[This is from the Freedom Road site: www.freedomroad.org/. Stan Goff is a retired Special Forces Master Sergeant.]

I am a veteran of operations gone bad, and right now I am experiencing a powerful sense of vicarious deja vu.

Four days ago, I couldn't watch CNN for more than ten minutes at a time or I was risking my own mental health. Now, I watch it with the perverse fascination one experiences when seeing a fifteen car pileup on the freeway.

Obviously, the parade of aging white Generals - even including my old commander Dave Grange - who simultaneously know that the US will prevail militarily through sheer force and that this entire operation is going terribly, terribly wrong, do not understand the wider political implications of what they are witnessing.

Still, they seem discomfited. They have been converted into cheap propagandists, and for me it's a lot like seeing a formerly tyrannical Sergeant Major who's retired and become an oily insurance salesman, reduced to haunting the barracks, kissing up to his own former troops to earn his way in the real world by selling them policies.

How the mighty can fall from great heights! Perhaps that's too majestic. The Haitians say, the higher the monkey climbs the tree, the more you see nothing but his ass.

Watch Wesley Clark, the CNN military star, who reputation in the Army was that of an inveterate ass kisser. He harbors presidential pretensions, and he's smooth as a baby's butt. Watch how the worry lines now come right through the pancake makeup.

Donald Rumsfeld has become positively humble - a first in his lifetime - during his Pentagon briefs.

George W. Bush is nearly absent. No one will risk his extemporaneous gaffes. Might he be medicated? His two-line appearances are hoarse and fatigued.

What's happening?

What's happening is that the superpower came face to face with its new counterpart: an international popular movement, focused against this war, but increasingly targeting US global hegemony itself. Our world-wide movement has become a material force on the battlefield, and has midwifed a deep crisis of legitimacy for the US military-political junta.

The whole adventure is rooted in systemic crisis, a reality that so far only the left wing of the movement itself understands. (For a longer discussion of that, see Military Matters #5: Overreach) How has the antiwar movement become a material force on the Iraqi battleground?

Let's take a snapshot of the tactical situation, as least can be gleaned from different accounts.

The original battle plan was scrapped. Let's start here. The complexity of planning a military operation of this scope is simply indescribable, and it takes months to do it right. But the unexpected loss of ground fronts, in Turkey in the North and Saudi Arabia in the South, forced a complete reconstruction of plans in a matter of days. The operation could be put off no longer. The aggressor's back was against the weather wall. The pre-summer sandstorms had already begun, and by late April the heat index inside a soldier's chemical protective gear will be 140 degrees Fahrenheit.

The international antiwar movement had firmed up political opposition around the world and forced the delays that culminated in the UN Security Council becoming a key arena of struggle. For all the infantile leftists who dismissed the UN on moral and ideological - and therefore idealist - grounds, I would say look now at Iraq and see how politics translates into military reality.

We stalled the Bush Administration to push to war where we could stall, and there is an effect.

The entire 4th Infantry Division is sitting in the barracks now waiting for their equipment to steam around the Arabian Peninsula in cargo ships because the Turkish parliament denied them their battlefront. Medium and short range tactical aircraft that could have struck dozens of key targets are sidelined because they are forbidden to take off from Saudi Arabia to deliver their "payloads."

Inside the Department of Defense there has been another war raging, that between the Generals of the Army and Marine Corps and the clique of doctrinal "revolutionaries" pushing Rumsfeld's crackpot theory of Network Centric Warfare (NCW), the methodological offspring of a strategic doctrine called Full Spectrum Dominance (FSD). The Rumsfeld Doctrine is cyberwar combined with commandos. Rumsfeld and his mentors have an absolute faith in the power of technology as the primary determinant of military outcomes, and a complete ignorance of politics as a force of war. (This will be the subject of a book due out this December, War Lies.)

Suffice it to say here, the combination of the failure of this new "doctrine" is creating a military debacle in Iraq. It is important to note that in war, which is an extreme form of politics, success is not measured empirically as it is in a sports competition. It is not measured in body counts or inventories of destroyed war materiel. In fact, it is not perfectly measurable at all. But success has to be gauged against the expectations of the military operation and its final objectives - which are always political. The US inflicted a terrible empirical toll on Southeast Asia and ultimately lost the Vietnam War. The US never grasped the political character of that war.

The US loss in Vietnam became the basis of the Powell Doctrine, which combines avoidance of decisive ground combat (and therefore avoidance of US casualties) with control over public perceptions of the war through the press. Rumsfeld's NCW attempts to assert that logic onto the battlefield with extremely complex technology that has displaced decision-making from human commanders to computerized hardware/software. I have referred to this in the past as "the organic composition of the military;" the relative weight of technological to cognitive process.

Every strength carries with it a corresponding weakness, and once military leaders perceive the strengths and weaknesses of their opposition, they can avoid the strengths and exploit the weaknesses.

The Iraqis are doing just that.

Accusations by the United States that the Russians are providing material assistance may very well be true. The Russians have now thrown in their lot with "old Europe" and China, and they are aiming to undermine US power at every opportunity. I suspect they have not only provided equipment and training on that equipment, but advisory assistance on the reorganization of the Iraqi military.

Someone sure has.

The Iraqi military has abandoned its former Soviet-style doctrine, predicated on armor, mass, and centralized command. It has seemingly now adopted tactics more suited to Special Operations; agile and decentralized. Such a switch requires a very intentional and systematic reorientation from top to bottom. This is an "asymmetrical" response to the high-tech doctrine the US developed to overcome the doctrine of its own predecessor. This Iraqi doctrinal reorientation is proving stunningly effective.

Rumsfeld's notion that he might "decapitate" the Iraqi military has led to an incessant and inane press speculation about whether on not Saddam Hussein is dead or alive. As the reports rolled of one setback after another, he was asked by the press whether there was any evidence to show that Saddam Hussein is dead. His response: "The word evidence is a hard word."

Less ridiculous and more telling was the statement by a Pentagon official, now dissing his boss Rumsfeld: "This is the ground war that was not going to happen in his plan."

Rumsfeld's computers told him that the Iraqis would be shocked and awed into capitulation within two days. Instead we have the (suppressed in the US) spectacle of ground troops in disarray as they attempted to cross their initial lines of departure, columns being stopped by urban resistance, ambushes of logistics tails, advances halted by blinding sandstorms, and captive American youngsters on television.

These first American prisoners of war were not Navy Seals or Delta Force, but military maintenance people and cooks, kids who signed up for an enlistment bonus, some college money, and a saleable skill. Now they stare hauntingly back at us all, with their fear almost an aura in their photographs.

The earlier uncomplicated advances, however, were remarkable. In set-piece war, Rumsfeld's impressive display of new battle software worked perfectly. Tank commanders could keep their lines dressed by simply referring to a digital display, and no one was pulling ahead into an adjacent unit's gunsights. Gee whiz.

The Generals are preoccupied now with retrieving their tactical victory from the chaos, a retrieval that will cost treasure, lives, and careers. But they are almost certainly also sharpening their knives and fantasizing about the spaces between Donald Rumsfeld's ribs.

The first images of the war were supposed to be the "liberation" of Basra, where jubilant crowds of Shi'ite Muslims would welcome the conquering American heroes. Instead, Basra fought back with a spectacular ferocity.

Now US ground forces are attempting to bypass every urban center on the road to Baghdad, but they are in the restricted terrain of the east, where bypass is not always an option. In Al Nasiriya, victory toasts turned to vinegar in their mouths.

City by city sieges have now become a real possibility, and the longer this war goes, the sharper will be the reaction throughout the region.

Aside from stalling, antiwar forces and the naked self-interest of the US regime have given us another multi-faceted victory. The US, fearing further erosion of its wounded legitimacy, has set out to genuinely limit civilian casualties. We have to be honest and clear about this. It is happening. There are certainly civilian casualties, but not nearly the mass slaughter many predicted.

One factor at play here is the need to avoid great damage to the infrastructure of their new prize. The other is the heat from the flames of an erupting international rebellion that they can illafford to fan any higher.

We must also be honest that this will cause the costs to American troops to go up, in lives. Basra can be conquered in a matter of hours, given a willingness to reduce it to rubble. So the US regime is caught between a rock and a hard place. The rock is international rage, including the ever more explosive rage of the Arab and Muslim masses in the region, and the concomitant certainty of further international isolation. The hard place is Colin Powell's nightmare - a parade of flag-draped coffins.

Given this choice, the US will probably be forced to abandon its precise target discrimination, and the bloodletting that has been thus far limited will likely happen after all. This underlinesthe urgency of the anti-war movement keeping up its unrelenting pressure.

Perhaps the most brilliant aspect of the US strategy - prior to recent developments - was the "embedded journalists" program. This is a masterpiece of Powell Doctrine: controlling public perceptions.

The criticism of the military "pool" system from the first Gulf War was checkmated. Reporters were put directly on the battlefield, and integrated into the actual military units. Those reporters are then dependent on the troops around them for their daily human contact, and grow quickly to identify directly with the people in those units.

Overt censorship is no longer needed.

But as the campaign goes further and further awry, these embedded journalists will see some of their new friends wounded and killed, and then the Powell anxiety becomes realized, the war is in our living rooms again, just like Vietnam. This fear of graphic audio-visual images of war is why there was such outrage at Al Jazeera showing dead GIs.

The bet that this would be a quick war with images of triumph is about to break the bank.

In the North, far from the most visible action, the Turkish military has already begun its incursions. The Kurds, in response, are already signing onto yet another Faustian deal with the Americans, now mostly Special Operations - Rangers to seize airheads and Special Forces to establish relationships with the Kurdish fighters. Without its Northern Front, the US is more dependent than ever on using Kurdish combatants to fight the Iraqis around the rich oilfields near Kirkuk.

Fragile Turkey is beset by a severe economic crisis. Its majority Muslim population has just elected a moderate Islamic Party, and the popular opposition to the war is overwhelming.

The Turkish ruling class cannot afford another insurrection from Kurdish nationalists, and the Turkish military has no intention of watching a Kurdish state take form to their South. Turkey, inside its stable exterior, is becoming a powder keg, and Kurdistan is a furnace.

The political implications reach deep into Europe, where one year ago the US saw the admission of Turkey as advancing in the EU. Germany, for instance, has a substantial population of Turks and Kurds, and the German government has a real and justifiable fear that open warfare in Iraqi Kurdistan will spill over into the streets of Germany.

