Justice Department quickly released a statement that said, "It should not be surprising that the Department of Justice ... discusses additional tools to protect the American people."
The act allows the government to:
* Conduct domestic wiretapping without court order for 15 days following a congressional authorization of use of force or an attack on the United States.
* Secretly detain citizens.
* Deport any alien, including green-card holders, who are convicted of drug possession or an aggravated felony.
* Access a citizen's credit reports without a subpoena.
* Abolish federal court "consent decrees" that limit police surveillance of non-criminal organizations and public events.
* Criminalize the use of encryption software in the commission or planning of a felony.
* Apply strict gag rules to those subpoenaed by a grand jury.
* Collect DNA from suspected terrorists and indeed from any individual whose DNA might assist terror investigations.
* Extend authorization periods for secret wiretaps and Internet surveillance.
* Ease restrictions on the use of secret evidence.
"The administration is pushing everything to less and less judicial and public oversight," said Deirdre Mulligan, director of the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic. "It's hard to shock me, but this legislation rises to level of shock of consciousness. Alarming as the Patriot Act was, these provisions are right off the edge."
"We haven't been given the most general statistics on the Patriot Act," said Jameel Jaffer of the American Civil Liberties Union, which has sued for information. "It doesn't make sense to expand their powers when we don't know how they are using the ones they got."
The hastily written Patriot Act faced little debate before being passed on Oct. 26, 2001, just weeks after the attacks of Sept. 11.
Since then, the Justice Department has been looking to tweak the Patriot Act, and some of the new proposals simply clean up the original's technically unclear passages.
Not everyone finds the draft outrageous.
"We need to come back and see if the Patriot Act's tools need strengthening," said Mike Scardaville, a policy analyst for the conservative Heritage Foundation. "This is not a program for total government secrecy."
Some news accounts have incorrectly said that the legislation was sent to the vice president and the House speaker. However, the control sheet (PDF) indicates only that the document was sent to 10 internal divisions of the department.
Given the intense attention already focused on this bill, some doubt it will be introduced soon.
"This is a very audacious bill designed to strike while the iron is still hot, but I wonder if it is still hot," said Chris Hoofnagle, deputy counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "There is already resistance to new government surveillance powers."
"This is something you have on the shelf," said Hoofnagle. "You wait for an opportune moment, like going to war, to introduce it. They call this a draft, but this bill is definitely close to final and gives a good road map of what the Justice Department wants."
ACTION!!!
Day: February 14th 2003
Time: 6:00 am - 10:00 am
Title: BOMBARD THE MEDIA! Anti-War Rally at THE TODAY SHOW NY, NY
Location: at the corner of 49th St. and Rockefeller Plaza btwn 5th and 6th Aves.
Phone Contact: (212) 443-9977
Topic / Issue: Iraq
Sponsor: BOMBARD THE MEDIA!
why...
because they've been ignoring and misrepresenting the anti-war movement for months now, it's time we BOMBARD THE MEDIA!
an anti-war rally will be taking place at a live taping of THE TODAY SHOW. the show is taped from 7-10am but it's best to get there early to get a camera-friendly spot. be sure to bring signs!
this is intended to increase the visibility of the anti-war movement to get the message out to middle america via the mainstream media, who has been trying to ignore us. also it is intended as a booster for the rally on saturday.
this time around we'll be on their turf and too big to ignore.
lots of people are needed to make this action successful. please show up and help out.
There is a peculiar circuit of influence between the USAmerican poets that most interest me, and which I’ve characterized through various readings of Lorine Niedecker’s “You see here,” a poem with an as-yet unattributed quotation.
You see here
the influence
of inference
Moon on rippled
stream
‘Except as
and unless’
Where does this imperative come from – or, from whom?
The ethics of attribution is in the news, of course. Of course, the news is in the ethics of attribution. Meanwhile, it’s far from enough to “take exception” when the inferences peculiar to the “abstract lyric” (so-called) – ‘as / and unless’ – do not do away with epistemology (as Zukofsky hoped Objectivism might). In Buffalo a year or two back, French poet Dominique Fourcade spoke generally about a “poetics of intimacy” and held the Niedecker-Zukofsky correspondence up as evidence. The particular inferences escape memory now, partly due to the difficulty of moving through a world whose ugliest impulses are seemingly instantaneously extended to principles of action. That’s part of my difficulty and perhaps others’ too. Yet I do turn to resources such as Circulars for a kind of intimacy. I read the initial mission statement as coming from a similar awareness of the peculiar value of the circuits of influence that interest me as subjects to history (social, aesthetic, political) as well as epistemology (though the rudiments of such an epistemology have yet to be articulated to my satisfaction, really, so I won’t go there).
To attempt to articulate this value, I have in mind some remarks on 1) Alan Gilbert’s “circular” from the “Poetry Is News” event at St. Mark’s in NYC, “The Present Versus (the) Now,” 2) Leslie Scalapino’s published response to the St. Mark’s “The Blank Generation?” forum in the latest Poetry Project Newsletter, 3) and last, recent rereading of some of Ron Silliman’s work, especially essays in his collection The New Sentence.
The problem I’m working out of is nonetheless similar, I think, to Gilbert’s viz. how one might accept the value of at least the potential influence between aesthetics and political action. At one time, for me, a potential “synaesthetic poetics” seemed promising (hence my little essay in the “Poetry as Activism” issue of Tripwire in 1998). “Now” it is the problem of the “present.” [How these problems are related, historically, is interesting, but I can't get into that right now.]
For Gilbert, “there’s a difference between a now in which one’s range of political and artistic choices are primarily immediate reactions to a current situation, and a present that draws upon a culture and politics of resistance rooted in the past, present, and future." What Gilbert calls a “micro-politics of the everyday” is this distinction, and connotes, for me, the always parenthetical definite article he places before “now” – what is the inference between every day and everyday? Every day the problem of presence (any instant whatever, as certain trends in continental critical theory have it) compels one to take exception, while “(the) now” elicits acceptance of one or another “reaction.” This dialectic seems to quickly short-circuit when, far from the luxury of speculative writing, the integrity of human bodies is being undermined, and the ludicrously “clear and present danger” of the Bush administration – who occupy the White House under criminal pretenses – exemplify for the nations of the world the worst forms of reactionary politics under the auspices of “moral” obligation. This is how I read Gilbert’s definition: “(the) now might be described as a brief lyric moment in these negotiations that’s interrupted by screaming.” While a suspension of disbelief seems like the last thing we need, what feels like an immanently definite “now” remains incredible. Gilbert remarks: “illiteracy is also a discourse” – I may be misunderstanding this remark, but doesn’t this artificially divide (as if a wider divide needed to be introduced to gain perspective here) the fact that “Language Poetry is now taught at Iowa” from the fact that hip hop stands as one of the most visible influences on contemporary poetic praxis? We can anticipate the historical reception of Chuck D. into the canon that already makes room for Ron Silliman. While I believe I share Gilbert’s impatience with “the reactive possibilities of (the) now,” the problem of the present emerges for me as an impossible one, wherein I’m constantly trying to calibrate what seems endemic with what seems insurgent – my “as” against my “unless,” past against future forthwith.
Discussing separate passages in which Silliman and Lyn Hejinian discuss the differences between the political motives of previous generations – namely, their generation – for Silliman a “critical” motivation marked by organization (?), for Hejinian in part the ability to consider utopian visions “tenable” – Scalapino writes, “Unbeknownst to their intention, both Silliman and Hejinian ‘oppose’ Stein and Dogen's theory of action: one's being in time, the outside and the inside, is one being the present alongside past and future at once.” To be present is deviant – “doing what the time is” – or, for Stein as for younger poets, to be continually present. Be vigilant, Silliman seems to say. Isn’t this a rather untenable critical utopia, holding vigil over or cherishing the lesson of the past? While for Gilbert – and I agree – to be present in the world is a critical act which is, in a term Hejinian has used and that might serve to temper Scalapino’s critique, myopic. Going on to perceive in Hejinian an opposition between thinking and being, Scalapino writes, “’Pain’ then (‘being’ rather than thinking) is connecting with one's being living in world war (not merely an individual's limitations, depoliticized as that characterization).” This is not a mourning but a confusion that is painful in the sense that, endemic to characterizations of aesthetics as politics and vice versa, the aesthetic is presumed to do anything other than hurt. Is that the limitation – namely, pleasure – of art?
I just came from a reading this afternoon where Nathaniel Mackey, to an audience nearly 20% sleeping (this was a college gig and we assume these nappers’ attendance was assigned), read:
I don’t much subscribe to the increasing talk, in these dreary times, of “empowerment,” “subversion,” “resistance” and so forth. I once quoted Bachelard’s line, “Thirst proves the existence of water,” to a friend, who answered, “No, water proves the existence of water.” I find myself more and more thinking that way. I find myself – and this goes for everyone else in the band, I think – increasingly unable (albeit not totally unable) to invest in notions of dialectical inevitability, to read the absence of what’s manifestly not there as the sing of its eventual presence. To whatever extent hyperbolic aubade appears to have eclipsed collective “could,” the ballons’ going on about love’s inflated goodbye should alert us to the Reaganomic roots of that eclipse.
I drove down to Santa Ana yesterday. An old friend and I went to the store at one point and on our way we passed a neighborhood park which has more and more become a camp for the homeless. Park Avenue people now call it, irony their one defense. Anyway, as we drove past, my friend, looking out the window, sneered, “Look at them, a bunch of dialects.” He meant derelicts.” So much for malaprop speech as oppositional speech, I couldn’t help thinking, so much of oppositional anything. (ATET A.D., 120-1).
“N.,” the narrator here, is in a temporarily somber mood, but I don’t think it diminishes the import of his approach. Temporary, but I think it’d be amply malaprop to call it provisional. But is it an instance of myopia (myopic speech)?
Since G. W. Bush and company are not legally elected, is it criminal to speak of their designs as policy? [I think so, yes.] How is it I find that I must resist doing so, given the “clear and present danger"?
Silliman: “Poetry in America … is class war – and more – conducted through the normal social mechanisms of verse. The primary ideological message of poetry lies not in its explicit content, political though it may be, but in the attitude toward reception it demands of the reader. It is this ‘attitude toward information,’ which is carried forward by the recipient. It is this attitude which forms the basis for a response to other information, not necessarily literary, in the text. And, beyond the poem, in the world” (“The Political Economy of Poetry,” The New Sentence, 31).
And what attitude is characterized by rapid eye movement (alternately paranoia and sleep). I’ll confess I assigned Mackey’s reading this afternoon to my writing students. I asked them, in the spirit of Hannah Weiner’s notes for a writing workshop she apparently never conducted ("AWARENESS AND COMMUNICATION - archived at UCSC Libraries), to write a response to the reading as a whole – what went through your mind while attending the event? I was cornered by a student on my way out of the auditorium, and he told me he had made an audio recording of the reading just in case. In case of what? In case I fell asleep – you said how we could write about whatever we were thinking – I want to write about how a bunch of people were asleep. He said he saw me sleeping too. I told him I had closed my eyes to listen. etc.