To mollify the Kurds, the US must hold back the Turkish military, and the Kurds will certainly not abandon their dream for an independent Kurdistan. To appease the Turkish military, the US will have to disarm the Kurds. And the Kurds, even as they sign the deal with the devil, know it. The Kurds have no intention of relinquishing their weapons, their autonomy or their dream of an independent nation. The Turks have no intention of allowing it. The US cannot have it both ways.

Stay tuned.

This diplomatic minefield has been fobbed off on Colin Powell. If he doesn't feel a trickle of sweat between his shoulder blades, he's not paying attention. Once this is all over, heads will roll, and the visceral enmity between Powell and Richard Perle is well-known. It's Powell, the Kissinger-style realist and brilliant bureaucrat, versus Perle, the racist, right-wing visionary. There are already whispers that Powell will be scapegoated after the war, and other rumors that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Perle will be handed walking papers, and Powell will run for VP.

This fragmentation is another material result of popular resistance around the world, and for some it was the goal–the political destruction of the Bush junta.

That objective is now within sight. What comes after remains to be seen.

While we have riveted our attention on the blazing guns, a quieter weapon of mass destruction has been unleashed against the US working class - a trillion-dollar tax cut for the rich that will torch the tattered remains of our social infrastructure. The political crisis that is now almost certain in the wake of the war will settle on the United States.

Then there are the soldiers.

Bear in mind that these are still the most pampered soldiers in the world. Their morale was already eroded by waiting. They were already faced with basic erosions of benefits at home. The sense of dislocation due to the doctrinal shift under Rumsfeld (that translates to a lot of confusion and turbulence in day-to-day operations), to increases in operational tempo, to the tripling of average time deployed away from home in the last decade, are taking a toll. Divorces are filed. Homesickness. Superiors who are assholes are now constant companions. A substantial number of troops - particularly Black soldiers - who really see this as a job and not some deep patriotic commitment.

Now, with the war is going badly, as they say in the Army, shit rolls downhill, and when things go wrong at the top, there is a lot of blame-shifting and carrying on that percolates down.

On a cautionary note, I will mention the incident (about which I don't know much yet) of the soldier who fragged his officers. Hasan Karim Akbar, 31, a sergeant in the 101st Airborne Division apparently attacked his own tactical operations center in Kuwait with hand grenades. Akbar is Black and a convert to Islam, according to reports.

What we in the movement don't know could hurt us. I want to warn against the natural desire to turn this into a cause celebre. We don't know what Akbar's motives were, and the conditions simply do not yet exist for a Vietnam-style epidemic of fragging. Sharp us-versus-them class consciousness has not yet developed in the military and there appears to be zero sympathy for Akbar's attack in the armed forces. There are already murmurings across the right-wing web of purging the armed forces of "black muslims."

Rather than a being a catalyst for generalized class struggle in the military, the fragging will more likely result in polarization between Black and white, given the latent racism in the military that reflects all of American society. This will emerge over time, and must be navigated very delicately by the left. Before more-militant-than-thou types make this sergeant a hero or martyr, and they should do some investigation. When the facts are sorted out, we will have to reckon with them.

Social polarization of all sorts - outside the military - will emerge in the coming period. It has already started, with the competing street mobilizations of anti-war and pro-war forces. And there is polarization beginning within the anti-war movement as some forces argue for moral censure and others argue for disruption. This too presents a challenge for anti-war forces, and for anti-imperialist forces within the anti-war movement.

Part of developing a critical stance on these issues, and figuring out what our role is in the context of this war is understanding the connections and consequences of what we do here, what others do around the world, and what the regime continues to do. I, for one, still see the political destruction of the Bush government as a strategic priority.

But we have to ensure that our movement is thinking strategically as well, that we are not attacking our adversaries at their strong points but exploiting their weaknesses. We have to ensure that we can function in ways that are agile and often decentralized, even as we keep the same enemy in sight.

This means that the wing of the movement, as it moves toward disruption instead of protest, will have to carefully calculate its own tactics to ensure that - even as we hold the movement accountable and preserve our own goals and identities - we do not split the movement or detach ourselves from the masses. That means that audacity and patience must reside in the same space together. Now is a time for discipline.

One thing is clear. The counter- counter-propaganda war is vital. We must begin to aim incessant, clear, rigorous, systematic, and dispassionate logic at the Bush Junta's every thinner rationalizations.

Leadership is perceived as leader-like only as long as it is respected. The content of the leadership certainly helps determine whether it is accepted, but impressions are also critical. People will take leadership from someone who is wrong, but they balk at being led by someone who is ridiculous.

We can exploit the absurdities of this administration that are now reproducing like rats.

Waving around the Geneva Conventions when our POWs get put on camera, and we've been broadcasting footage of Iraqi prisoners on for days. Invoking a UN resolution to violate a UN charter. Rumsfeld's comment that, "The word evidence is a hard word." Examples are legion.

They are down, and we dare not let them back up.

I'm dusting off an old Bob Dylan record. Hard rain's a gonna fall.

--Stan Goff

by Ruben Navarrette Jr

DALLAS -- I KNOW the saying dictates that to the victor go the spoils. But there are serious questions emerging over the process by which US companies are hired to put out oil fires, build roads and bridges, restart oil production, and do whatever is necessary to ''reconstruct'' Iraq after allied forces deconstruct it. Some answers need to come from Vice President Dick Cheney, a major architect of the war with Iraq, according to many newspapers and columnists around the country. That's the same Dick Cheney who was, until 2 1/2 years ago, chief executive officer of Halliburton Co., a Houston-based oil field services firm that takes in nearly $20 billion annually.

It is a Halliburton subsidiary -- Kellogg, Brown & Root -- that landed on a short list of companies invited by the US Agency for International Development to bid on what could grow to be a $900 million contract to rebuild Iraq. That's the same Kellogg, Brown & Root that was recently awarded, by the Defense Department, the contract to put out fires at oil fields in Iraq.

Good work if you can get it. Oil-field firefighting firms fetch up to $50,000 per day, and it can take weeks to cap a single well. There's no telling how much work there will be in Iraq, but experience says there could be plenty.

In the first Gulf War, Iraqis torched more than 700 oil wells in Kuwait. About half the fires were extinguished by Halliburton.

There's that name again.

And just to prove what a small world it is, the man who was secretary of defense in 1991 was later himself awarded a choice position: CEO of Halliburton. His name: Dick Cheney.

The Halliburton gig, from 1995 to 2000, was a cash cow for Cheney. During his final 8 1/2 months on the job, he pulled down a salary of $806,332 and collected another $100,000 in benefits.

And, mind you, all this was occurring while he was directing George W. Bush's search for a running mate.

Not only did Halliburton not seem to mind that its CEO was moonlighting as a headhunter, it gave Cheney a $1.5 million bonus. But that was cookie jar money compared with what Cheney pocketed when Bush made him his running mate. Cheney then sold his stock options and pocketed another $22 million and change.

Now $22 million and change isn't just a golden handshake. It's a wet, sloppy kiss. And that brings us to the questions. Are the new contracts for Halliburton Cheney's idea of reciprocity? If not, why was the process done by invitation only and not opened to other bids? And why was all this done in relative quiet?

Moreover, why hasn't the vice president's office been more forthcoming in trying to clear up any confusion about any benefit that Halliburton might derive from having its former CEO now sitting to the right hand of the president? Why has Cheney's office typically referred inquiring reporters from The Washington Post to Halliburton, only to have Halliburton refer them back to the vice president?

And given that these are tax dollars we're talking about (lots of them), why isn't there more transparency in the whole process?

Americans may never learn the answers. After howls of protests from competing firms around the world that were aced out of the Iraqi reconstruction bidding process, the government has now shifted the responsibility for overseeing the oil-field contracts to the Army Corps of Engineers and stamped the matter ''classified.''

And why is that, exactly?

Here's the big question: Did the vice president of the United States use his influence to help make his wealthy friends at his old company wealthier?

No one knows. And it's mighty hard to find out when no one is talking and folks are giving reporters the run-around. That has to stop. Cheney should speak up and settle once and for all these questions about how his private sector experience may be affecting his public service.

AMMAN, Jordan - Bruised and bleeding, in need of medical care, the Americans stranded in Iraq's western desert approached the mud-brick town and found the hospital destroyed by bombs.

"Why? Why?" a doctor demanded of them. "Why did you Americans bomb our children's hospital?" Scores of Iraqi townspeople crowded around.

The American peace activists' account was the first confirmation of a report last week that a hospital in Rutbah was bombed Wednesday, with dead and injured. The travelers said they saw no significant Iraqi military presence near the hospital or elsewhere in Rutbah. The doctor did not discuss casualties, the Americans said.

U.S. Central Command said Sunday it had no knowledge of a hospital bombing in Rutbah. The U.S. military has said it is doing its best to avoid civilian casualties in its campaign to oust Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

For the battered band of peace activists, recounting their nerve-jarring exit from Iraq on Sunday, it was one of the worst moments in 10 days of war.

That exit had begun at 9:15 a.m. Saturday, when a dozen foreigners — eight Americans and one Irish member of the Iraq Peace Team, and three unaffiliated Japanese and South Korean activists — set out from Baghdad on the 300-mile (480-kilometer) trek to the western border with Jordan, through a nation at war.

Members of the antiwar group have shuttled in and out of the Iraqi capital for months to take part in vigils, small demonstrations and other activities to protest U.S. war plans. Since March 20, they have borne witness and compiled reports on the U.S. bombing of Baghdad.

Some who left Saturday had been ordered out by jittery Iraqi bureaucrats for a minor infraction — taking snapshots in Baghdad without an official escort. Others said they left to get out the story of the Baghdad bombing.

The journey was a straight shot through the gritty western desert, the Badiyat ash-Sham, over a divided superhighway eerily empty of traffic. American special forces and warplanes have been staging raids and air attacks on isolated targets across the west.

"I'd say we passed up to 20 bombed-out, burned-out vehicles along the way," said Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, 22, a student from Devon, Pennsylvania. Four were Iraqi tanks and other military vehicles, he said, but the others appeared to be civilian, including a bus and an ambulance.

"We had to detour around a bombed-out bridge, dodge lightpoles down across the road," said Shane Claiborne, 27, a community organizer from Philadelphia.

Three times the group — in a big white GMC Suburban and two yellow taxis — spotted bomb explosions nearby. The last, in early afternoon, occurred near the far-western town of Rutbah. Their Iraqi drivers' nerves were fraying as they sped toward Jordan at 80 mph (130 kph).

"He kept going faster, faster," Betty Scholten, 69, of Mount Rainier, Maryland, said of her driver.

Suddenly the lagging taxi, pushing to catch up, blew a tire. It careened, spun out of control and plunged down a ditch, landing on its side. "It was a heavy hit," Claiborne said. All five men inside were hurt. "We pulled each other up through the side doors."

A passing car eventually braked to a halt. The Iraqis inside got out, helped the injured into their vehicle and drove back toward Rutbah and a hospital. Along the way, Claiborne said, he spotted the contrails of a jet streaking toward the car. The Iraqis frantically waved a white sheet out a window, and the plane veered off, he said.

In poor, remote Rutbah, a burned-out oil tanker truck sat in the road, and the customs building and communications center had been wrecked by bombing. When they reached the hospital, they saw it, too, had been bombed, its roof caved in.

Claiborne said an English-speaking Iraqi doctor took them to a small nearby clinic, and 100 or so townspeople then gathered around the building. The men were worried, but the doctor told them, "We'll take care of you. Muslim, Christian, whatever, we are all brothers and sisters,'" Claiborne recalled.

The staff tended to them, stitching up a scalp laceration for group leader Cliff Kindy, 53, of North Manchester, Indiana, and doing their best for the worst hurt, Weldon Nisly, 57, of Seattle, who suffered cracked ribs and similar injuries.

The two other carloads, missing the third, eventually doubled back and found the men in Rutbah. All then ventured onward the final 80 miles (130 kilometers) to the Jordan border, and then Amman, where Nisly was admitted to a hospital early Sunday.

As they left Rutbah, said Wilson-Hartgrove's wife, Leah, 22, the villagers "said to us, `Please tell them about the hospital.'"

American Peace Activists Confirm Iraqi Hospital Bombed

Thickening

It is March 18, exactly 4:00 by my watch , which means 3:57 by the school’s clock, as I unlock my office door. The phone rings. Hello this is S. He is asking if I would be a reference for a federal job. Of course, what’s the job. The job is to assist in archiving an Islamic library in Dearborn. What have you been doing he asks. I’ve just returned from witnessing with Asa an act of non-violent civil disobedience.

We agree to meet for coffee after the war begins. Perhaps we should meet at the zoo. I am thinking about Victor Shklovsky’s Zoo or Letters Not About Love. What happens when one becomes a correspondent from a distance? Shklovsky, the herding animal, wanted above all to get back into his country. I am a migratory creature, one who has little means to travel, but I manage to see enough to bring back some news to my students confined in the unwieldy metropolis. The Middle East is not in my flight path except through the poets, faculty, and students I know here on the ground.

I would meet at the butterfly exhibit. Would you? With butterflies from all over the world. We could talk while meditating on fragility and its opposite, prolific regeneration. Within this beautiful container we could discuss the problem of violence. And the way that violence, gives us, like it did Shklovsky, poetic devices.

Let us consider, for example, the path of the butterfly crossing the path of the automobile. Let us consider the potential fragility of the automobile in the path of a bomb. Or consider a bomb, which can not regenerate in the prolific manner of the butterfly.

Or a body instead of a gun.

S. tells me about the Koran, that the intellect is more important than the heart. Is that because one doesn’t have to wait for a “good” or “powerful” feeling to make an ethical judgment? That one can act ethically toward others without having to know them or have any particular feeling for them? This begins with one’s transcending of one’s fear of Allah.

He lives in the paradox between idealism and pragmatism. This is something he considers deeply.

Then he said, there are not enough people who can act ethically. It is human nature to forget. The people who retain the memory to act correctly are too small in numbers.

Right now I am thinking about shoes and boots. Black boots laced up above the calves of a large man in a black uniform with an insignia, federal marshal, on the pocket lapel. He stands in front of a gray-haired man, who, dressed in black trousers and a black t-shirt printed with the insignia pax cristi, is lying on the Federal Building steps. There are about ten people similarly dressed lying down on the steps. Behind them more marshals and federal agents. People are stepping over the bodies. People who have business in court. Lawyers. Clients. Our lawyers also. At this entrance there are about 35 or so supporters at first, until the people, perhaps 17 of them, on the other side are arrested. Then all of the supporters are here: we’re possibly two hundred in number, watching the die-in and singing, carrying anti-war placards, and waiting for the people doing the action to get arrested. It is going to be a federal criminal charge, blocking a federal building.

Last night Bush declared his pre-emptive war on Iraq in the guise of a preposterous demand. We are at the Federal Building today announcing our non-compliance with his war and with his refusal to obey international law. We indict him for intention to commit genocide.

Also at the Federal Building is the first day of the trial of four or is it three? people accused of being terrorists. It is no accident that the jury for this historical trial is being selected the day after Bush has made his baby furious declaration.

We are all being taken care of by a furious baby. Papa baby, who decided to side with the hawks, playing the role of their commander. Where shall we go today hawks? Iraq? Iran? Saudi Arabia? North Korea? When I was quite small, I used to watch the hawks in an empty field near my house and contemplate their vast travels. How glorious it would be to be a baby in charge of hawks, and by extension the baby parent of everyone, including my own father and sister Elizabeth, who must be at least in her 80’s seated in her wheelchair abutting the steps of the federal building.

But what I want to emphasize is how ordinary everything feels and looks. It is only the mind that tells me anything extraordinary about these events. It is cold. We are shivering. Most of us didn’t wear winter coats. Time is passing. Some of us are lying down on hard steps. Some of us are singing. And time is passing. There are a lot of cameras, all sorts. No butterflies, few birds. But it is all very quiet. And no one is in a hurry to get anywhere. We are just here, being. But H., H., who wants to be a lyric poet, has already been arrested on the other side. Everything is simple. Ordinary. The day goes by. I am standing alone at a garage entrance looking out for official vehicles carrying those who have already been arrested. A federal agent in a brown suit passes me. How are you, he asks? I’m okay. And yourself? We are actors with a script, and off stage, we are simply people at work.

At last, federal marshals carefully bend over the bodies on the steps. They ask them to get up. One by one people refuse to get up and one by one they are put under arrest. It is a small ceremony. Quiet, a tap here or there, and another person in black street clothes walks up the steps slowly with a marshal or two marshals in black uniforms on either side of them. They disappear into the Federal Building one by one. Some, who refuse to get up, are carried up, gently, as a civilian casualty might be carried by a medic in a war zone. We are all at the funeral together. Goodbye Judith, goodbye Bill, goodbye Billie. And this part is over.

[from The Globe and Mail:]

Dear America: This is a difficult letter to write, because I'm no longer sure who you are.

Some of you may be having the same trouble. I thought I knew you: We'd become well acquainted over the past 55 years. You were the Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck comic books I read in the late 1940s. You were the radio shows -- Jack Benny, Our Miss Brooks. You were the music I sang and danced to: the Andrews Sisters, Ella Fitzgerald, the Platters, Elvis. You were a ton of fun.

You wrote some of my favourite books. You created Huckleberry Finn, and Hawkeye, and Beth and Jo in Little Women, courageous in their different ways. Later, you were my beloved Thoreau, father of environmentalism, witness to individual conscience; and Walt Whitman, singer of the great Republic; and Emily Dickinson, keeper of the private soul. You were Hammett and Chandler, heroic walkers of mean streets; even later, you were the amazing trio, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, who traced the dark labyrinths of your hidden heart. You were Sinclair Lewis and Arthur Miller, who, with their own American idealism, went after the sham in you, because they thought you could do better.

You were Marlon Brando in On The Waterfront, you were Humphrey Bogart in Key Largo, you were Lillian Gish in Night of the Hunter. You stood up for freedom, honesty and justice; you protected the innocent. I believed most of that. I think you did, too. It seemed true at the time.

You put God on the money, though, even then. You had a way of thinking that the things of Caesar were the same as the things of God: that gave you self-confidence. You have always wanted to be a city upon a hill, a light to all nations, and for a while you were. Give me your tired, your poor, you sang, and for a while you meant it.

We've always been close, you and us. History, that old entangler, has twisted us together since the early 17th century. Some of us used to be you; some of us want to be you; some of you used to be us. You are not only our neighbours: In many cases -- mine, for instance -- you are also our blood relations, our colleagues, and our personal friends. But although we've had a ringside seat, we've never understood you completely, up here north of the 49th parallel.

We're like Romanized Gauls -- look like Romans, dress like Romans, but aren't Romans -- peering over the wall at the real Romans. What are they doing? Why? What are they doing now? Why is the haruspex eyeballing the sheep's liver? Why is the soothsayer wholesaling the Bewares?

Perhaps that's been my difficulty in writing you this letter: I'm not sure I know what's really going on. Anyway, you have a huge posse of experienced entrail-sifters who do nothing but analyze your every vein and lobe. What can I tell you about yourself that you don't already know?

This might be the reason for my hesitation: embarrassment, brought on by a becoming modesty. But it is more likely to be embarrassment of another sort. When my grandmother -- from a New England background -- was confronted with an unsavoury topic, she would change the subject and gaze out the window. And that is my own inclination: Mind your own business.

But I'll take the plunge, because your business is no longer merely your business. To paraphrase Marley's Ghost, who figured it out too late, mankind is your business. And vice versa: When the Jolly Green Giant goes on the rampage, many lesser plants and animals get trampled underfoot. As for us, you're our biggest trading partner: We know perfectly well that if you go down the plug-hole, we're going with you. We have every reason to wish you well.

I won't go into the reasons why I think your recent Iraqi adventures have been -- taking the long view -- an ill-advised tactical error. By the time you read this, Baghdad may or may not look like the craters of the Moon, and many more sheep entrails will have been examined. Let's talk, then, not about what you're doing to other people, but about what you're doing to yourselves.

You're gutting the Constitution. Already your home can be entered without your knowledge or permission, you can be snatched away and incarcerated without cause, your mail can be spied on, your private records searched. Why isn't this a recipe for widespread business theft, political intimidation, and fraud? I know you've been told all this is for your own safety and protection, but think about it for a minute. Anyway, when did you get so scared? You didn't used to be easily frightened.

You're running up a record level of debt. Keep spending at this rate and pretty soon you won't be able to afford any big military adventures. Either that or you'll go the way of the USSR: lots of tanks, but no air conditioning. That will make folks very cross. They'll be even crosser when they can't take a shower because your short-sighted bulldozing of environmental protections has dirtied most of the water and dried up the rest. Then things will get hot and dirty indeed.