If his observation had been accurate (he wanted me to sleep), it would have been useful to write. In our previous class session, I found (rereading now Silliman’s essay “The New Sentence”) some vague afterlight of the hypothesis that there is an innate learning curve from full thought to imitation of sentence formulation based on complete thoughts – complete sentences. But I’d set up a dialogic situation in which “As I walked” was a complete thought yet to be completed as a sentence, and that the information carried was itself a vague afterlight of a preceding dialogue. So that, every sentence is “new” in that it ends or arrives, teleologically (the final term [.] is defined by the preceding terms). This is the seam through which Silliman is able to weave “K as if with a chamomile” (Tjanting, 132). “Literary criticism,” writes Silliman, summarizing Willard Van Orman Quine, “ought to serve as a corrective. Unlike philosophy, it is a discourse with a clearly understood material object” (“The New Sentence,” 71). This is, of course, untenable. That's Silliman's critique. But it is not so far from Silliman’s signal reference to Stein: “What Stein means about paragraphs being emotional and sentences not is precisely … that linguistic units integrate only up to the level of the sentence, but higher orders of meaning – such as emotion – integrate at higher levels than the sentence and occur only in the presence of either many sentences or … in the presence of certain complex sentences in which dependent clauses integrate with independent ones. The sentence is the horizon …” (87). But my dialogic approach had had nothing to do with the “removal of context” Silliman points to in Bob Grenier’s Sentences. I would argue against characterizing Grenier’s work in that way. My pedagogical approach anticipated that context is presence insofar as “time-sense” relates to sentence structure. Silliman thought, in this time, “poetic form has moved into the interiors of prose” (89). But this severing of context is precisely the work of the implicit dialectic teleology of Quine’s “eternal sentence” proposes as the intentional object of writing, critical writing.
Why I don’t read blogs: they are at best ‘dialects.’
Why I read, and would like to contribute to, Circulars: it is dialogic and, hence, timely.
Join us ...
-------------------------------------------------------
The Baghdad Snapshot Action will be carried out on
Thursday February 13. Teams of artists & activists will
paste thousands of copies of recent photographs from
Baghdad across Manhattan.
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To join meet us at 9pm:
548 W 21st Street
b/w 10th and 11th (near 11th)
south side of street, ring artists studio bell
what to bring -- warm clothes, wheat pasting supplies [wall paper powder, gallon bucket, water, brush, towel], staple gun, wide clear packing tape, friend(s)/postering partner. if you don't have friends or supplies we will supply you with either or both because we're like that. please let us know what you need.
we'll give you copies of the snapshots and one of the following: a cup of hot cider, a cup of cheap wine, a pepperidge farm goldfish cracker, a hearty welcome.
then we'll have a quick intro/explanation of the project plan and get into a distribution huddle whereby we assign the teams to the various neighborhoods of NYC. If you have specific requests re: neighborhoods you can let us know then. if you have any questions or concerns you can email us. we'll send you a reminder message on Thursday.
We've made 9,000 flyers-bring friends more people more coverage.
See you Thursday night.
emergency contact:
917.572.4909
newyork2baghdad@yahoo.com
The Super-Secret Creative-Subversive Anti-Propagandists
Poets will be meeting at 11:00 am this Saturday, Feb. 15:
Outside Conran's food emporium plaza on East 59th Street and 1st Avenue, just under the 59th street bridge.
Look for the Guernica banner and the Poets For Peace banner.
We will begin walking towards the main rally (1st Avenue stretching north from 49th Street) at around 11:30 am.
We will be forming a "feeder march" to the main rally as recommended on the United for Peace website.
Info from the United for Peace website:
For information on feeder marches and the law, see "Know Your Rights: Demonstrating in New York City" by the New York Civil Liberties Union. In general, marching on the sidewalk without a permit is legal so long as you do not obstruct pedestrian traffic. Marching in the street without a permit would be an act of civil disobedience.
(note: This is the official plan. The Bryant park plan is no longer in place.)
[The same mainstream UK paper that put the Amocoming to Kick Your Ass rebus on its cover, which it plagiarized from the internet, shows that plagiarism works both ways in this story on Tony Blair's ghost writer.]
Real Authors of Iraq Dossier Blast Blair
JOURNALIST Sean Boyne and student Ibrahim al-Marashi have attacked Tony Blair for using their reports to call for war against Iraq.
Mr Boyne, who works for military magazine Jane's Intelligence Review, said he was shocked his work had been used in the Government's dossier.
Articles he wrote in 1997 were plagiarized for a 19-page intelligence document entitled Iraq: Its Infrastructure Of Concealment, Deception And Intimidation to add weight to the PM's warmongering.
He said: "I don't like to think that anything I wrote has been used for an argument for war. I am concerned because I am against the war."
The other main source was a thesis by post-graduate student, Ibrahim al-Marashi, the US-born son of Iraqis, who lives in California. His research was partly based on documents seized in the 1991 Gulf War.
He said: "This is wholesale deception. How can the British public trust the Government if it is up to these sort of tricks? People will treat any other information they publish with a lot of skepticism from now on."
After the dossier's origins were revealed, Mr Blair was accused by his own MPs of theft and lies. The fiasco has deeply damaged his attempts to win backing for military action.
It emerged the PA to Mr Blair's spin chief Alastair Campbell was involved in drawing up the dossier which was published last month.
Alison Blackshaw and a Government press officer were both named on the dossier when it was first put on the Government's website. But the names were later removed.
The bulk of the Government's document is directly copied, without acknowledgement, from Ibrahim's 5,000-word thesis - Iraq's Security and Intelligence Network - published last September.
He did not even know the dossier existed until Glen Rangwala, a Cambridge-based Iraq analyst, spotted the plagiarism and called him.
Ibrahim, whose parents fled to the US from Iraq in 1968, said the Government not only blatantly lifted much of his work, including typing and grammatical errors. Mr al-Marashi and Mr Boyne said their figures had been altered in the Government document.
Former Labour Defense Minister MP Peter Kilfoyle said: "It just adds to the general impression that what we have been treated to is a farrago of half-truths.
"I am shocked that on such thin evidence that we should be trying to convince the British people that this is a war worth fighting."
And Labour MP Glenda Jackson said: "It is another example of how the Government is attempting to mislead the country and Parliament.
"And of course to mislead is a Parliamentary euphemism for lying."
The PM's official spokesman rejected Ms Jackson's claims but admitted it had been a mistake not to acknowledge Mr al-Marashi's thesis in the dossier.
He added: "The fact we used some of his work doesn't throw into question the accuracy of the document as a whole. This document is solid."
Asked whether Downing Street was embarrassed about the affair, the spokesman said: "We all have lessons to learn."
The dossier had been praised by US Secretary of State Colin Powell in his speech to the UN Security Council. Mr Boyne added: "Maybe I should invoice Colin Powell."
© mirror.co.uk 2003
[I haven't read anything about this story in US papers; this one comes from a Toronto press, but apparently this documentary has already been playing in Europe and has been shown on German television and to several European parliaments.]
NOW: Out for revenge, Feb 6 - 12, 2003
UK FILMMAKER SAYS GIS COVERED UP TALIBAN MASSACRE BY TED RALL New York City -- In a new documentary to be released in North America within the next few weeks, a Scottish filmmaker offers evidence that American soldiers may have been responsible for war crimes during the invasion of Afghanistan.According to eyewitnesses interviewed in Afghan Massacre: The Convoy Of Death, which few have seen on this side of the Atlantic, U.S. Special Forces supervised -- some say orchestrated -- the systematic murder of more than 3,000 captured Taliban soldiers in November 2001.
"There has been a cover-up by the Pentagon," says director Jamie Doran, a former producer for the BBC. "They're hiding behind a wall of secrecy, hoping this story will go away -- but it won't." Indeed, Afghan Massacre has already been shown on German television and to several European parliaments. The United Nations has promised an investigation. But thanks to a virtual media blackout, few North Americans are aware of the doc.
The allegations stem from the uprising at Qala-i-Jhangi fortress, a dramatic event that marked the last major confrontation between U.S.-backed forces of the Northern Alliance and the Taliban government. Several hundred prisoners, including "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, revolted against their guards and seized a weapons cache. Responding to Special Forces soldiers working with the Northern Alliance, U.S. jets used bombs to kill most of the rebels.
Eighty-six Talibs, including Lindh, survived the Qala-i-Jhangi revolt. Meanwhile, 8,000 more soldiers surrendered at Kunduz, the last Taliban redoubt in northern Afghanistan. Commanders loyal to General Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek warlord who later became Hamid Karzai's deputy defence minister, had painstakingly negotiated the surrender of the Taliban from Kunduz and Qala-i-Jhangi.
As I observed while covering the Kunduz front last fall, Northern Alliance commanders promised to quickly release ethnic Afghans among the Taliban once they laid down their arms. Many immediately joined the Northern Alliance. The status of foreign nationals, the so-called Arab Taliban, was somewhat nebulous since they didn't have hometowns in Afghanistan to which they might return after being released. In the end, Dostum guaranteed the lives of all 8,000-plus POWs. "Both British and American military officers were present" at the surrender deal, says Doran.
Newsweek reported that Special Forces commandos from the U.S. Fifth Group hooked up with Dostum in October 2001, offering hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes, advanced weaponry and the use of the air force to strike the targets he indicated. Special Forces soldiers turned Dostum and his top commanders into America's proxy army; the Afghans didn't dare to disobey the source of that largesse.
Although the Americans have been portrayed as tagging along with the Northern Alliance, Afghan forces followed their orders. U.S. troops were in de facto command of joint U.S.-Afghan operations, including Dostum's actions in the north.
Five thousand of the 8,000 prisoners made the trip to Sheberghan prison in the backs of open-air Soviet-era pickup trucks. But Dostum's soldiers were out for vengeance. They stopped and commandeered private container trucks to transport the other 3,000 prisoners. "It was awful," Irfan Azgar Ali, a survivor of the trip, told England's Guardian newspaper. "They crammed us into sealed shipping containers. We had no water for 20 hours. We banged on the side of the container. There was no air, and it was very hot. There were 300 of us in my container. By the time we arrived in Sheberghan, only 10 of us were alive."
One Afghan trucker, forced to drive one such container, says the prisoners began to beg for air. Northern Alliance commanders "told us to stop the trucks, and we came down. After that, they shot into the containers [to make air holes]. Blood came pouring out. They were screaming inside." Another driver in the convoy estimates that an average of 150 to 160 people died in each container.
When the containers were unlocked at Sheberghan, the bodies of the dead tumbled out. A 12-man U.S. Fifth Special Forces Group unit, Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA) 595, guarded the prison's front gates and, according to witnesses, controlled the facility in the hopes of picking key prisoners for interrogation and possible transportation to Guantánamo Bay. (This is how Lindh was singled out.)
"Everything was under the control of the American commanders," a Northern Alliance soldier tells Doran in the film. American troops searched the bodies for al Qaeda identification cards. But, says another driver, "some of [the prisoners] were alive. They were shot" while "maybe 30 or 40" American soldiers watched.
Members of ODA 595, interviewed for the PBS program Frontline on August 2, 2002, confirm their presence at Sheberghan but cagily deny participating in war crimes. "I didn't see any atrocities, but I easily could have. Some prisoners may have died because they were sick or ill, and Dostum's forces just couldn't give them any care because they didn't have it."
But even General Dostum admits 200 such deaths. And the Northern Alliance soldier quoted above says U.S. troops masterminded the cover-up: "The Americans told the Sheberghan people to get rid of them [the bodies] before satellite pictures could be taken."