You're torching the American economy. How soon before the answer to that will be, not to produce anything yourselves, but to grab stuff other people produce, at gunboat-diplomacy prices? Is the world going to consist of a few megarich King Midases, with the rest being serfs, both inside and outside your country? Will the biggest business sector in the United States be the prison system? Let's hope not.

If you proceed much further down the slippery slope, people around the world will stop admiring the good things about you. They'll decide that your city upon the hill is a slum and your democracy is a sham, and therefore you have no business trying to impose your sullied vision on them. They'll think you've abandoned the rule of law. They'll think you've fouled your own nest.

The British used to have a myth about King Arthur. He wasn't dead, but sleeping in a cave, it was said; in the country's hour of greatest peril, he would return. You, too, have great spirits of the past you may call upon: men and women of courage, of conscience, of prescience. Summon them now, to stand with you, to inspire you, to defend the best in you. You need them.

Margaret Atwood studied American literature -- among other things -- at Radcliffe and Harvard in the 1960s. She is the author of 10 novels. Her 11th, Oryx and Crake, will be published in May. This essay also appears in The Nation.

(Gothic News Service, 03/31) The Petroleum Kids Studio ­-- a breakaway branch of the sculptor Matthew Barney¹s infamous film crew ­-- is reported about to complete a ten-minute work for Network News television. Filmed by the Studio at night on location in Monument Valley, New Mexico ­-- site of numerous cowboy features, including John Ford's "Stage Coach" --­ the Newscast features the White House's War Counsel. Framed against one of the Monument's most dramatic high-rise cliffs, the white petroleum greased theatrical set included elaborate multi-platform scaffolds, thick ropes and pulleys, a razor sharp, leather bull whip, a free wheeling Bradley steel tank tread, and an illuminated empty missile tip. Dressed in transparent body suits --­ also thoroughly greased in white jelly -­members of the President's War Counsel are filmed in an intense workout that is designed to revive the Administration's commitment to roll over Iraq in an ideologically consistent and timely manner.

Consistent with the work of Matthew Barney -- a Studio statement reads -- the Petroleum Kids’ work leaves no doubt as to the ambiguities of the power relationships within the Counsel. Vice President Cheney, while being raised and lowered from platform to platform, cannot stop rubbing large gobs of petroleum jelly into his heart. War Secretary Rumsfeld -- while held upside down by General Tommy Franks -- repetitively applies little dabs of the jelly lubricant to the muscles around his squinting eyes. At the same time, the General appears to use his feet to tightly enwrap the War Secretary inside the grip of the loose and greasy tank tread. Running up and down the ladders between scaffolds, Condoleezza Rice, National Security Adviser snaps the whip with a grace and ease, the white tip apparently stinging each Member in sensitive places in ways that cause their torsos to wince into rigid and freshly familiar postures. Only the President is spared the whip. Through out the sequence, while embracing a white missile tip, he struggles not to fall off a western saddle that is raised and lowered up and down the cliff by a barely stable, but well-oiled leather harness. Ironically General Collin Powell appears wrestle with Richard Perle and Paul Wolfolitz in a jelly mountain at the bottom of the set.

Back in New York, the Petroleum Kid’s reported great satisfaction with the first round of edits. Today’s film studio statement went on to say, "The use of malleable use of the white petroleum jelly in the Western context is perfect for showing the War Counsel’s slippery oscillations between covert and overt behavior. As a Studio we realize it as our public duty to dramatize and envision the ways in which the forceful members of this particular group­ especially in light of battleground realities -- are working to regroup and reframe the invasion and mastery of Iraq." At Press time it is not known whether or not the News Feature will achieve domestic distribution by any of Networks, however worldwide exposure appears a sure opportunity with much international interest immediately expressed.

The National Monument Park Service -- when asked - reports that no props were found on the reported film site. "We did find some odd white filaments of what looked like grease or jelly at the bottom of one the cliffs. Nothing serious. It did not seem to have anything to with making a cowboy movie, but we did pause to wonder if some Native American Church Group had secretly got in here to re-enact a version of The Ghost Dance. The remnants did have a scary, ghostly look about them."

Today's Philadelphia Inquirer has a page of poems by Sandy Solomon, Charles Bernstein, Daniel Hoffman and Rachel Blau Duplessis (links below)...

Taking in the news
Sandy Solomon

In the stupid computer game
to which I devote myself
as the world hurls itself
at war's impersonal fires
and bright-faced youths in fatigues ...

War stories
Charles Bernstein

War is the extension of prose by other means.
War is never having to say you're sorry.
War is the logical outcome of moral certainty. ...

A Riddle
Daniel Hoffman

If all but one desire me, I am not.
The Greeks had gods for everything but me. ...

From Draft 51: Clay Songs
Rachel Blau Duplessis

Why does it begin again and again?
Why insist on the jagged line
the lightning hitting precariously clear
the flooded splashbacks of political despair?

On May 3rd, 2003, The Works on Shirts Project invites you to take part in "WEARNICA", an international exhibition of artistic reactions to war. On the day of the event, participants in cities around the world will form walking art galleries, wearing original works they've created on the backs of white dress shirts into museums and monuments, parks and shopping malls to help raise public awareness of the realities of war in our time.

On February 5th, Colin Powell stood before the U. N. to make his case for a new resolution authorizing the U.S. to take military action against Iraq. Notably absent was Picasso's "Guernica" [...]

perhaps one of the the twentieth century's greatest, most unsettling artistic images depicting the brutal, self-destructive nature of war. Under pressure from the U.S. Government, The tapestry was covered prior to the Secretary of State's speech out of concern that the painting's message might speak to historical parallels that the Bush administration and UN officials were clearly determined that the media or the public should not make.

In response, the Works on Shirts Project (http://www.worksonshirts.org) has initiated this historic event to give people in the U.S. and around the world an opportunity to follow Picasso's example by publicly expressing their own personal reactions to the war in Iraq and continuing conflicts throughout the world.

Here's what YOU can do:

By staging an event in your area, making a financial contribution or just spreading the word, you can help send a message to the Bush administration, the U.N. and the world that the power of art to reveal the horrors of war and the promise of peace cannot be covered up.

The Idea is Simple:

By creating original war-inspired artwork that can be worn as clothing, it's possible to stage an art exhibition in any location open to the public. As long as the participants conform to the standard behavior for the general public in the space, the white dress shirts will visually tie the pieces together, and the images will speak for themselves.

Toronto Star art critic Peter Goddard wrote of the Guernica coverup: "If there is a war with Iraq, there's already been the first casualty — art." We can change that. Where one image has been silenced, a thousand may drown out the drums of war forever.

Those interested in learning more about this event and how they can participate should visit: http://www.worksonshirts.org

Bus Ride and March in Washington

At 9:30 Friday night, I got on one of four Detroit departing buses, sponsored as far as I can tell by a coalition that included both the peace and anti-racist activist organization A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) and the International Socialist Party of Michigan (I wrote my $60 check to the ISP), and traveled overnight to the national demonstration against the on-going and forthcoming war in Iraq in Washington D.C. Most of the people on the bus were not affiliated with any specific organization, however. The man I sat next to was an ex-marine who used to work in the tourist industry and who hadn’t been to a demonstration since 1972, when he had been involved with veterans’ participation in the Viet Nam anti-war movement. [...]

He and I were of a small number of people traveling alone on our bus. Seated across from me was a woman with her three grown-up sons and a family friend. There were students from local high schools and the University of Michigan, and some people I took to be young Chomsky-style anarchists: one of them, or so I imagined, Corey, was a friend of Asa’s, but Asa now tells me “she doesn’t know what she is.” It was a happy coincidence that two of Asa’s friends were on the bus, as neither Asa, Barry, nor my friend Katie could make the trip. The other of Asa’s friends was Matt, who has become a committed member of the Socialist Party of Michigan. After the march on Saturday, Matt and I spent a good long time together looking for our missing bus in below-twenty degree weather.

On the bus were also a handful of “aging” street-style activists, including a new age-y radical wearing yellow ski pants and donning a head of thick bottle-enhanced deep yellow hair who claimed to be from Berkeley. I grew quite fond of this man and also to rely on his cheerful pants as a familiar fixture amongst the seas of travelers in the truck stops, all of who, like me, were bundled up against the bitter cold in similar dark clothes.

I was told there were 19 buses from Michigan altogether, with one from the resort town Traverse City. At the Pennsylvania truck stops jam packed with buses from all over the Midwest, I learned there were four busses from a village in Northern Wisconsin, eleven from Ohio State University, eleven from Milwaukee and many more than that from Minnesota. Loud speakers announced the departures of the busses: the bus from Missouri is leaving. Bus number such and such from Chicago is leaving. Another bus such and such from Chicago is leaving. A woman from Chicago in front of me on line for the women’s room had never been out of Chicago. She was looking into the gift shop window and asking, are we in Pennsylvania? I just bought all these D.C. postcards thinking I was in D.C.

I ate grits and cold eggs and soft biscuits at 5:30 a.m. with two women traveling on the Northern Wisconsin bus. They said that they knew 50% of the people on the four buses from their town. One of them was a high school math teacher. One of her students had decided to go at the last minute—she laughed and said, “That’s pretty good for my conservative school.” I asked her if she was able to introduce discussion of the war crisis into her teaching. Yes, a little bit, with probability problems. She started to mumble something about how to get away with it. We talked about fear of speaking out, but as we were speaking the fear was felt as past tense. I hope that with the nation-wide demonstrations achieving a larger, critical mass, the fear will be put behind us.

Ironically, when we woke up this morning, Asa’s car windows were painted with Fear in big red letters. Around the corner of our driveway is a flag Asa mounted on Christmas Eve. It says Hope.

Back to Pennsylvania--two older white women from West Detroit had met on a tour of Italy. One of them had bent arthritic hands. I wondered how she would do in the cold. They told me, over truck-stop coffee, that they had boarded a bus in Warren because they were afraid to leave their cars downtown. They had never been to a demonstration before, but they said they had to go—what Bush is doing is too scary they said. They also said that they expected we would all be ignored.

At first, I couldn’t believe that all of these buses, herds of them, were going to D.C. Weren’t any of them vacation tour buses? In the murky light of the eating halls, I kept trying to make myself see something else, something I could have imagined—even that didn’t make sense (who would be going on a vacation tour bus at 4 a.m. in the middle of winter in this part of the world?) other than what I did see. We were all war protestors, crowding into the slushy cafeterias somewhere on the mountain passes of Pennsylvania in the middle of night—this was not 1968, it was January 17, 2003 and we weren’t supposed to be here: we were supposed to be in snug, or not so snug, in isolated enclaves ignorant of each other dreaming our neo Orwellian dreams as the world’s boundaries stretched and warped unfathomably beyond us.

Every one of us was going to D.C. A few were affiliated with Christian organizations and schools. More were traveling under the sign of Wellstone---there were Wellstone buttons everywhere. In the march, I met people from Boston and Buffalo and Alabama and Colorado who had traveled by plane. Where are you from and how did you get here and how long did it take? We asked each other in the cafeteria and rest room lines, sharing tables for meals, and while marching. We were between the ages of eight and eighty.

I met Tom at the rally. We wandered around the three squares across from the capitol and caught up with each other, mostly talking about children, work, his experiences of Pakistan, writing, and friends. How is everybody? For the most part, the speeches weren’t news, although, I had earlier been impressed by a Korean American woman critiquing the deployment of the phrase “axis of evil.” I learned later that each square, when full, held 250,000 people—this according to one of the protest organizers. Later, I heard that we were 500,000 in all. Tom and I went for coffee at Starbucks, which was filled with demonstrators, including a man seated at a nearby stool who seemed to be suffering from a terrible headache. Later, after the march, lots of people had aches—a woman on my bus had frostbitten toes and the woman seated across from me seemed to be suffering from a little hypothermia as she was shivering uncontrollably.

In spite of the cold and the problem finding buses after the event was over, the march was wonderful, a joyful and determined experience. It took hours. In some places, I’m remembering particularly the Botanical Garden building, there were so many of us there already and so many others joining us that we couldn’t walk more than ten steps a minute. When we finally stretched out making a line you couldn’t see the end of, things would speed up and then slow way down, sometimes stop. As we got out of the government area and into the shopping area, we were greeted with NO WAR signs in the windows of shops and bistros. Dressed up young Asian women working at a nails salon, waved and danced on the balcony as we passed. The march had a nice beat: there was lots of hand drumming and singing and Bread and Puppet and other agit prop weaving its way through the crowd. A group of Philippino-American performers moved to the edge of a crowd, encircled themselves with a banner. Please move around us, we are going to congregate here, they said. I was moving past: it was hard sometimes to stop for performances. When I looked back, they had melted into the crowd. Another group weaving their way through the march were dressed all in black carrying a big black banner they held like a rope to keep them connected to each other. The grim, the parodic, the quiet were gathered in a massive harmonic. People chanted this is democracy. Masked Bushes and Cheneys and Rumsfelds skipped and strutted around us, trying to shake our hands: we mocked them, laughed, and they moved on.

When I talked to my 85 year-old 88 pound mother on the phone, she said, “I wish I could have been there.” “Next time, I’ll carry you,” I said in a mock-heroic tone. She also wanted reassurance that the crowd of protestors was diverse and was happy to hear of the placard that read, “Conservatives against the war in Iraq.”

India's national newspaper, The Hindu, is reporting that the British Government is angry over the way BBC is presenting the war in Iraq.

A senior Cabinet member had last week made clear his irritation to the public broadcaster's political editor. John Reid, chairman of Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labour Party and a member of his War Cabinet, took up the issue with Andrew Marr.

Blair's office believes the 24-hour coverage is distorting the events, and Reid is reported to have accused BBC of acting like a "friend of Baghdad".

Marr is reported to have responded that the Government was "angry that they can control where reporters go but what they cannot control is what they see".

[Thanks to Christian Bök and Bill Kennedy for sending this simultaneously ... ]

The horrible truth, just in time for Terminator 3.

Are you a Commander-in-Chief who needs a name for your next military operation? Just click here to generate up to 100 at a time ...

20 Randomly Generated American Military Operation Names

1. Operation Engorged Pit Bull
2. Operation Inflamed Manticore
3. Operation Eternal Cougar
4. Operation Shining Dragon
5. Operation Oversized Fiend
6. Operation Cowboy Badger
7. Operation Destroy the Otter
8. Operation Unindulgent Emu
9. Operation Nervous Democracy
10. Operation Don't Mess With Our Sucker Punch
11. Operation Terrible Equality
12. Operation Umbrageous Djinn
13. Operation Platinum Wombat
14. Operation Unexpected Imperialism
15. Operation Bitter Mosque
16. Operation Strong Missile
17. Operation Delirious Turban
18. Operation Rioting Supernova
19. Operation Wraithlike Beaver
20. Operation Angry Ka'bah

[Some good links at the end of this one, and mention of Circulars via our embedded Toronto correspondent, Darren W=H.]

By JOHN ALLEMANG

The first Gulf War did it for CNN. The new one may do it for 'blogs' -- personal Web pages of news and opinion, tracking and debating Iraq's fate by the minute. As JOHN ALLEMANG writes, they're now many people's first choice for unembedded journalism.

He calls himself George Paine, in a proud allusion to the 18th-century American patriot and pamphleteer Thomas Paine. But in every other respect, the young New York technology consultant is a man of these anxious times.

Talking into his cellphone at a patio table in a Chelsea café, keeping one eye on the darkening clouds while searching the Web for updates on the war in Iraq, the young man in his 20s is the very model of a communications revolution.

But the news George Paine accumulates and analyzes isn't just for his own peace of mind or intellectual hunger. Within minutes of finding an Arab-media contradiction of a CNN report, he will post it on his argumentative antiwar site, warblogging.com, and subversive readers who share his doubts will also share his newfound knowledge.

George Paine is what's called a blogger, a man who keeps a running log on the Web ("Web log" is contracted to "blog") of news and links of interest to him, with his own commentary. As it turns out, they are also of interest to tens of thousands of avid readers who don't believe that either government or the mainstream media have their best interests in mind.

"Seven or eight months ago," he says, "I was feeling dismayed by the direction my country was going in. I was looking for an outlet to share my feelings and maybe score some points against the authorities, and when the Patriot Act came along, I started the site."

With no formal journalistic training, he began by writing a paragraph or two about civil-liberties issues and the American war on terror. He reckons he had about 100 readers in the first month. But now, as the fog of war sweeps through Iraq, and eager reports of surrenders and uprisings disappear into the desert air, about 100,000 readers search warblogging.com for news and arguments ("I am ashamed that my country is engaged in an aggressive war") that embedded journalists can't or won't put forward.

George Paine is now writing thousands of words every day, and with the help of sympathetic readers, he is passing on hundreds of links where a wider range of war stories are told. And he is still working full-time as a technology consultant. "I post during the day, but I don't allow it to interfere with my day job," he says. "I'm blogging on breaks, or while I'm waiting for someone to call back. If I spend nine or 10 hours in the office, I'll bill for eight."

This is a large part of how the world, and especially that part of it under 40, is informing itself about the war. The truth, as they see it, is being composed on coffee breaks by people nowhere near the front lines, writers who are beholden to no one -- except perhaps the bosses in their off-line lives, who force them to use a liberating pseudonym.

Using free and relatively simple software available from such sites as blogger.com, with tools that can handle a huge amount of data, anyone with a modem can publish his views and find a following. And that following will probably grow, as younger readers numbed by the conventions of mainstream reporting and discouraged by its connections to government find a shared intimacy in the Web's daily diaries.

"I think that sort of clarity of voice and immediacy is more possible on Web logs than in any print media," says Dean Allen of textism.com. "I can't think of another broadcast medium that has such a potential for directness. Someone reporting live from the battlefield for CNN can't come close: As impressive as it can be, the reporter is still speaking though an editorial, journalistic gauze."

Of course, when anyone can do all this at low cost and with minimal technological skill, there's no shortage of eye-glazing egomania. Personal Web logs -- the daily, hourly and even minute-by-minute chronicles of lifeless keystrokers -- abound on the Web and have a terrible reputation among the serious-minded war bloggers. Yet even the war chroniclers, Mr. Allen says, seem to be getting carried away by both the recent deluge of recent media hype and the increased feedback their sites are receiving.

"These factors have led to oceans of unself-consciously hilarious self-importance on the part of people who are, after all, sitting in front of a computer typing a commentary through links on this and that."

And for all the alternative-culture myth-making that surrounds blogging, it is not the exclusive preserve of the enlightened fringe. Hard as it is to believe, one of the roots of all this harried Web activity was Matt Drudge's scandal-chasing Drudge Report. Andrew Sullivan, one of the pioneers of blogdom's public-pundit side, came to the Web from the editorship of the influential magazine The New Republic, and actually makes good money from his daily words.

Power-worshippers as diverse as David Frum and Warren Kinsella now share their thoughts with Web readers, and few mainstream news operations don't include a Web log somewhere on their site -- in the case of msnbc.com and its affiliated slate.com, that comes to means all blogs, all the time.

This mainstreaming of the Web log caused trouble for CNN's Iraq reporter Kevin Sites, whose much admired personal war blog kevinsites.net was ordered closed (temporarily, he hopes) by the people paying his salary.

Yet the most powerful blog to emerge from the war in Iraq is not from a North American networker, but from a Baghdad blogger who calls himself Salam Pax (from the Arabic and Latin words for peace). Salam is described as a worldly, 28-year-old, gay architect, who has little use for either Saddam Hussein or the war against him. But what makes his diary so affecting is the way it achieves an easy intimacy that eludes the one-size-fits-all coverage of Baghdad's besieged residents.

Humane in an inhuman environment, Salam writes of how to pack in case you have to flee, why he dislikes the self-appointed foreign human shields ("every third one of these shields will be writing an article somewhere"), what you need to buy when the Americans are coming (manual pump, 60 litres of gasoline, two kerosene cookers, particle masks), the music on the radio ("What good are patriotic songs when bombs are dropping?") and the distressing TV behaviour of Iraq's Interior Minister ("Hurling abuse at the world is the only thing left for them to do").

Like all good bloggers, once discovered, Salam has been overwhelmed by comments and questions. "Please stop sending e-mails asking if I were for real," he writes. "Don't believe it? Then don't read it. I am not anybody's propaganda ploy -- well, except my own."

For Paul Grabowicz, a professor of new media at the University of California School of Journalism at Berkeley, it's this kind of dialogue, along with the back-and-forth debates at more formal sites, that elevates Web logs into a powerful new form of communication.