Ten minutes down the road from Sheberghan is the windswept scrub of Dasht-i-Leili. According to the Boston-based group Physicians for Human Rights, the 3,000 murdered Taliban POWs were brought to Dasht-i-Leili for mass burial. One witness tells the Guardian that a Special Forces vehicle was parked at the scene as bulldozers buried the dead. Despite a sloppy attempt to remove evidence after the fact, Doran's camera sweeps over clothing, bits of skull, matted hair, jaws, femurs and ribs jutting out of the sand. Bullet casings littering the site offer grim testimony that some Talibs were still alive before being dumped in the desert.
"If we're a civilized society, then when men surrender they have to be given basic protection,'' says Doran. "These men were murdered in a grotesque fashion, summarily executed and kicked into large holes in the ground as U.S. soldiers stood by."
In recent months, Doran says, two witnesses who appear in his film have been brought to Sheberghan prison and executed by men loyal to deputy defence minister Dostum. The Pentagon refuses to investigate these charges.
Poets Against the War urgently needs funds to pay for ads in key U.S. newspapers on President's Day, February 17th, expressing our profound opposition to the Bush administration's drive toward war in Iraq. We believe that the world is poised on the knife-edge of a decision between war and peace, and it is conceivably the passionate, miraculous efforts of a growing throng of peace-loving poets that may be able to make part of the difference.
Since January 30, poets in many countries have joined an upsurge of conscience and compassion, submitting poems to the Poets Against the War web site, organizing hundreds of anti-war poetry readings around the world, joining with millions of others in vigils, processions, prayers and intercessions, lobbying and rallying for peace. At no time in history have so many poets spoken in such a large chorus.
Here is the text of the proposed newspaper ad:
Poets Against the War
In the face of so much opposition from U.N. members, despite the disapproval of the vast majority of citizens of the world, in defiance of the advice of its own intelligence agencies, and contrary to both common sense and fundamental notions of morality, the Bush administration seems to be headed for war in Iraq.
Over the past two weeks, over 5,000 poets have submitted poems or personal statements to register their opposition to this war. In doing so, they honor a long and rich tradition of thoughtful and moral opposition by poets and other artists to senseless and murderous policies, including those of our own government. At no time in history have so many poets spoken in such a large chorus.
We call upon the Bush administration to halt its headlong rush toward war, to heed the voices of the people of the world, and to seek peaceful means of resolving conflicts in company with the world community.
[First of a series of email newsletters that poet Carol Mirakove has started circulating and which will be appearing regularly on this site. Great links to substantial articles and essays. There is an email address at the end of the article to which you can send subscription requests.]
SHOULD WE BELIEVE THE EVIDENCE AGAINST IRAQ?
Well, we -know- the US government greatly exaggerated the facts and doctored photos in 1991 in order to justify the Gulf War. Here's only one of many citations: "Purchased by ABC from the Soviet commercial satellite agency Soyez-Karta, the photos were expected to reveal the presence of a massive Iraqi troop deployment in Kuwait, but failed to disclose anything near the number of troops claimed by the Bush administration. ABC declined to use them.." "Two satellite experts who had formerly worked for the U.S. government failed to find evidence of the alleged buildup." www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/papers/gulfwar1.htm
The Guardian published on Fri, Feb 7, that the UK war dossier (you know, the one that's supposedly based on secret intelligence about the current state of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction) was plagiarized from documents that are more than a decade old. "Apart from passing this off as the work of its intelligence services," Dr Rangwala said, "it indicates that the UK really does not have any independent sources of information on Iraq's internal policies. It just draws upon publicly available data." www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,890916,00.html
As for Colin Powell's presentation at the UN, none of the information can be substantiated. Who are "their sources"? Other questions that Colin Powell really needs to be answering are here: www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=21&ItemID=2993
Of course, the US government has a long history of this kind of lying. In 1964, President Johnson tricked Congress into okaying the Vietnam War by claiming the North Vietnamese has attacked a US destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin. As he was well aware, the event never happened -- but that didn't stop him from launching a war that claimed the lives of 57,000 American soldiers and millions of Vietnamese civilians. Are we ready for another one of -those-? www.counterpunch.org/tristam1016.html http://www.fair.org/media-beat/940727.html
EVEN IF THE EVIDENCE IS CREDIBLE, IS WAR NECESSARY?
Despite that this large-scale attack casts us into serious peril, our government officials and our major media channels are telling us that it is necessary. Does it make sense to you that Saddam Hussein -- under UN watch -- is a bigger threat to us than the threat of retaliation? From CNN, "Rumsfeld said: "We are sending very clear messages to people around him that they would be well-advised not to use those weapons. In the event, they do, they would wish they hadn't." Rumsfeld was answering a question that referred to President Bush's statement that Saddam has authorized field commanders to use chemical weapons." www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/02/07/sprj.irq.rumsfeld.europe/index.htm l
So question one is, why are our officials answering questions about cremating U.S. soldiers who are killed in chemical warfare (in order to get their bodies home for a memorial) rather than answering questions about how to prevent U.S. soldiers from meeting such a fate? Furthermore, what kind of leverage does Rumsfeld imagine he has over Iraq? The U.S. government is openly planning to flatten the nation at the onset, with hundreds of cruise missiles. What would Iraq have to lose in unleashing chemical warfare, on their own land, or on ours? And then, if the U.S. does go ahead and demolish Iraq, retaliation won't be coming from that country alone (do you think the rest of the middle east [and other oil-rich nations] will sit around and wait to be similarly invaded?). Ok -- per the Belfer Center at Harvard's JFK School of Government, Saddam can be contained: bcsia.ksg.harvard.edu/publication.cfm?program=CORE&ctype=paper&item_i d=361
U.S. SOLDIERS MADE TO BURY IRAQIS ALIVE IN GULF WAR
Do we want more U.S. soldiers to experience this brutality (not to mention their victims!)? Patrick J. Sloyan, Newsday reporter, broke the story on Sept 12, 1991, that U.S. soldiers were made to bulldoze Iraqi soldiers alive. Timothy McVeigh was among those who received this order. Sloyan's summary of Gulf War bulldozing is here: digitaljournalist.org/issue0211/sloyan.html
From the National Catholic Register, a Gulf War Veteran recounts: "I had to give the order, order men who drove the earth-movers to just cover up the trenches. To bury those poor bastards alive." www.ncregister.com/Register_News/120802war.htm
From Charles Sheehan-Miles, Gulf War Veteran: "The first Gulf War wasn't clean, it wasn't pretty, and it wasn't precise. In the chaos and destruction of battle, anything can happen. We killed a lot of people." www.veteransforcommonsense.org/
FBI, CIA SAY THERE IS NO CONNECTION BETWEEN HUSSEIN AND AL-QAEDA
This has been looked at, continuously, by U.S. intelligence since Sept 11, 2001. "Why the CIA thinks Bush is wrong": www.sundayherald.com/print28384. "No one's got proof": www.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/08/26/time.iraq/. But media distortion leads to phenomena such as this: 1,200 US citizens were asked, "To the best of your knowledge, how many of the September 11 hijackers were Iraqi citizens?" Of those surveyed, only 17 percent knew the correct answer: that none of the hijackers were Iraqi. 44 percent of USAmericans believe that most or some of the hijackers were Iraqi; another 6 percent believe that one of the hijackers was a citizen of that most notorious node in the axis of evil. That leaves 33 percent who did not know enough to offer an answer. www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2003/02/06/iraq_poll/
IT IS ABOUT OIL
The U.S. has been long-planning to control and re-map the Middle East. From the Institute for National Defense Strategic Studies: "The overriding American concern was preserving access to Gulf oil at reasonable prices and keeping the region secure from threat or invasion." www.ndu.edu/inss/press/Spelreprts/SR_03.htm
Robert Jensen explains, "No one suggests the United States seeks to permanently take direct possession of Iraqi oil. Instead, policymakers are interested in control over the flow of oil and oil profits.." "U.S. control over Iraq through a compliant regime -- beholden for its very existence to the United States -- dramatically increases U.S. control over oil, and therefore over the world economy." www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=2970
Oh yeah!, and then there's the one about George Bush, Senior, and the Bin Laden family sitting together on the board of the Carlyle group: "Carlyle's investors include the Bin Laden family, which has disowned its terrorist son Osama; Bush Sr.; and former Bush inner guard members Nick Carlucci and James Baker. Judicial Watch says all involved stand to benefit from any increase in U.S. defense spending." www.villagevoice.com/issues/0141/gray.php
IRAQIS WANT THE U.S. TO LEAVE THEM ALONE
The NYC-based artist Paul Chan was in Baghdad from Dec 14-Jan 14 with members of the Iraq Peace Team (www.iraqpeaceteam.org/). They broke sanctions, bringing medicine, toys, and art supplies to the people of Iraq. The people of Iraq -like- us; they hate Bush (Senior and Junior). They want the U.S. to leave them alone. In insisting that the Iraqi people experience the same freedoms that we experience, Paul says the U.S. would be delivering liberty and death in a single blow. Please go to Paul's site and experience wonderful images of people living in Baghdad today: www.nationalphilistine.com/
1.2 MILLION IRAQIS HAVE BEEN KILLED SINCE 1992 We don't want any more blood on our hands: U.S. and UK-led, UN sanctions against Iraq have claimed an estimated 1.2 million Iraqi lives. UNICEF estimates that the total number of casualties includes more than 600,000 Iraqi children under the age of 5, with 4,500 dying each month. www.doctorsworldwide.org/projects/iraq.htm
MESSAGE FROM THE WORLD SOCIAL FORUM: "IF YOU DOUBT THE IMPORTANCE OF THIS, THINK BACK TO SEPTEMBER 11, 2001"
The U.S. is not listening to the UN, it is not listening to the world in protest. If we keep pissing people off & stomping around like a big bully, we are -more- likely to suffer attacks on our landmarks, our homes, our families, our selves. Furthermore, those attacks will be used to justify deeper cuts to our body of civil liberties by our own government. We need to pay attention to, and participate in, our political processes. Robert Jensen recently wrote, "If you doubt the importance of this, think back to September 11, 2001. On that day, we got a glimpse of what it will look like if the empire is dismantled from the outside, if the empire continues to ignore the world. But we have a choice. We, the first citizens of the empire, can commit to dismantling the empire from within, peacefully and non-violently, in solidarity with those around the world struggling for justice." www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=1&ItemID=2950
GOOD NEWS: THE UN MAY BE ABLE TO BLOCK THE ATTACKS
"In 1950, the Security Council set up a procedure for insuring that stalemates between countries would not prevent the United Nations from carrying out its mission to "maintain international peace and security." With the United States playing an important role in its adoption, the Council adopted Resolution 377, the aptly named "Uniting for Peace" in an almost unanimous vote." See the Center for Constitutional Rights website: www.ccr-ny.org
SUBSCRIPTION REQUESTS
Thank you for reading through. I know it's hard and painful and depressing. But, you know, people around the country -- around the world -- are getting together, and that's a good thing.
Send subscription requests to mirakove_relay@yahoo.com.
[Following is a link to an important memorandum on a new initiative to extend the Patriot Act to give the government power to make secret arrests (first time in US history), deport lawful permanent resident aliens without trial, etc. Click "More" to read the entire interview.]
NOW: Politics & Economy - Breaking News | PBS
There's an important story developing tonight at the Justice Department. The non-partisan Center for Public Integrity obtained a closely-guarded document that shows plans for a sweeping expansion of the government's police powers. Until now, few people outside of the department, not even members of key congressional committees have seen this draft legislation. It could lead to increased surveillance and greater secrecy - all in the name of the war on terror. It raises questions about how we balance liberty and security - the rights of individuals versus the rule of law. Bill Moyers talks to Chuck Lewis about the significance of the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003 and how it would affect civil liberties.