"Traditional journalism can be very good at collecting information, writing great narratives and crafting a story. But that's just the starting point -- if there's no conversation, it's like making art and not showing it in a gallery. To me, the whole point is to get people talking."

Part of that conversation demands that you know what other people are looking at. Toronto writer and teacher Darren Wershler-Henry finds out through a site called Blogdex, which tracks the top stories being read on Web logs. "This way you know what everyone else on the Web is talking about," he says, "The more connectivity you can generate, the more powerful are your applications."

Mr. Wershler-Henry contributes to three Web logs when he's not writing poetry or teaching communications students at York University. At http://www.arras.net/circulars, he and New York writer Brian Stefans have brought together a blog group they title "Poets, Artists and Critics Respond to U.S. Policy."

Here, you can learn how to filter out jingoistic spam, read an eye-opening PRWeek magazine article on how the White House spins its public relations, link to a gambling site where you can bet on Saddam Hussein's future (the odds change rapidly) or follow the diary of a American teaching in Turkey. All of this, Mr. Wershler-Henry says, contributes to creating "communities of interest."

Some observers, such as Mr. Grabowicz, are critical of sites that are simply an excuse for people of like minds to agree, but Mr. Wershler-Henry resists the idea that the poets, artists and critics may be segregating themselves.

"The Internet was founded on rigorous debate," he says, "and you don't have to go far to see a lively discussion. You read one Web log and, sure, you're limited in what you're seeing. But if you read one newspaper or watch one television network, you're just as limited."

At this early stage in war-blog history, most sites are extremely wide-ranging and and almost unbearably informative (do these people ever leave their laptops?) without sacrificing the first-person approach. Eric Alterman writes an opinionated column called Altercations for msnbc.com, and his paragraphs are filled with blue-tinted links.

"I make my arguments," he says, mentioning how he had called the Bush foreign-policy team incompetent bozos. "But it's important for me to show that I'm not just talking off the top of my head."

By writing for a mainstream outlet such as msnbc.com, Mr. Alterman gets much stronger reactions than he would if he were isolated in his own private blog space. He quotes a letter he's just opened (all bloggers are unapologetic multitaskers) that calls his diary "a compendium of extremist stupidity." And yet, he says, this wider exposure of his intimate thoughts is both good and necessary.

"You judge a man by his enemies to some extent. I need to be exposed to ideas outside my own cocoon."

That will certainly happen to bloggers as more and more big media organizations pick up on the device, and many Web logs will undoubtedly lose their edge as they move upscale. But even now, reaching thousands of readers instead of dozens, many war bloggers say they can only practise their craft by treating it as the personal space it originally was.

"It really doesn't concern me whether anyone looks at this besides me," Bruce Rolston says. Mr. Rolston, who manages a university Web site by day and serves as a Canadian Forces logistics officer on weekends, writes a wonderfully detailed analysis of the war's tactics at http://www.snappingturtle.net/jmc/flit.

Though he disclaims any military expertise, Mr. Rolston's trenchant critiques of what he believes is going on are bracing to war obsessives who need to know everything -- a group that appears to be growing day by day. If you want to follow the movements of the 101st Airborne, or consider how bad the fighting in Najal might be, or conjecture why the beleaguered U.S. military might cut some ties with the embedded journalists, read the man with the laptop in Toronto.

No newspaper editor or TV producer would ever allow Mr. Rolston's work near a general reader or viewer, for fear of taxing or boring them. But war creates a need to know and the desire to share expertise, whether it's about daily life in Baghdad, antiwar poets in New York, or where the war is going on the banks of the Euphrates.

"The thirst for information on-line is remarkable now," Mr. Rolston says. "It's a defence mechanism after Sept. 11 -- people are willing to suck the information system dry."

John Allemang is a feature writer for The Globe and Mail.

Top war blogs

Some of the most popular and admired Web logs following the war, all linked with numerous other blogs and news sites:

The Agonist:

http://www.agonist.org
Renowned for its rapid reporting, this is the site many people turn to for the latest developments.

Tacitus:

http://www.tacitus.org

A smart, generous pro-war blog specializing in strategy and deep background.

The Command Post:

command-post.org

Minute-by-minute war updates, and reliably rant-free.

Warblogging.com:

http://www.warblogging.com

All-encompassing news and views, from an antiwar perspective.

Back to Iraq 2.0:

http://www.back-to-iraq.com

Supported by on-line donations, journalist Christopher Allbritton has been hailed as the first independent Web foreign correspondent.

Where is Raed?:

dear_raed.blogspot.com

Moving accounts of daily life in Baghdad, now worryingly sporadic.

Kevin Sites:

http://www.kevinsites.net

The CNN correspondent's suspended personal site chronicles life in Northern Iraq.

InstaPundit:

instapundit.com

Labelled the Grand Central Station of Bloggerville for its wide-ranging links, bolstered by cocky opinionizing from a Tennessee law professor.

Eschaton:

atrios.blogspot.com

Mouthy, to-the-point observations on bad government and weak media.

-- John Allemang

The Globe and Mail

U.S. intelligence officials have been spamming Iraq's generals and leaders of Saddam Hussein's ruling Baath Party via phone and email with promises of safety, asylum and a role in Iraq's new government if they defect, mount a coup or agree not to use biological or chemical weapons.

The spam, directed by the CIA, began three months ago during the buildup of U.S. and coalition forces on Iraq's borders. Initially, U.S. officials were so confident that they could persuade Iraqi leaders to surrender that they delayed the start of the war. And although those early efforts were largely unsuccessful, the communications have resumed even as U.S. forces carry out air and ground assaults inside Iraq, according to three intelligence and two military officials directly involved in the communications efforts.

United Press international reports that Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Moore is working on a documentary about the "the murky relationship" between former President George Bush and the family of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. The movie, Fahrenheit 911, will suggest that the bin Laden family profited greatly from the association.

According to Moore, the former president had a business relationship with Osama bin Laden's father, Mohammed bin Laden, a Saudi construction magnate who left $300 million to Osama bin Laden. It has been widely reported that bin Laden used the inheritance to finance global terrorism.

Moore said the bin Laden family was heavily invested in the Carlyle Group, a private global investment firm that the filmmaker said frequently buys failing defense companies and then sells them at a profit. Former President Bush has reportedly served as a senior adviser with the firm.

"The senior Bush kept his ties with the bin Laden family up until two months after Sept. 11," said Moore.

Moore said he expects the new movie to be in U.S. theaters in time for the 2004 presidential election. "I expressed exactly what was in the film and instead of being blacklisted, I've not only gotten a deal to fund Fahrenheit 911 but offers on the film after," he said.

From MoveOn.org:

"American media outlets have chosen to stifle or simply not show the most terrible and saddening aspects of this war. They are reluctant to air the voices of critics who are raising important questions about its effectiveness and purpose. And they appear to have acceded to the Bush Administration's desire to black out pictures or footage of civilian casualties.

We need to demand the full picture. The MoveOn Media Corps is a group of committed MoveOn volunteers who will mobilize to push the media to fairly cover this war. The action ideas we send you won't generally take longer than 15 minutes, but to be part of the Corps we ask that you commit to taking up to one action per day. The actions could include calling media outlets when they air especially bad coverage, pushing Clear Channel radio to stop censoring anti-war songs, or writing letters to the editor."

Interested parties can join by filling out this form. MoveOn is extending a special request to AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) users: "we especially need your help. We're developing an IM-based instant response network. By adding your handle, we'll be able to contact you with urgent, time-sensitive alerts that can make an impact more quickly than ever possible before."

The Guardian reports that General Paul Van Riper, a retired marine lieutenant-general, told the Army Times that the biggest war game in US military history, staged this month at a cost of £165 m with 13,000 troops, was rigged to ensure that the Americans beat their "Middle Eastern" adversaries.

Gen. Van Riper protested by quitting his role as commander of "enemy forces" (which bore a strong re semblance to Iraq, but could have been Iran), and warning that the Pentagon might wrongly conclude that its experimental tactics were working.

The Army Times reported that, as commander of a low-tech, third-world army, Gen Van Riper appeared to have repeatedly outwitted US forces. He sent orders with motorcycle couriers to evade sophisticated electronic eavesdropping equipment. When the US fleet sailed into the Gulf, he instructed his small boats and planes to move around in apparently aimless circles before launching a surprise attack which sank a substantial part of the US navy. The war game had to be stopped and the American ships "refloated" so that the US forces stood a chance.

After too much success, Van riper noted that "We were directed... to move air defences so that the army and marine units could successfully land," he said. "We were simply directed to turn [air defence systems] off or move them... So it was scripted to be whatever the control group wanted it to be."

[Glad to see that they're using smart bombs -- imagine this kid got hit in the eye?]

Saja Jaffar, 2, is treated by a hospital nurse after being wounded by a bomb that landed in West Baghdad Friday, March 28 2003. Five died in the blast according to local hospital sources. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay)

[I'm not sure about this one myself - I mean the organization is legit, certainly, just the concept seems troublesome. Well, it's too late for me, I filed a week ago. -- bks]

It's almost time again for those it's-almost-time-again news stories about the tax deadline, some old-fashioned good-natured, compassionating grumbling about the pain of civic duty, all of which will be reducible to that old-fashioned good-natured command: PAY TRIBUTE (AND ON TIME PLEASE). But in part or in whole you don't have to, and, especially right now, you might consider coyly withholding some or all of your alienating dollars to be your pressing civic duty. Or you might just get a little extra languorous about deadlines while the military machine gets a little more nervous about time passing. If you're at all interested in blocking the intersection of you and government, go to the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee at http://www.nwtrcc.org/. -- Geoffrey G. O'Brien

(Gothic News Services, 03/29) United Nations, Secretary-General Koffi Annan's Washington, D.C. Address at an undisclosed location where the Secretary-General briefly spoke on Britain and the United States¹ Refusal to Comply with the Inspection Process and the Joint Decision of these two former Member countries to secede from the rule of the United Nations and Invade the Sovereign Nation of Iraq:

Two score and eighteen years ago, our nations' leaders brought forth on this globe, the United Nations, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all member nations are created equal. Now we are engaged in an international civil war, testing whether the United Nations, or any global body so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are not yet met on the great battle-field of this war. We have not yet come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who will give their lives so that these United Nations will live. It will be altogether fitting and proper do this.