MOYERS: Chuck Lewis, whom you just saw in that piece is with me now. He is the Executive Director of the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity, the organization responsible for obtaining that document. Chuck Lewis, thank you for joining us.
LEWIS: Thank you.
MOYERS: The Patriot Act was passed six weeks after 9/11. We know now that it greatly changed the balance between liberty and security in this nation's framework. What do you think — what's the significance of this new document, called the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003?
LEWIS: I think the significance is it just deepens and broadens, further extends the first Patriot Act. That act in 2001, they had six weeks, which was not a lot of time to throw something together. Now there's been 18 months of all kinds of things that have happened and court decisions that have tried to roll back some of the Patriot Act.
And other concerns, law enforcement, people have, and so they've had time to sift and sort what they want. And it's arguably might be a more thorough rendering of all the things law enforcement and intelligence agencies would like to have in a perfect world. It's sort of how I look at it, and I think it's a very tough document when it comes to secrecy and surveillance.
I understand the concerns about fear of terrorism. And it certainly…
MOYERS: We all have those…
LEWIS: We all have those and there are things in the legislation that make sense, and that are reasonable, I think for any American. But there are other things that really take some of the Patriot Act civil liberties issues that folks were concerned about and go even further. And I think it's gonna be very controversial. Some of these sections are gonna be debated for weeks and months.
MOYERS: So many of these powers latent in this draft legislation were powers that were taken away from the intelligence community some years ago because they were abused.
LEWIS: That's right.
MOYERS: Do you see any protection in here against potential abuse?
LEWIS: I don't think there's very much — there's a lot more authority and power for government. There's less oversight and information about what government is doing. That's the headline and that's the theme. And the safeguards seem to be pretty minimal to me.
MOYERS: I just go through here, you know? "Will give the Attorney General the unchecked power to deport any foreigner?"
LEWIS: Right.
MOYERS: Including lawful permanent resident aliens. It would give the government the power to keep certain arrests secret until an indictment is found never in our history have we permitted secret arrests. It would give the government power to bypass courts and grand juries in order to conduct surveillance without a judge's permission. I mean these do really further upend the balance between liberty on the one hand and security on the other.
LEWIS: Well, they do. They reduce judicial oversight with the secret intelligence courts instead of saying the court may do this now it's the court will do this. They can have ex parte conversations where they go into the judge without anyone else around. In terms of information about detainees, not only can they detain anyone they'd like to detain, there is no public information about it.
Journalists cannot find out the names of — we detained over a thousand people after September 11th because we thought they might all be terrorists. Not one of them was really found with any criminal charges to be a terrorist. And we don't know the names of almost all those people, still. And so it does appear that everything that folks might be concerned about with the Patriot Act, this is times five or times ten is what I look at it. I see it very serious.
MOYERS: You and I have had this kind of discussion often, we go back a long way together. The foundation that I serve on has been a big supporter of yours and you've been a big supporter of our journalism. If we were fighting terrorists instead of being journalists, wouldn't we want this kind of power in our hands?
LEWIS: Well, we would, but we operate in a democracy and there's other considerations. I mean I think, you know, there's no question, if you're in law enforcement, this is gonna make it easier for you to do your job. The problem is, we have a history in our country, just in our lifetime, in the last quarter century.
Where we've seen FBI and CIA abuses of ordinary citizens. Where mail has been opened, where homes have been broken into. Where infiltration has occurred in political groups. Informants have been used, misused. People's lives have been ruined. People have committed suicide because of the pressures brought against them by the government, by these kinds of secret intelligence agencies.
This is not a completely crazy idea to worry about the power of the government. And it was curbed and rolled back in the '70s. And there is something obviously occurring here in the public space around the whole issue of liberty and security right now.
And it is clearly changing and it's moving towards security. And the question for us as a people is what is the right balance. And I think my biggest personal concern is that there ought to be a debate about this. So the Patriot Act jammed through Congress in six weeks.
There was a Congressional — there was a Senate hearing that lasted an hour and a half, there were no questions to the Attorney General by the senators. This is too important for our country. Whatever anyone's point of view, this should be a conversation that the country should have.
And if I'm afraid they're waiting for a war or something and then they're gonna pop this baby out and then try to jam it through.
MOYERS: You mean that if it were not rolled out and discussed publicly until the United States has had war in Iraq, people might not pay as much attention to it as they would now.
LEWIS: They wouldn't pay as much attention and you know, our worries and our fears are gonna be different than they are now. And there will be less of — all these things will melt away. These are nice concerns about liberties but we'll be at war. And we'll have presidents and attorneys general and other government officials telling us things. And I just see a — I see that it wouldn't work quite as easily for them if it comes out in the next few weeks as opposed to then.
MOYERS: Congressman Burton, Dan Burton, of Indiana, a very conservative congressman, who is Chairman on the Committee on Government Reform. He said recently, "An iron veil is descending over the executive branch."
Now your forte is moving information around in Washington trying to find out what's going on. Would you agree with what Congressman Burton has said here?
LEWIS: I absolutely agree with what he's saying. I mean there have been 300 roll-backs of the Freedom of Information Act since September 11th. All over America, at the state and local level, as well as the federal government. The Attorney General sent a message to every federal employee, when in doubt, deny any Freedom of Information request.
We have other things like presidential papers being sealed off. We have reporters trying to cover things in Afghanistan being locked in a warehouse and not able to file their stories. Even before September 11th, we had one reporter's home phone records seized by a grand jury without telling him or his news organization.
There's a lot of things happening with information, access to information, and efforts to stop journalism that I have not seen in 20 plus years of watching Washington and journalism and government interact. And it's not just information. It's not information for information's sake. This is about health, safety, lives…
MOYERS: What do you mean?
LEWIS: Well, you have this whole thing in this current draft legislation that there's a worst case scenario type requirement that every company that is making hazardous or toxic materials has to make that information available to the public. So if something terrible does happen they know that it's possible that it could happen and there's some sort of assessment about it. Well now that is not gonna be required. Chemical companies will not have to tell the world about these problems.
And they will — the citizens in that community will not have access to that information in an easy accessible way. And that's new and that affects their life. If some problem occurs, they're unrelated to the terrorism. Something just goes wrong, they will not know anything about that in their community.
So we're rolling back health and safety and environmental and other considerations and sensitivities that have been in our culture now for decades. Are melting away because of — all in the name of fighting terrorism.
MOYERS: What would be the Attorney General's justification for wanting to restrict access to information about toxic chemicals?
LEWIS: Well, the — I haven't heard one. But I think the rationale is that terrorists could get information about a chemical plant and its security, bad security, inadequate security and somehow then bring about a threat.
But the problem is sunlight is the best disinfectant. If these plants have bad security or they're not being well run and they're actually unsafe it's usually exposing it and talking about it and the public being aware of it that ends up improving the plant or the facility or whatever it is.
I actually find that that's how change occurs usually. And so the ostensible rationale is to keep it away from terrorists. But I think it's also a rationale to protect companies frankly in this instance. Well I happen to know that's been the chemical lobbyist's dream for a long time.
A long time before 9/11. They did not want this information made available.
LEWIS: I see a lot of opportunism here around the fear and paranoia in the wake of September 11th. And taking advantage of the insecurity that we all feel today. And that is, to me, incredibly offensive. And that's why a conversation about it, there's 40 sections in this thing. The public needs to have a sense what exactly are we getting here.
There needs to be a chewing over. This should not jam through Congress. This should be out there and being — be talked about.
I mean the realm between public and private, between foreign and domestic, all these things have morphed into the citizen against all of this out there — this morass of regulations and rules and intrusions. And at the same time they can come after you, get your credit card data, your library records, your Internet searching, everything. And they'll decide whether or not you're a suspect or not.
Whether or not they like you. If you're a disfavored political group, or from the wrong ethnic background, then you might become on the radar screen of some folks that you don't know about, you can't find out about, and they can do things. They have — this is incredible power.
MOYERS: One of the provisions in here as I understand it is that the government could actually strip citizenship from someone if — for example, if you were found, according to this, if you were found making what you thought was a legitimate contribution to some non profit organization.
LEWIS: Right.
MOYERS: Foundation. And months from then, that foundation were deemed by the government or that organization were deemed by the government to have been in some way supporting terrorists, you could lose your citizenship because of your contribution, even if you didn't know…
LEWIS: That's right.
MOYERS: That you were contributing to an organization like that.
LEWIS: No, that's absolutely — they have that power. They can also extradite all over world, even if we don't have treaties. I mean, some of the things in here are — strain credulity for legal scholars. They're not sure, they've never seen these kinds of provisions trotted out. I mean, a lot of the question is if it does pass Congress, what would the courts do with it later.
I mean I think there are some legitimate issues there.
MOYERS: What do you make of this? This is the document that went from the Department of Justice with this draft legislation to certain very key people in government. Among them, Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert and Vice President, Richard Cheney, for their comments on this obviously confidential document.
Why the Speaker of the House and the Vice President and not the committee chairman of the Judiciary Committee in the Senate or the appropriate committee in the House?
LEWIS: It's a way to say you've consulted Congress to some extent by sending it to the Speaker and not really consulting Congress.
As far as I can tell, and we have not polled every member or anything like that, but it appears that virtually no one on Capitol Hill, except for the Speaker, has seen this legislation. I'm talking about the people at the judiciary committees in the House and Senate don't have this legislation. And have even been kind of yanked around a little bit for months about whether there will even be legislation.
MOYERS: The House Judiciary Committee actually asked the FBI a few months ago how it has used the new powers that had been given to it under the Patriot Act. And the Justice department said, "We can't tell you that information, it's classified."
And this prompted then-Congressman then Bob Barr, from Georgia, another conservative, by the way, he said the attitude of the Justice Department seems to be that even Congress isn't entitled to know how they are using the authority that Congress gave them.
LEWIS: It's incredible. I mean, if Congress doesn't have oversight over the Justice Department and these programs, who does? That's how it's supposed to work in our constitution and in our set up for government.
MOYERS: That's one of your real concerns, isn't it? That there's no oversight when secrecy is this tight.
LEWIS: Absolutely. The Congress is the people's chance to monitor the executive branch. That is the only… it is the closest branch of government to the people. The House members are up for election every two years. If the House of Representatives and the Congress in general cannot keep a watch on the executive branch and cannot be informed about their activities. There's something very serious here.
MOYERS: Chuck, I hear people out there in the audience thinking, you know, I'm scared. We're — this is a new ballgame, to put it trivially. War on terrorists, they came on 9/11, we keep getting reports they're coming again, who knows where it'll happen. Everybody's scared.
You guys are living in Lotus Land, you journalists talking about this sort of thing. Because we really want the government to protect us from another World Trade Center attack on the Pentagon, which is not far from where your office is in Washington.
LEWIS: Right.
MOYERS: What about that?
LEWIS: Look, I wanna be protected by the government as much as anyone.
But actually, in some ways that's beside the point. There are also freedoms and rights and liberties that, you know, millions of Americas have fought for over 200 years to make sure that this is a special kind of country. And isn't it possible that to be secure and have liberties?
Why give all the power and authority and have no oversight and accountability. What are the safeguards. And that's the question.
MOYERS: When someone inside government, inside the Justice Department, presumably, gives you a confidential document marked, "Not For Distribution," The Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003, knowing that this administration has been cracking down on watchdogs and leaks from inside government, do you consider this person a patriot?