But in a larger sense, we will not dedicate ­ we will not consecrate ­ we will not hallow this ground. The brave men and women, living and dead, who will have struggled here, will have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it will never forget what they will have done here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who will have fought here will have so nobly advanced. It is for us to be dedicated to the great task remaining before us ­ that from the to be honored dead we may take increased devotion to that cause for which they will give the last full measure of devotion ­ that we here highly resolve that the future dead shall not have died in vain ­ that these United Nations shall have a new birth of freedom ­ and that the government of nations, by the nations, for the nations, and for the peoples of these nations of the world, shall not perish from the earth.

My station is a threat to American media control - and they know it

by Faisal Bodi

Last month, when it became clear that the US-led drive to war was irreversible, I - like many other British journalists - relocated to Qatar for a ringside seat. But I am an Islamist journalist, so while the others bedded down at the £1m media center at US central command in As-Sayliyah, I found a more humble berth in the capital Doha, working for the internet arm of al-Jazeera.

And yet, only a week into the war, I find myself working for the most sought-after news resource in the world. On March 23, the night the channel screened the first footage of captured US PoW's, al-Jazeera was the most searched item on the internet portal, Lycos, registering three times as many hits as the next item.

I do not mean to brag - people are turning to us simply because the western media coverage has been so poor. For although Doha is just a 15-minute drive from central command, the view of events from here could not be more different. Of all the major global networks, al-Jazeera has been alone in proceeding from the premise that this war should be viewed as an illegal enterprise. It has broadcast the horror of the bombing campaign, the blown-out brains, the blood-spattered pavements, the screaming infants and the corpses. Its team of on-the-ground, unembedded correspondents has provided a corrective to the official line that the campaign is, barring occasional resistance, going to plan.

Last Tuesday, while western channels were celebrating a Basra "uprising" which none of them could have witnessed since they don't have reporters in the city, our correspondent in the Sheraton there returned a rather flat verdict of "uneventful" - a view confirmed shortly afterwards by a spokesman for the opposition Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. By reporting propaganda as fact, the mainstream media had simply mirrored the Blair/Bush fantasy that the people who have been starved by UN sanctions and deformed by depleted uranium since 1991 will greet them as saviors.

Only hours before the Basra non-event, one of Iraq's most esteemed Shia authorities, Ayatollah Sistani, had dented coalition hopes of a southern uprising by reiterating a fatwa calling on all Muslims to resist the US-led forces. This real, and highly significant, event went unreported in the west.

Earlier in the week Arab viewers had seen the gruesome aftermath of the coalition bombing of "Ansar al-Islam" positions in the north-east of the country. All but two of the 35 killed were civilians in an area controlled by a neutral Islamist group, a fact passed over with undue haste in western reports. And before that, on the second day of the war, most of the western media reported verbatim central command statements that Umm Qasr was under "coalition" control - it was not until Wednesday that al-Jazeera could confirm all resistance there had been pacified.

Throughout the past week, armed peoples in the west and south have been attacking the exposed rearguard of coalition positions, while all the time - despite debilitating sandstorms - western TV audiences have seen little except their steady advance towards Baghdad. This is not truthful reporting.

There is also a marked difference when reporting the anger the invasion has unleashed on the Muslim street. The view from here is that any vestige of goodwill towards the US has evaporated with this latest aggression, and that Britain has now joined the US and Israel as a target of this rage.

The British media has condemned al-Jazeera's decision to screen a 30-second video clip of two dead British soldiers. This is simple hypocrisy. From the outset of the war, the British media has not balked at showing images of Iraqi soldiers either dead or captured and humiliated.

Amid the battle for hearts and minds in the most information-controlled war in history, one measure of the importance of those American PoW pictures and the images of the dead British soldiers is surely the sustained "shock and awe" hacking campaign directed at aljazeera.net since the start of the war. As I write, the al-Jazeera website has been down for three days and few here doubt that the provenance of the attack is the Pentagon. Meanwhile, our hosting company, the US-based DataPipe, has terminated our contract after lobbying by other clients whose websites have been brought down by the hacking.

It's too early for me to say when, or indeed if, I will return to my homeland. So far this war has progressed according to a near worst-case scenario. Iraqis have not turned against their tormentor. The southern Shia regard the invasion force as the greater Satan. Opposition in surrounding countries is shaking their regimes. I fear there remains much work to be done.

Al-Jazeera Tells the Truth About War

[Special thanks to my New Yorker reading friends for pointing this one out to me-- I didn't even know they were online. Read following Ari & I to see how fond the Administration is of Seymour Hersh.]

Why did the Administration endorse a forgery about Iraq’s nuclear program?

Last September 24th, as Congress prepared to vote on the resolution authorizing President George W. Bush to wage war in Iraq, a group of senior intelligence officials, including George Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence, briefed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Iraq’s weapons capability. It was an important presentation for the Bush Administration. Some Democrats were publicly questioning the President’s claim that Iraq still possessed weapons of mass destruction which posed an immediate threat to the United States. Just the day before, former Vice-President Al Gore had sharply criticized the Administration’s advocacy of preëmptive war, calling it a doctrine that would replace “a world in which states consider themselves subject to law” with “the notion that there is no law but the discretion of the President of the United States.” A few Democrats were also considering putting an alternative resolution before Congress.

According to two of those present at the briefing, which was highly classified and took place in the committee’s secure hearing room, Tenet declared, as he had done before, that a shipment of high-strength aluminum tubes that was intercepted on its way to Iraq had been meant for the construction of centrifuges that could be used to produce enriched uranium. The suitability of the tubes for that purpose had been disputed, but this time the argument that Iraq had a nuclear program under way was buttressed by a new and striking fact: the C.I.A. had recently received intelligence showing that, between 1999 and 2001, Iraq had attempted to buy five hundred tons of uranium oxide from Niger, one of the world’s largest producers. The uranium, known as “yellow cake,” can be used to make fuel for nuclear reactors; if processed differently, it can also be enriched to make weapons. Five tons can produce enough weapon-grade uranium for a bomb. (When the C.I.A. spokesman William Harlow was asked for comment, he denied that Tenet had briefed the senators on Niger.)

On the same day, in London, Tony Blair’s government made public a dossier containing much of the information that the Senate committee was being given in secret—that Iraq had sought to buy “significant quantities of uranium” from an unnamed African country, “despite having no active civil nuclear power programme that could require it.” The allegation attracted immediate attention; a headline in the London Guardian declared, “african gangs offer route to uranium.”

Two days later, Secretary of State Colin Powell, appearing before a closed hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also cited Iraq’s attempt to obtain uranium from Niger as evidence of its persistent nuclear ambitions. The testimony from Tenet and Powell helped to mollify the Democrats, and two weeks later the resolution passed overwhelmingly, giving the President a congressional mandate for a military assault on Iraq.

On December 19th, Washington, for the first time, publicly identified Niger as the alleged seller of the nuclear materials, in a State Department position paper that rhetorically asked, “Why is the Iraqi regime hiding their uranium procurement?” (The charge was denied by both Iraq and Niger.) A former high-level intelligence official told me that the information on Niger was judged serious enough to include in the President’s Daily Brief, known as the P.D.B., one of the most sensitive intelligence documents in the American system. Its information is supposed to be carefully analyzed, or “scrubbed.” Distribution of the two- or three-page early-morning report, which is prepared by the C.I.A., is limited to the President and a few other senior officials. The P.D.B. is not made available, for example, to any members of the Senate or House Intelligence Committees. “I don’t think anybody here sees that thing,” a State Department analyst told me. “You only know what’s in the P.D.B. because it echoes—people talk about it.”

President Bush cited the uranium deal, along with the aluminum tubes, in his State of the Union Message, on January 28th, while crediting Britain as the source of the information: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” He commented, “Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide.”

Then the story fell apart. On March 7th, Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna, told the U.N. Security Council that the documents involving the Niger-Iraq uranium sale were fakes. “The I.A.E.A. has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents . . . are in fact not authentic,” ElBaradei said.

One senior I.A.E.A. official went further. He told me, “These documents are so bad that I cannot imagine that they came from a serious intelligence agency. It depresses me, given the low quality of the documents, that it was not stopped. At the level it reached, I would have expected more checking.”

The I.A.E.A. had first sought the documents last fall, shortly after the British government released its dossier. After months of pleading by the I.A.E.A., the United States turned them over to Jacques Baute, who is the director of the agency’s Iraq Nuclear Verification Office.

It took Baute’s team only a few hours to determine that the documents were fake. The agency had been given about a half-dozen letters and other communications between officials in Niger and Iraq, many of them written on letterheads of the Niger government. The problems were glaring. One letter, dated October 10, 2000, was signed with the name of Allele Habibou, a Niger Minister of Foreign Affairs and Coöperation, who had been out of office since 1989. Another letter, allegedly from Tandja Mamadou, the President of Niger, had a signature that had obviously been faked and a text with inaccuracies so egregious, the senior I.A.E.A. official said, that “they could be spotted by someone using Google on the Internet.”

The large quantity of uranium involved should have been another warning sign. Niger’s “yellow cake” comes from two uranium mines controlled by a French company, with its entire output presold to nuclear power companies in France, Japan, and Spain. “Five hundred tons can’t be siphoned off without anyone noticing,” another I.A.E.A. official told me.

This official told me that the I.A.E.A. has not been able to determine who actually prepared the documents. “It could be someone who intercepted faxes in Israel, or someone at the headquarters of the Niger Foreign Ministry, in Niamey. We just don’t know,” the official said. “Somebody got old letterheads and signatures, and cut and pasted.” Some I.A.E.A. investigators suspected that the inspiration for the documents was a trip that the Iraqi Ambassador to Italy took to several African countries, including Niger, in February, 1999. They also speculated that MI6—the branch of British intelligence responsible for foreign operations—had become involved, perhaps through contacts in Italy, after the Ambassador’s return to Rome.

Baute, according to the I.A.E.A. official, “confronted the United States with the forgery: ‘What do you have to say?’ They had nothing to say.”

ElBaradei’s disclosure has not been disputed by any government or intelligence official in Washington or London. Colin Powell, asked about the forgery during a television interview two days after ElBaradei’s report, dismissed the subject by saying, “If that issue is resolved, that issue is resolved.” A few days later, at a House hearing, he denied that anyone in the United States government had anything to do with the forgery. “It came from other sources,” Powell testified. “It was provided in good faith to the inspectors.”

The forgery became the object of widespread, and bitter, questions in Europe about the credibility of the United States. But it initially provoked only a few news stories in America, and little sustained questioning about how the White House could endorse such an obvious fake. On March 8th, an American official who had reviewed the documents was quoted in the Washington Post as explaining, simply, “We fell for it.”