LEWIS: I really do. I think it takes incredible guts to take something that bothers someone, and for whatever reason, they feel they must give it out. And they know they're gonna be polygraphed, they're gonna be questioned. There's gonna be a clampdown found, there's gonna be a witch-hunt after this occurs. They could very likely not only lose their job but-- maybe worse.
MOYERS: Be sued by the government?
LEWIS: Be sued by the government and otherwise ruined professionally. That is the most incredible kind of courage. And I have an incredible respect for anyone who does that.
MOYERS: I should make this clear this is not marked "Top Secret" — this is not a classified document. It is stamped "Confidential" but nobody is betraying the Secrets Act.
LEWIS: Yeah, that's right, I mean, I've — I'm glad to say that that's right.
MOYERS: There was a story this week in Congressional Quarterly, which is a very respected non-partisan journal in Washington. It says "Pentagon's proposed changes strike some as difficult, dangerous and destabilizing." And one of the things Donald Rumsfeld wants is wavers of environmental laws so that troops can conduct more "realistic exercises."
And then this magazine, which is non-partisan, says this is part of the administration's broad campaign to run the federal government more like a private business. And with private businesses you have more control over employees, you have more control over information. Do you see that developing as a syndrome of this administration?
LEWIS: I think it's incredible what's happening. I see a wholesale assault on access to information in this country that has not really been seen, I have to just say it, since Richard Nixon.
When you look at the roll-backs of freedom of information, when you look at things like meeting with energy companies with the Vice President. It's simple things though in government property with government officials getting paid by taxpayer money and it's not available to the public.
When you see some of the things that we have talked about earlier with reporters from detainees to military actions not being able to see things. I see a lot of very aggressive behavior by government officials towards the act of getting information out and information itself. I think that we're in a very unusual situation right now. And it really worries me actually.
MOYERS: Chuck Lewis, Center for Public Integrity, thank you very much.
LEWIS: Thank you.
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
As the rhetoric of war in Iraq grows louder, there is an urgent need for reflective, responsive, and resistant voices in the Canadian public sphere. Published by Three Squares Press, and edited by Mark Higgins, Stephen Pender, and Darren Wershler-Henry, The Common Sky: Canadian Writers against the War will assemble a diversity of Canadian writers expressing their opposition to another (potential) war in the Middle East.
Writers are invited to submit poetry (1-3 pages, max. 3 submissions) and short fiction (max. 1500 words) occasioned by the threat of war in Iraq.
Electronic submissions strongly encouraged.
OR
Three Squares Press
16 Ashdale Ave.
Toronto, ON
M4L 2Y7
*Please include a self-addressed, stamped envelope if you need your submission returned.
Contributors will receive 2 copies of the anthology.
Proceeds from the sale of the book will be donated to the Canadian Peace Alliance
Submission deadline: Tuesday February 11, 2003
Publication date: March, 2003
**PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY **
[Just got back from a great talk by Paul Chan, an artist who was in Iraq in December/January and has been giving talks all over the place -- colleges, artist spaces, etc. -- for the past several weeks. Besides a great series of dispatches that he managed to get out of there, he's also took a series of powerful, if very humble and unpretentious, photographs -- both texts and images are posted on his site, nationalphilistine.com.]
Mass Actions in New York City on Feb. 15 and San Francisco on Feb. 16
On February 15, hundreds of thousands of people will converge on New York City to stand with millions around the globe against the Bush Administration's plan for war on Iraq. While we are still unable to announce a location for this march and rally, one thing is certain: It is happening. We urge all those who oppose the war crusade to continue mobilizing full speed ahead for February 15. We have just filed a federal lawsuit over the denial of our march permit and have a hearing before the judge on February 7.
[Just fell into my inbox -- click "more" below and get links to the two papers in question.]
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | UK war dossier a sham, say experts
British 'intelligence' lifted from academic articles
Michael White and Brian Whitaker
Friday February 7, 2003
The Guardian
Downing Street was last night plunged into acute international embarrassment after it emerged that large parts of the British government's latest dossier on Iraq - allegedly based on "intelligence material" - were taken from published academic articles, some of them several years old.
Amid charges of "scandalous" plagiarism on the night when Tony Blair attempted to rally support for the US-led campaign against Saddam Hussein, Whitehall's dismay was compounded by the knowledge that the disputed document was singled out for praise by the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, in his speech to the UN security council on Wednesday.
Citing the British dossier, entitled Iraq - its infrastructure of concealment, deception and intimidation in front of a worldwide television audience Mr Powell said: "I would call my colleagues' attention to the fine paper that the United Kingdom distributed... which describes in exquisite detail Iraqi deception activities."
But on Channel 4 News last night it was revealed that four of the report's 19 pages had been copied - with only minor editing and a few insertions - from the internet version of an article by Ibrahim al-Marashi which appeared in the Middle East Review of International Affairs last September.
Though that was not the only textual embarrassment No 10 seemed determined to tough it out last night.
Dismissing the gathering controversy as the latest example of media obsession with spin, officials insisted it in no way undermines the underlying truth of the dossier, whose contents had been re-checked with British intelligence sources. "The important thing is that it is accurate," said one source.
What Whitehall may not grasp is the horror with which unacknowledged borrowing of material - the crime of plagiarism - is regarded in American academic and media circles, even though successive US governments have a poor record of misleading their own citizens on foreign policy issues at least since the Vietnam war. On a special edi tion of BBC Newsnight, filmed before a critical audience last night, Mr Blair stressed that he was willing to forgo popularity to warn voters of the dangers of weapons of mass destruction: "I may be wrong, but I do believe it."
With trust a critical element in the battle to woo a sceptical public the first sentence of the No 10 document merely states, somewhat cryptically, that it "draws upon a number of sources, including intelligence material".
But Glen Rangwala, a lecturer in politics at Cambridge University, told Channel 4: "I found it quite startling when I realised that I'd read most of it before."
The content of six more pages relies heavily on articles by Sean Boyne and Ken Gause that appeared in Jane's Intelligence Review in 1997 and last November. None of these sources is acknowledged.
The document, as posted on Downing Street's website at the end of January, also acci dentally named four Whitehall officials who had worked on it: P Hamill, J Pratt, A Blackshaw and M Khan. It was reposted on February 3 with the first three names deleted.
"Apart from passing this off as the work of its intelligence services," Dr Rangwala said, "it indicates that the UK really does not have any independent sources of information on Iraq's internal policies. It just draws upon publicly available data."
Evidence of an electronic cut-and-paste operation by Whitehall officials can be found in the way the dossier preserves textual quirks from its original sources. One sentence in Dr Marashi's article includes a misplaced comma in referring to Iraq's head of military intelligence during the 1991 Gulf war. The same sentence in Downing Street's report contains the same misplaced comma.
A Downing Street spokesman declined to say why the report's public sources had not been acknowledged. "We said that it draws on a number of sources, including intelligence. It speaks for itself."
Dr Marashi, a research associate at the Centre for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California, said no one had contacted him before lifting the material.
But on the regular edition of Newsnight he later gave some comfort to No 10. "In my opinion, the UK document overall is accurate even though there are a few minor cosmetic changes. The only inaccuracies in the UK document were that they maybe inflated some of the numbers of these intelligence agencies," he said.
Explaining the more journalistic changes inserted into his work by Whitehall he added: "Being an academic paper, I tried to soften the language.
"For example, in one of my documents, I said that they support organisations in what Iraq considers hostile regimes, whereas the UK document refers to it as 'supporting terrorist organisations in hostile regimes'.
"The primary documents I used for this article are a collection of two sets of documents, one taken from Kurdish rebels in the north of Iraq - around 4m documents - as well as 300,000 documents left by Iraqi security services in Kuwait. After that, I have been following events in the Iraqi security services for the last 10 years."
Iraq's decision last night to let weapons inspectors interview one of its scientists for the first time without government "minders" signalled that Baghdad may be bending under international pressure.
But diplomats will be trying to determine over the next few days whether it is a token gesture or a real shift away from what they describe as Iraq's "catch us if you can" approach to inspections. Hours before the announcement, a Foreign Office source in London signalled that this was the kind of change of heart that Iraq would have to make to avoid war.
Key documents
Read the government's paper
Read the academic's paper
[Click through to get a .pdf with more news on this event, yet another -- like the Wayne State event below, inspired by Laura Bush! This one's in Toronto.]
P O E T R Y
O P P O S E D
T O W A R
Or, Laura Bush's Poetry Salon
*****
You are cordially invited to the poetry reading originally scheduled for February 12 but indefinitely postponed. Due to the controversial nature of this event, it has been moved to the campus of Wayne State University. Join poets of the Wayne community in sending a message to the White House on poetry's understanding of the nature of war.
Readers to include...
Ron Allen / Abbas Bazzi / Bill Harris / Carla Harryman / M. L. Liebler / Ted Pearson / Franziska Ruprecht / Katie Scott / Craig Smith / Chris Tysh / George Tysh / Justin Vidovic / Anca Vlasopolos / Barrett Watten
*****
Wednesday, February 12
2:30 to 4:30 PM
Bernath Auditorium
Adamany Undergraduate Library
Sponsored by
Wayne English Department Against the War
*****
[Here's some good, cheap, lowbrow political humor from www.mnftiu.cc | get your war on. There's TONS more where this came from.]
[This is from artist Paul Chan's National Philistine -- Combat edition, where you can read the complete set of posts he sent while in Iraq, along with a series of photographs.]
I find myself here, today, in an impossible situation.
I must speak to you--the press--with you and through you, using your kind of sentences and leaps of reason, letting you sell me like a precious but marginal commodity, so I can say what everyone already knows but a few vaguely important people in this city are unwilling to admit: that no one wants a war; that an attack against Iraq is no attack against terrorism; that an attack will in fact make the United States less safe; that the Iraqi people do not want a war to liberate them because they will not live through the liberation; that as Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. said, "if we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight." I must convey all of this to you, sell it to you, all the while knowing that I find you despicable.
The wild dogs of Baghdad have more dignity and sense than you. You travel in packs and think the same way. You mistake quotes with facts and facts with meaning. You lack historical imagination and intellectual empathy. Your sentences are short and puritanical. In Baghdad you step over children and knock over speakers, reduce subtleties and ignore contexts. An American newspaper journalist in Baghdad told me with a gleeful sense of pride that journalists are lazy and under pressure to write, so issues and ideas have to be reduced into sound bites in order to function as media. Pathetic.
History rarely reads like a press release. And history is being made right now by those who have no time to issue statements. Get complex and get curious or get out of the way.
I think we are going to stop this one without you.
Thank you.
This is the fourth invitation I’ve received in a month asking me to comment on the relationship between poetry and politics: two for print publication forums dedicated to the topic and two for symposiums revolving around the issue. As someone who’s written on the connections between poetry, art, culture, and politics for more than just a month, it got me thinking about the apparent sudden urgency to address the relationship between poetry and politics. This, in turn, caused me to consider different ways in which to conceive of the idea of the present, both as a historical category and in relation to contemporary culture, specifically, poetry and art. What became clear, at least to me, is that there’s a difference between a now in which one’s range of political and artistic choices are primarily immediate reactions to a current situation, and a present that draws upon a culture and politics of resistance rooted in the past, present, and future.
(The) now is a fragile history. Barely torn from the past at the same moment it erratically staggers into the future, (the) now moves so quickly, yet obliquely, that its blur appears determined. In an information-oriented society built on speed, this is particularly true; and anyone who sits in front of a computer all day as part of her or his job knows the feeling of watching fresh headlines continually pop up on the homepages of Internet news providers. This is an experience of history—or one form of it—as whizzing by before lunchtime. As a result, (the) now often only leaves room for reaction in its small space and the short time it has left.
One of my biggest concerns when thinking about differences between (the) now and the present is that the demand for action “now” has the potential to override the demands for action “then” and in the future—demands that never disappear, even when forgotten, covered-up, or silenced. For instance, I’m heartened—perverse as the use of this word may be, given the context—that because of the threat of war on Iraq and the diminishment of civil liberties in the US, people are once again thinking about the relationship between politics and poetry. But why weren’t there just as many symposiums and print forums dedicated to this topic when the Clinton administration was dismantling social welfare programs during the go-go ’90s? And what about the writers and visual artists who had trouble publishing and exhibiting their work not so long ago because it was deemed “too political”? And what happens to this work and this dialogue we’re having today once the war in Iraq has been averted or won or lost? Or when Hillary Clinton is elected president? (The) now is sometimes quick to elide these kinds of questions, instead favoring immediate reaction.
This plays out on a grassroots level, where it can be difficult to convince people of the need to protest the impending war on Iraq when they’re more worried about their unemployment benefits running out, or when the police are perceived as more of an immediate threat than so-called “weapons of mass destruction,” or when neighborhood schools are chronically underfunded and unsafe. I want a conception of politics that can respond as much to the day-to-day politics of people just getting by as it does to the out-of-touch national politics of Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe. Which isn’t to say that it wouldn’t be particularly difficult to make a map connecting the bombing of Iraqi children with the failure of schools in the US, something the strategists of the Democratic Party seem unwilling to do. But I’m hesitant to define politics exclusively in terms of broad-based social movements. It’s crucial that a micro-politics of the everyday isn’t forgotten by this generation’s peace movement, or else this movement may end up being as relatively homogenous as other recent versions.
A politics of the everyday negotiations with power that take place in the present—though not always in (the) now—are extrapolations of earlier, as well as yet-to-be-articulated, aspirations for a better shared world. To use a metaphor informed by poetry, (the) now might be described as a brief lyric moment in these negotiations that’s interrupted by screaming. (The) now always has the capacity for beautiful interventions—the slogans written on the walls of the Sorbonne in May of ’68, the ACT UP poster art of Gran Fury in the ’80s, the puppets and costumes at the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999—but these interventions move beyond the rhetorical certainties of (the) now and into the uncertain possibilities of the present when they become articulated to larger social and ideological formations. Similarly, poetry is never inseparable from the moment of both its utterance and its reception, an utterance and reception that are socially situated, and therefore politically and ideologically inflected. It’s important to listen or read for this, especially when the ability to corrode stale rhetorics from the inside and make accepted ideologies appear unnatural are two things that poetry and art have the potential to do effectively and brilliantly.
Yet to say that all poetry and art is political negates the ability to use politics as a critical concept, just as saying that all thought is ideological diminishes ideology’s capacity for critique. This isn’t to argue that all poetry can’t be read politically and ideologically, which may be more to the point. As access to information becomes a fundamental material level in society, while the digital divide remains yet another form of wealth disparity, the ability to read critically will assume a significance on par with more traditional political concepts such as voting, union membership, etc. Pedagogy then has the potential to become a revolutionary activity, because illiteracy is also a discourse, as the reigning president has illustrated so well—all humor aside.
If power is not permanent, then politics is not a privilege. Poetry and art examine language, image, and movement at the point of production, even if this production is frequently complicit with economic, social, and institutional status quos. At these moments of complicity, the farther one gets from a poetry and art of (the) now, the closer one gets to poetry and art as imagining and invoking an alternative set of present conditions, both within poetry and art, and outside of them. The poetry renaissance that occurred in North America during the ’90s is the result of the substantial role poetry plays in marginalized communities. This can be seen most obviously in the various forms of spoken word, performance poetry, and hip hop that, in many ways, instigated this renaissance a decade or so ago. The current cycle of poetry’s relevance and political vitality—as evidenced most strikingly by First Lady Laura Bush’s canceling of a poetry symposium at the White House that poet and publisher Sam Hamill planned to turn into a political protest—has decidedly not occurred because Jorie Graham sells more books than her equivalent in the ’80s, or because Billy Collins is NPR’s darling, or because Language poetry is now taught at Iowa. In fact, it’s happened in spite of them.
The reactive possibilities of (the) now—with its frequent retreat into moral pieties and political sloganeering on both the left and the right—are a horizon away from the creative emancipations of the present, however brief, however defeated by other pasts, presents, and futures. In this sense, it’s necessary to ask why are certain stories told and others not, why are certain kinds of information known and other kinds not, why are certain situations and phenomena represented and others not. “[H]ow is it,” asks Michel Foucault in the Archaeology of Knowledge, “that one particular statement appeared rather than another?” This question is as much the province of artists as it is of activists and historians, of artists as activists and historians. But it’s not simply a matter of spontaneous free expression; rather, specific statements must be understood within a larger constellation of institutions, communities, and ideologies. Without this contextual awareness, artistic, critical, and political interventions dissipate within the mystifying climate of (the) now.
All the while, it’s necessary to be realistic about what cultural workers are capable of. Thus, one strategic challenge for writers and artists—and not solely during times of crisis, because time is always in crisis—is not to try to compete with a mass media network that has rarely served to represent anything other than ruling class interests. Instead, the aim might be to foster alternative cultures, modes of representation, ideologies, and communities that the mostly false “public”—i.e., corporate-controlled—channels of communication will then be obliged to address, and with which the hegemonies they help prop up will be compelled to negotiate. This is a process different from—however tenuous the distinction—the absorption of alternatives by the mainstream . . . a process forced open by a now-informed-by-history.
St. Mark's Poetry Project, NYC, 1 February 2003
[As some people familiar with my Vaneigem series know, I like to take pre-existing web pages and change the contents of them for political ends. It's not an original idea; in fact, I stole it all from the Situationists, many of whose writings are online at The Situationist International Text Library.]
Détournement, the reuse of preexisting artistic elements in a new ensemble, has been a constantly present tendency of the contemporary avant-garde, both before and since the formation of the SI. The two fundamental laws of détournement are the loss of importance of each detourned autonomous element — which may go so far as to completely lose its original sense — and at the same time the organization of another meaningful ensemble that confers on each element its new scope and effect.
Détournement has a peculiar power which obviously stems from the double meaning, from the enrichment of most of the terms by the coexistence within them of their old and new senses. Détournement is practical because it is so easy to use and because of its inexhaustible potential for reuse. Concerning the negligible effort required for détournement, we have already noted that "the cheapness of its products is the heavy artillery that breaks through all the Chinese walls of understanding" (A User's Guide to Détournement, May 1956). But these points would not by themselves justify recourse to this method, which the same text describes as "clashing head-on against all social and legal conventions." Détournement has a historical significance. What is it?
"Détournement is a game made possible by the capacity of devaluation," writes Jorn in his study Detourned Painting (May 1959), and he goes on to say that all the elements of the cultural past must be "reinvested" or disappear. Détournement is thus first of all a negation of the value of the previous organization of expression. It arises and grows increasingly stronger in the historical period of the decomposition of artistic expression. But at the same time, the attempts to reuse the "detournable bloc" as material for other ensembles express the search for a vaster construction, a new genre of creation at a higher level.
The SI is a very special kind of movement, different in nature from preceding artistic avant-gardes. Within culture, the SI can be likened to a research laboratory, for example, or to a party in which we are situationists but nothing that we do can yet be situationist. This is not a disavowal for anyone. We are partisans of a certain future of culture and of life. Situationist activity is a particular craft that we are not yet practicing.
Thus the signature of the situationist movement, the sign of its presence and contestation in contemporary cultural reality (since we cannot represent any common style whatsoever), is first of all the use of détournement. Examples of our use of detourned expression include Jorn's altered paintings; Debord and Jorn's book Mémoires, "composed entirely of prefabricated elements," in which the writing on each page runs in all directions and the reciprocal relations of the phrases are invariably uncompleted; Constant's projects for detourned sculptures; and Debord's detourned documentary film, On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Period of Time. At the stage of what the "User's Guide to Détournement" calls "ultradétournement, that is, the tendencies for détournement to operate in everyday social life" (e.g. passwords or the wearing of disguises, belonging to the sphere of play), we might mention, at different levels, Gallizio's industrial painting; Wyckaert's "orchestral" project for assembly-line painting with a division of labor based on color; and numerous détournements of buildings that were at the origin of unitary urbanism. But we should also mention in this context the SI's very forms of "organization" and propaganda.
At this point in the world's development, all forms of expression are losing their grip on reality and being reduced to self-parody. As the readers of this journal can frequently verify, present-day writing invariably has an element of parody. As the "User's Guide" notes: "It is necessary to conceive of a parodic-serious stage where the accumulation of detourned elements, far from aiming to arouse indignation or laughter by alluding to some original work, will express our indifference toward a meaningless and forgotten original, and concern itself with rendering a certain sublimity."
This combination of parody and seriousness reflects the contradictions of an era in which we find ourselves confronted with both the urgent necessity and the near impossibility of initiating and carrying out a totally innovative collective action — an era in which the most serious ventures are masked in the ambiguous interplay between art and its necessary negation, and in which the essential voyages of discovery have been undertaken by such astonishingly incapable people.
[I've just got this one dropped into my inbox. It is probably the most cogent, but also willfully controversial, statement I have read on the situation of poets right now, especially his assessment of the three options for creative intervention. It is the third, poets turning to prose, that has most inspired the creation of this site -- that and the fact that Bush's speech writer is an evangelical Christian.]
I am both pessimistic and optimistic about what's happening and briefly, or not so briefly, I'd like to say why:
First, I take the word "politics" in a very narrow sense: that is, how governments are run. And I take the word "government" to mean the organized infliction or alleviation of suffering among one's own people and among other peoples.
One of the things that happened after the Vietnam War was that, in the U.S., on the intellectual left, politics metamorphosed into something entirely different: identity politics and its nerd brother, theory, who thought he was a Marxist, but never allowed any actual governments to interrupt his train of thought. The right however, stuck to politics in the narrow sense, and grew powerful in the absence of any genuine political opposition, or even criticism, for the left had its mind elsewhere: It was preoccupied with finding examples of sexism, classism, racism, colonialism, homophobia, etc. -- usually among its own members or the long-dead, while ignoring the genuine and active racists/ sexists/ homophobes of the right-- and it tended to express itself in an incomprehensible academic jargon or tangentially referential academic poetry under the delusion that such language was some form of resistance to the prevailing power structures-- power, of course, only being imagined in the abstract. (Never mind that truly politically revolutionary works-- Tom Paine or the Communist Manifesto or Brecht or Hikmet or a thousand others-- are written in simple direct speech.)
Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan was completely dismantling the social programs of the New Deal and Johnson's Great Society-- creating the millions of homeless, the 25% of American children who live in poverty, the obscene polarization of wealth, and so on. (And the poets, typically, were only moved to speak up when he cut the NEA budget.) Clinton might have had a more compassionate public face, but essentially the political center had shifted so far right that today the Democratic party is to the right of any European conservative party, and the Republicans just slightly to the left of a European national front party. We may never live to see an American president as left-wing as Jacques Chirac.
The main result of almost thirty years of these so-called politics on the left is that there are now more women and minorities in the Norton anthologies, and we all know how to pronounce "hegemony"-- surely a great comfort to the 4 million people, predominately black men, currently in the prison system, or the teenage girls in most places in America who need an abortion and there's nowhere to get help, or the parents and babies who create the statistics of by far the highest infant mortality rate among the technological nations, or the 20% of high school seniors who can't find the U.S. on a world map.
The good news about the monstrosity of the Bush administration is that it is so extreme and so out of control that it has finally woken up the left, and once again we're talking about politics as the rest of the world knows it, about people getting slaughtered, people being hungry, and people deprived of basic human rights-- and not about language as a capitalist construct or queer musicology. The best news of all is that very young people-- the generation of the Zeroes-- after the decades of MTV and Nintendo somnambulism, are being politicized by the collapsed economy, the prospect of a reinstituted draft, and the realization that their sneakers are made by child-slaves in the Third World. Every political youth movement has its own culture-- look at the 30's, the 60's, or radical Islam today. It will be extremely interesting to see, and utterly unexpected to find, what culture this youth movement produces: What will be their ideals and practices, their music and poetry, or even their dress? I have a feeling that we won't have a clue, and that their response may well be a sort of iconoclastic asceticism, not unlike radical Islam, impervious to corporate takeover, and completely alien to their parents. [One of the hardest things for people my age to understand is that this is not 1967 all over again, that things are going to be very different, and that, if we don't learn to listen, we are going to end up being, as our old formula goes, part of the problem and not part of the solution.]
I take this gathering as a kind of union meeting-- the union of writers, mainly poets-- and it seems to me the primary question for us is: things are going to be happening with or without us, are we going to be part of it, or are we going to continue to talk about essentialism at the MLA and finding your voice at the AWP?
Poets in times of political crises basically have three models. The first is to write overtly political poems, as was done during the Vietnam War. 95% of those poems will be junk, but so what? 95% of anything is junk. It is undeniable that the countless poems and poetry readings against the Vietnam War contributed to creating and legitimizing a general climate of opposition; they were the soul of the movement. And it also resulted in some of the most enduring poems of the 20th century, news that has stayed news indeed.
The second model is epitomized by George Oppen, who as a Communist in the 30's, and a poet uncomfortable with the prevailing modes of political poetry, decided that poets should not be treated differently from others, that the work to be done was organizing, and so he stopped writing and became a union leader.
The third model is César Vallejo, another Communist in the 20's and 30's. He refused to write propaganda poems-- he wanted to write the poems he wanted to write-- so to serve the cause he wrote a great deal of propaganda prose.
The first model (political poems) is the most common, and no doubt the one we'll be seeing the most, and frankly it will come as a relief from all those anecdotes of unhappy childhoods and ironic preoccupations with "surface." Oppen, of course, was a kind of secular saint-- and most of us are too egotistical to take a vow of silence. But it is the example of Vallejo that seems to me the least explored.
People who are poets presumably know something about writing. So why does it never occur to them to write something other than poems? There are approximately 8000 poets registered in the Directory of American Poets-- are there even four or five who have written an article against the Bush Administration? Most of us can't get onto the Op-Ed page of the Times-- we'd never displace Condoleezza there-- but most of us do have access to countless other venues: hometown newspapers, college newspapers, professional newsletters, specialist magazines, websites, and so on. All writers have contacts somewhere, and all these periodicals must fill their pages. Even poetry magazines: Why must poetry magazines always be graveyards of orderly tombstones of poems? How many of them in the 1980's, for example, even mentioned the name "Reagan"? How many of them today have any political content at all?
I've been writing articles since Bush's inauguration for translation in magazines and newspapers abroad and, if nothing else, they at least help to demonstrate that the US is not a monolith of opinion. Foreign periodicals can't get enough of Americans critical of Bush-- which is why the collaboration of such supposedly antiwar poets as Robert Creeley and Robert Pinsky in the recent State Dept anthology was so grotesque. If, as they claim, they wanted to give Americans a human face, there was no end of other forums abroad-- they didn't have to do it as flunkies for Bush. More tellingly, the only public condemnations of that anthology have come from foreign newspapers-- American writers were either indifferent or afraid of alienating a future prize jury.
In English, I send my articles out via e-mail. It's one of the best ways, and certainly the easiest, to publish political writing in this country. Send it to your friends and let the friends, if they want, send it on. Let the readers vote, not with their feet, but with the forward button.
The last time I was here at St Marks, in 1994, I was practically laughed off the stage for saying that the major organizing force of political opposition in the future was going to be the internet. Now of course, it's a banality. The internet has completely changed all the rules. It's how the like-minded instantly find each other; it's the one national and international forum that has been-- so far-- impossible to control; and it's practically the only source of opposition information and opinions from everywhere in the world: not only immediate access to the foreign press, but also-- if you really want to give yourself nightmares-- to the endless reports available from the Dept of Defense and right-wing think tanks. That still-unrecognized prophet, Abbie Hoffman, said, almost 40 years ago, that if you want to start a revolution, don't bother to organize, seize a television station. With the internet, we are all our own tv stations and publishing companies and newspapers. The potential is limitless: Trent Lott was brought down by a weblog; all the doubts about the war that are seeping into the general public began online; and just this week even lovely Laura's Poetry Tea got canceled thanks to an e-mail petition.
There are 8000 poets in the Directory, and Anne Waldman and Ammiel Alcalay, a month ago had trouble coming up with a list to invite to speak here. One eye may half-open when, like Laura's party, it directly involves them, but most American writers have lost the ability to even think politically, or nationally, or internationally. In all the anthologies and magazines devoted to 9/11 and its aftermath, nearly every single writer resorted to first-person anecdote: "It reminded me of the day my father died..." "I took an herbal bath and decided to call an old boyfriend..."Barely a one could imagine the event outside of the context of the prison cell of their own expressive self. (Or, on the avant-garde, it was a little too real for ironic pastiche from their expressive non-self.)
We are where we are in part because American writers-- supposedly the most articulate members of society-- have generally had nothing to say about the world for the last 30 years. How many of those 8000 poets have ever been to a Third World country (excluding beach vacations)? How many think it worthwhile to translate something? How many can name a single contemporary poet, not living in the U.S., from Latin America or Africa or Asia? In short, how many know anything more about the world than George Bush knows?
After thirty years of self-absorption in MFA and MLA career-mongering and knee-jerk demography and the personal as political and the impersonal as poetical, American writers now have the government we deserve. We were good Germans under Reagan and Bush I; we were never able to separate Clinton's person from his policies and gave him a complacent benefit of the doubt; and the result is Cheney and Rumsfeld and Ashcroft and Perle and Wolfowitz and Scalia and Rice and their little president. They can't be stopped, but I do think they can be slowed down.
Eliot Weinberger
Statement for "Poetry is News" conference
St. Mark's Poetry Project, NYC, 1 February 2003
[Here's a short essay by Alan Gilbert I ripped from the Pores website.]
This past summer, as I was sitting in one of Anthology Film Archives' movie theaters waiting for the documentary film Gaza Strip (Longley 2002) to begin, I overheard snippets of conversation coming from a group of six or seven women and men from different backgrounds and in their mid-twenties sitting in the row directly in front of me. One of them was providing some context for the film they were about to watch (it was produced by an American filmmaker who planned to spend a couple weeks in the Gaza Strip making a documentary about the current intifada, but ended up staying three months and filming everyday life under its harsh conditions); another person was talking about films she'd recently seen at Anthology (run by Jonas Mekas, Anthology Film Archives remains one of the few places in New York City, and the United States as a whole, that shows avant-garde and experimental films on a daily basis; even the films of old-school experimental filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage are screened monthly); another member of the group was talking about her new job. Then suddenly, or so it seemed to me because I hadn't heard any of the particular conversation leading up to it, someone in the group said: “It'll be twenty years before anyone makes an avant-garde film again.” Intrigued as I was to hear any responses to such a claim, or further clarifications from the person who uttered it, I couldn't catch much else, and the movie started soon after.
Gaza Strip is a mostly conventional documentary that nevertheless eschews a number of conventional documentary techniques: no solemn voice-over, a certain amount of non-linear narrative and editing, and a sprinkling of digital effects that are meant to enhance moments of emergency and danger. Its organizing conceit is to follow around a Palestinian boy named Mohammed Hejazi as he throws rocks at Israeli tanks, sells newspapers, visits his young friends after they've been shot by Israeli soldiers, and joins funerals. But plenty of other aspects of life for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are also represented: bulldozed houses, snipers firing on schoolyards, rockets fired into houses, and poisonous gas attacks; in other words, the film has everything except, as J. Hoberman pointed out in his Village Voice review, footage of the horrific carnage inflicted on Israelis by Palestinian suicide bombers (2002). But Gaza Strip isn't blatantly biased, nor is it overly didactic. Simply filming the Israeli army terrorizing Palestinians in the Gaza Strip is damning enough, especially when a soldier in one of its tanks rolls what looks like a metal toy toward a group of Palestinian children playing, only to have one of the kids discover after he picks it up that it's actually a small bomb which then blows most of his abdomen away.
The 100th issue of the journal October is a special anniversary volume somewhat ironically dedicated to the topic of “Obsolescence.” A number of artists responded to a questionnaire dealing with the concept, and two roundtables addressed it in relation to contemporary art criticism and “American avant-garde film,” respectively. Both roundtables returned again and again to the idea of institutionality—in relation to visual art and the discourses surrounding it. In the roundtable on art criticism, institutionality was seen as a potential danger to art and art criticism, while, at the same time, all of the participants generally agreed on the difficulties of working, or even conceiving themselves, outside the art world system. Andrea Fraser, whose renowned brand of institutional critique receives ongoing institutional support, was perhaps the most representative roundtable member in this regard. In contrast, the roundtable on “American avant-garde film” mostly embraced institutionality as the only way in which this film practice could continue to reach an audience beyond a very select few, the majority of whom are fellow avant-garde filmmakers.
The lone exception, experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs, espoused a do-it-yourself 1960s—later punk, later Internet—fuck the system outsider stance in which artmaking isn't dependent upon institutional support for its vitality. He also fell back on what might be seen as a relatively separate strand of vanguardist innovation:
[Ken] Jacobs: . . . But then you have things that uphold the idea of the avant-garde, which is to forage and get out there into new territory, to think completely freshly, come up with whole other ways of putting things together, unexpected things to go for. New things have been made all through these years. New things are being made now.[Paul] Arthur: I'm sure that's true, but I find this aspect of the cultural ideology somewhat suspect, even obsolescent. This idea of constant innovation, of stretching the envelope of what's possible in cinema . . . I find that a problematic notion at this point.
[Annette] Michelson: Why?
Arthur: Because I don't see that much stretching these days, but I do see a very strongly institutionalized movement, and for me, that's the essential definition. (2002: 117)
Here, film critic Paul Arthur is referring less to institutionality as a network of support encompassing the production, distribution, and screening of experimental film, and more to a codified, and even ossified, vanguardist aesthetics. If the notion of vanguardism is conceptually derived from the militaristic scouting forays made by the lead part of an advancing army, then maybe after a century of the worst warfare in human history and plenty of avant-garde experiments (many of them ending up in some dubious political affiliations), it's time for the avant-garde to drop back a little, not in order to march shoulder-to-shoulder with this army (as ethicist Emmanual Levinas once described Martin Heidegger's booted march toward Being [1987: 40-41, 93-94]), but to meet it face-to-face. Semantically, at least, the avant-garde would no longer be an avant-garde; but, then, maybe the army would no longer be an army.
After the feelings of shock, sadness, and anger I experienced in the hours following the attacks on the World Trade Center, and when more information began to filter in about exactly what happened, my two initial thoughts were: 1) this will seriously damage the Palestinian cause, since sentiment in mainstream US media and society had finally begun to shift toward a less one-sided understanding of Israeli-Palestinian relations; and 2) this is partly the responsibility of the US auto industry—in collaboration with the major oil companies—for refusing to develop serious alternatives to the gas combustion engine. These may appear odd first thoughts; but one can imagine what it was like to be in New York City on the evening of September 11, 2001, watching the smoke rising from southern Manhattan's enormous scar billow against a spectacular sunset, rendered, it may sound grotesque to say (although people in Los Angeles experience this all the time), even more spectacular by the pollutants in the atmosphere. Everyone in New York City that day and in the following days was breathing in the cremated remains of thousands of people, though absolutely no one could say it—then, or even now. Instantly, what seemed like millions of flyers of missing persons with photographs and contact information for relatives and friends covered every available surface. Spontaneous public spaces were established in parks and open areas around the city; and while some writers exaggerated the level of civic discourse and debate in these temporary public spheres, they nevertheless were places where people congregated and dialogued freely and with a certain degree of self-allowed autonomy.
This made the authorities nervous, but the level of grief was so intense that even then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani—who was pleased to be able to finally run the city like the police state he always dreamed of, and who did a good job of it, if efficiently running a police state is something one can be complimented on or take pride in—couldn't tear down the flyers or break up the gatherings. But within a couple weeks he did, and suddenly the flyers were gone, as if overnight, and people no longer congregated in public spaces. The attacks also meant the Bush administration finally had an objective other than to loot everything in sight; and just as it's easy to forget how low Giuliani had sunk in the general opinion of New Yorker's before 9/11 (the second fatal shooting of an unarmed African-American man by his police corps was one of the final straws), to the point of excusing himself from his Senate race against Hillary Clinton, so, too, is it difficult to remember exactly what the Bush administration was up to before its attentions were turned toward Afghanistan and Iraq. Unlike the Reagan administration, which at least formulated a pernicious ideology of trickle-down economics to justify its greed, Bush, Jr., and his recycled Reagan/Bush père cronies were/are only after one thing: wealth, and the most massive redistribution of it in the US since the latter half of the 19th century.
Exploiting contradictions is one strategy art, writing, and the larger cultural sphere might explore in the wake of 9/11. Focusing in on contradiction, exposing it without necessarily adding explicit commentary and/or a heavy-handed narrative structure, is a dialogic process, one that can be politicized without in turn being made demagogic. But an attention to contradiction is as much a strategy of reading as it is a mode of cultural production. In a so-called “Information Age” of media monopolies, with their consolidations and restrictions of available information, it's increasingly essential to read this information against the grain. It's also crucial to cultivate alternative sources of information, which are in wild proliferation, whether in print or on the Internet. Both attitudes toward information are summarized in Marshall McLuhan's declaration: “When information is brushed against information . . . the results are startling and effective” (1967: 76,78). There's no reason why art can't be “startling” and “effective,” even though the two categories have frequently been kept separate: the former associated with formal innovation and extravagance, the latter with dry political utility and pedagogy.
It's important that an approach to cultural production and reading which brushes information against information have a wide range of applications. For instance, I wouldn't be the first to point to the contradictions at the heart of David LaChapelle's photography, and its very voguish attempt to blur the distinctions between fashion and art (2002, 1999, 1996). On the surface, LaChapelle's work is among the most effusive celebrations of celebrity culture currently produced today. It makes gushing television shows such as Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood, which also push celebrity culture and its products, downright dull in comparison. But perhaps LaChapelle's work is more complex than this. Perhaps Jeff Koons isn't Warhol's most immediate Pop offspring—LaChapelle is (after all, he got his start photographing for Warhol's Interview magazine). Like Warhol, the image factory and its resultant celebrity goods—and vice versa—is LaChapelle's world. Similar to Warhol's work as discussed by Hal Foster in The Return of the Real, specifically his '60s silkscreens of car crashes, criminals, and even celebrities (1996: 130-136), there's a sense of violence and death in LaChapelle's depictions of the commonplace-as-incongruous and the incongruous-as-commonplace in mass culture. Celebrities may strive to transcend mortality in both Warhol and LaChapelle (and in this their art subscribes to one of the most conventional of aesthetic notions), but death and the intrinsic, never-resolved contradiction it brings is always sniffing at the edges of the frame.
At one level, Warhol and LaChapelle's projects couldn't make much more clear—without, that is, becoming purely “effective”—the primary relationship between consumption and death. To this I would add the relationship in capitalist societies between consumption, death, and war. But this connection is also a contradiction: to consume is to try to elude death, and to consume is also supposed to negate war, as Thomas Friedman famously remarked when he said that two countries with a McDonald's in them would never go to war (rather quickly disproved when the US bombed Serbia, to which Friedman responded that this exception actually proved his rule [1999]). In their most complex work, Warhol and LaChapelle bypass irony (the easiest of critical gestures) for contradiction. The very excessiveness of LaChapelle's depiction of celebrity and riches practically begs the viewer to read back critically into the constructed image and to understand that too much is literally too much. Of course, this begging is also a sign of the work's complicity, and one should be careful not to exaggerate the critical aspect of LaChapelle's images. The contradictions I'm pointing to in LaChapelle's photography may serve as a reading of resistance, but the key is to link up this reading with larger social, political, and cultural formations and movements. And for that, a globalized view is necessary, an awareness that's becoming more widespread, if the unexpected strong-selling success of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire is any indication (2000)—though Empire might do a better job of reminding its readers that without robustly functioning nation-states, transnational capitalism would collapse within months, if not weeks.
If any contemporary photographer could be considered the polar opposite of David LaChapelle it might be Allan Sekula. Sekula's epic Fish Story was shown in its entirety at this year's Documenta. In his installation of the work and book of the same title (1995), Sekula documents global shipping routes and ports of transnational trade. If, on first glance, LaChapelle's work is “startling,” Sekula's work might be considered “effective.” Yet there's a rigorous attention to formal concerns in Sekula's photographs. Sekula may work in a somewhat traditional documentary mode, but unlike documentary that tries to capture an entire span of intellectual and emotional response within a single frame or film or video, a Sekula photograph is incomprehensible without the context he creates for it with accompanying images and text, which in turn comment directly on larger socio-economic conditions. The failure of traditional documentary is that it trusts the immediate impact of its images, and remains satisfied with these direct representations. This distinction between different documentary methods is cited by critic and curator Matthew Higgs: “Writing elsewhere on documentary photography, British artist Liam Gillick has described the kind of work that seeks meaning in the apparent profundity of its subject matter in lieu of offering a 'constructed critique' as a 'stunned mirror'” (Higgs 2002: 167). Sekula's quick movement in Fish Story between the macro and the micro, his constant historicizing as well as his attention to the smallest details, are the result of a complex formal and critical process. What at first glance makes Sekula's work appear the product of a classical documentary lineage turns out to be his refusal to accept consumption as the fundamental social and economic reality. Even in a world full of simulacra, most commodities still have to be produced and transported before they can be consumed. In a manner that's the complete opposite of LaChapelle, Sekula's work seeks to strip the commodity of its fetishistic dimension. This forces a reading of resistance to be read back, in turn, into a capitalist economy and social organization that uses an ideology of consumption—of goods and images—to camouflage inherent structural contradictions.
Unfortunately, not much has changed, in art or otherwise, after 9/11. At the same time, a quote such as, “It'll be twenty years before anyone makes an avant-garde film again,” however off-hand, however unsubstantiated, however unjustified, perhaps could only have been made after 9/11. But has anything changed? A space has opened up within political discourse and artistic practice in the US, a space partially and metaphorically vacated by the Twin Towers, in which contradictions have the potential to become more evident. Yet if one of the main challenges of various forms of cultural production is to expose contradictions in dominant ideologies, then they must also learn to expose contradictions within themselves. Without serious self-critique, art slowly loses its capacity for anything more than shallow institutional critique. For the avant-garde in particular (or what's left of it), self-critique may allow it to step back—though not so far as to become a rearguard—and engage with the progressive cultural populism it needs in order to rejuvenate itself and again function as a radical project.
Alan Gilbert
Bibliography
Arthur, Paul; Frye, Brian; Iles, Chrissie; Jacobs, Ken; Michelson, Annette; Turvey, Malcolm (2002) “Round Table: Obsolescence and American Avant-Garde Film.” In October. No. 100 (Spring 2002): 115-132.
Foster, Hal (1996) The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. The MIT Press, Cambridge and London.
Friedman, Thomas L. (1999) “The Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention.” In The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization. Anchor Books, New York. 248-275.
Hardt, Michael, and Negri, Antonio (2000) Empire. Harvard University Press, Cambridge and London.
Higgs, Matthew (2002) “Same Old Same Old.” In Artforum. Vol. XLI, No. 1 (September 2002): 166-167.
Hoberman, J. (2002) “Crime Scenes.” In The Village Voice. Vol. XLVII, No. 31 (July 31-August 6, 2002): 103.
LaChapelle, David (2002) Photographs. Museums Betriebsgesellschaft mbH, Wien.
------ (1999) Hotel LaChapelle. Bulfinch Press, Boston, New York, and London.
------ (1996) LaChapelle Land. Simon & Schuster, New York.
Levinas, Emmanuel (1987) Time and the Other. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh.
Longley, James (2002) Gaza Strip. Directed by James Longley. Produced by James Longley.
McLuhan, Marshall and Fiore, Quentin (1967) The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. Gingko Press, Corte Madera, CA.
Sekula, Allan (1995) Fish Story. Richter Verlag, Düsseldorf.
[A little news story about an incident that partly inspired this site.]
Thursday January 30, 2003 4:50 AM
NEW YORK (AP) - The White House said Wednesday it postponed a poetry symposium because of concerns that the event would be politicized. Some poets had said they wanted to protest military action against Iraq. The symposium on the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman was scheduled for Feb. 12. No future date has been announced.
"While Mrs. Bush respects the right of all Americans to express their opinions, she, too, has opinions and believes it would be inappropriate to turn a literary event into a political forum." Noelia Rodriguez, spokeswoman for first lady Laura Bush, said Wednesday.
Mrs. Bush, a former librarian who has made teaching and early childhood development her signature issues, has held a series of White House symposiums to salute America's authors. The gatherings are usually lively affairs with discussions of literature and its societal impact. But the poetry symposium soon inspired a nationwide protest.
Sam Hamill, a poet and founder of the highly regarded Copper Canyon Press, declined the invitation and e-mailed friends asking for anti-war poems or statements. He encouraged those who planned to attend to bring along anti-war poems.
Hamill said he's gotten more than 1,500 contributions, including ones from poets W.S. Merwin, Adrienne Rich and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
"I'm putting in 18-hour days. I'm 60 and I'm tired, but it's pretty wonderful," says Hamill, based in Port Townsend, Wash., and author of such works as "Destination Zero" and "Gratitude."
Marilyn Nelson, Connecticut's poet laureate, said Wednesday that she had accepted the White House invitation and had planned to wear a silk scarf with peace signs that she commissioned.
"I had decided to go because I felt my presence would promote peace," she said.