The Bush Administration’s reliance on the Niger documents may, however, have stemmed from more than bureaucratic carelessness or political overreaching. Forged documents and false accusations have been an element in U.S. and British policy toward Iraq at least since the fall of 1997, after an impasse over U.N. inspections. Then as now, the Security Council was divided, with the French, the Russians, and the Chinese telling the United States and the United Kingdom that they were being too tough on the Iraqis. President Bill Clinton, weakened by the impeachment proceedings, hinted of renewed bombing, but, then as now, the British and the Americans were losing the battle for international public opinion. A former Clinton Administration official told me that London had resorted to, among other things, spreading false information about Iraq. The British propaganda program—part of its Information Operations, or I/Ops—was known to a few senior officials in Washington. “I knew that was going on,” the former Clinton Administration official said of the British efforts. “We were getting ready for action in Iraq, and we wanted the Brits to prepare.”

Over the next year, a former American intelligence officer told me, at least one member of the U.N. inspection team who supported the American and British position arranged for dozens of unverified and unverifiable intelligence reports and tips—data known as inactionable intelligence—to be funnelled to MI6 operatives and quietly passed along to newspapers in London and elsewhere. “It was intelligence that was crap, and that we couldn’t move on, but the Brits wanted to plant stories in England and around the world,” the former officer said. There was a series of clandestine meetings with MI6, at which documents were provided, as well as quiet meetings, usually at safe houses in the Washington area. The British propaganda scheme eventually became known to some members of the U.N. inspection team. “I knew a bit,” one official still on duty at U.N. headquarters acknowledged last week, “but I was never officially told about it.”

None of the past and present officials I spoke with were able to categorically state that the fake Niger documents were created or instigated by the same propaganda office in MI6 that had been part of the anti-Iraq propaganda wars in the late nineteen-nineties. (An MI6 intelligence source declined to comment.) Press reports in the United States and elsewhere have suggested other possible sources: the Iraqi exile community, the Italians, the French. What is generally agreed upon, a congressional intelligence-committee staff member told me, is that the Niger documents were initially circulated by the British—President Bush said as much in his State of the Union speech—and that “the Brits placed more stock in them than we did.” It is also clear, as the former high-level intelligence official told me, that “something as bizarre as Niger raises suspicions everywhere.”

What went wrong? Did a poorly conceived propaganda effort by British intelligence, whose practices had been known for years to senior American officials, manage to move, without significant challenge, through the top layers of the American intelligence community and into the most sacrosanct of Presidential briefings? Who permitted it to go into the President’s State of the Union speech? Was the message—the threat posed by Iraq—more important than the integrity of the intelligence-vetting process? Was the Administration lying to itself? Or did it deliberately give Congress and the public what it knew to be bad information?

Asked to respond, Harlow, the C.I.A. spokesman, said that the agency had not obtained the actual documents until early this year, after the President’s State of the Union speech and after the congressional briefings, and therefore had been unable to evaluate them in a timely manner. Harlow refused to respond to questions about the role of Britain’s MI6. Harlow’s statement does not, of course, explain why the agency left the job of exposing the embarrassing forgery to the I.A.E.A. It puts the C.I.A. in an unfortunate position: it is, essentially, copping a plea of incompetence.

The chance for American intelligence to challenge the documents came as the Administration debated whether to pass them on to ElBaradei. The former high-level intelligence official told me that some senior C.I.A. officials were aware that the documents weren’t trustworthy. “It’s not a question as to whether they were marginal. They can’t be ‘sort of’ bad, or ‘sort of’ ambiguous. They knew it was a fraud—it was useless. Everybody bit their tongue and said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if the Secretary of State said this?’ The Secretary of State never saw the documents.” He added, “He’s absolutely apoplectic about it.” (A State Department spokesman was unable to comment.) A former intelligence officer told me that some questions about the authenticity of the Niger documents were raised inside the government by analysts at the Department of Energy and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. However, these warnings were not heeded.

“Somebody deliberately let something false get in there,” the former high-level intelligence official added. “It could not have gotten into the system without the agency being involved. Therefore it was an internal intention. Someone set someone up.” (The White House declined to comment.)

Washington’s case that the Iraqi regime had failed to meet its obligation to give up weapons of mass destruction was, of course, based on much more than a few documents of questionable provenance from a small African nation. But George W. Bush’s war against Iraq has created enormous anxiety throughout the world—in part because one side is a superpower and the other is not. It can’t help the President’s case, or his international standing, when his advisers brief him with falsehoods, whether by design or by mistake.

On March 14th, Senator Jay Rockefeller, of West Virginia, the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, formally asked Robert Mueller, the F.B.I. director, to investigate the forged documents. Rockefeller had voted for the resolution authorizing force last fall. Now he wrote to Mueller, “There is a possibility that the fabrication of these documents may be part of a larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq.” He urged the F.B.I. to ascertain the source of the documents, the skill-level of the forgery, the motives of those responsible, and “why the intelligence community did not recognize the documents were fabricated.” A Rockefeller aide told me that the F.B.I. had promised to look into it.

Mokhiber: Richard N. Perle is the chairman of the Defense Policy Board and a leading public advocate for war on Iraq. In the New Yorker magazine this week, Seymour Hersh reports that Perle is also managing partner in a venture capital company, Trireme Partners, that is positioned to profit from a war with Iraq. The federal Code of Conduct, which governs Perle in this matter, prohibits conflicts of interest. Henry Kissinger resigned from the 911 commission because of similar business conflicts. When asked on Sunday by Wolf Blitzer about the New Yorker article, Perle called Hersh "the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist." Two questions. Given Perle's conflict of interest, and given the widespread public belief that this war is being driven by corporate interests -- war for oil, war for defense contracts, war for construction contracts -- does the President believe -

Fleischer: Whose informed judgement is that?

Mokhiber: Widespread public belief.

Fleischer: Widespread?

Mokhiber: Yes, widespread.

Fleischer: Widespread, or just that chair?

Mokhiber: No, widespread. Does the President believe that Richard Perle should resign from the Defense Policy Board? And the second question, do you agree with Richard Perle that Hersh is "the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist."

Fleischer: Russell, there is absolutely no basis to your own individual and personal statement about what may lead to war. If anything leads to it is the fact that Saddam Hussein has refused to disarm. And I think you do an injustice to people, no matter what their background, if you believe that people believe that Saddam Hussein should be disarmed for any reason that suggests personal profit.

Mokhiber: What about the question Ari? Should he resign - and is he a terrorist?

Fleischer: Russell, you have made your speech.

Mokhiber: You didn't answer the question.

Fleischer: You have made your speech.

Ari & I: White House Press Briefing - March 13, 2003

The war is language,
          language abused
                    for Advertisement,
          language used
like magic for power on the planet

          —Allen Ginsberg, “Wichita Vortex Sutra” (1966)

If the first casualty of war is truth, the weapon of choice for its destruction is language. Tautology: “A war is a war.” We are caught in a barrage of language that is meant to destroy our capacity to interpret what is said, to make rational judgments, to evaluate moral choices, to visualize what is going on, to think the unthinkable, to remember, to imagine an alternative future, to connect to others, to use language for all its purposes, to convey content, to express emotion, to reveal its own signification, to make noise. Non sequitur: “Reassurance and Safety Fashion Show in Detroit: Valerie Hillery came because she is concerned. Not scared, she said, just concerned ‘because anything can happen.’” This destruction of truth by language as a military objective is being undertaken in multiple and reinforcing ways, primarily by the selection of metaphors and frame narratives that lock on to interpretive targets (what you are encouraged to think) so as to exclude collateral damage (anything else you might think), reinforced by their stultifying redundancy such that language is emptied of anything but its dumbed-down signification. [. . .]

Personification: “‘This is the head-of-the-snake conundrum,” said one senior official who was deeply involved in the planning for a post-Hussein Iraq.” Euphemism: “‘No one wants to commit themselves until it is clear regime change is happening.’” We are being saturated with the language of war games, policy scenarios, press conferences, official narratives, insider speculation, all scripted to be conveyed as if their assumptions were shared by everyone. “American military officials said the American soldiers had killed about 450 Iraqis and destroyed more than 35 vehicles. There was no word on American casualties.” At the same time, this language depends on a circularity in which the undeniable evidence of power (jets take off from aircraft carriers; military hardware lines up at the border; news media records surgical bombing campaigns; barefoot prisoners of war submit to troops) is juxtaposed with unavailable evidence of mysteries that may never be revealed (foremost among them, weapons of mass destruction as the rationale for war). For Gen. Tommy Franks, “there is no doubt that they exist” is equivalent to “our victory is sure.” Objective pseudo-facts are invented on the spot to explain rationales that have failed: that southern Iraqis have not revolted in support of the invasion = presence of “fedayeen,” so new to the public relations campaign that Gen. Tommy Franks cannot pronounce it. Metonymy: a “fedayeen” is a dark cipher, a shadowy particular that explains any event that does not go according to predetermined script, the antagonistic element that denies us our destiny. For it is a circular truth that everything can only go according to plan, a sublime blueprint known only to those closest to power: providence unfolds in mysterious ways. Narrative: “‘The moment the security apparatus of the country crumbles, the people will rise up,’ he said.” When will we convene a war crimes tribunal for the abuse of language, seen as a universal good? “Mr. Rumsfeld said today: I am very reluctant to run around the world encouraging people to rise up. . . . But I hope and pray they’ll do it at a time when there are sufficient forces nearby to be helpful to them rather than at a time where it simply costs their life and it’s a wasted life.” Driving to Kansas State University in Wichita, in a Volkswagen bus in February 1966, talking nonstop into a tape recorder as he listened to radio reports and took in the road signs along the way, Allen Ginsberg had a prescient vision of the condition of language we are in. Poetry: “Has anyone looked in the eyes of the wounded? / Have we seen but paper faces, Life Magazine? / Are screaming faces made of dots, / electric dots on Television—fuzzy decibels registering / the mammal voiced howl / from the outskirts of Saigon to console model picture tubes / in Beatrice, in Hutchinson, in El Dorado / in historic Abilene / O inconsolable!” The critique of the language is the first place to begin to attempt remove the veil to perception that has been imposed on us and to see things as they are. Pseudo-rationality based on lack of evidence or supporting argument: “It is difficult to conceive the volume of supplies required for a large combat force or the difficulty of delivering them where they are needed in a timely fashion.” We need to take the mechanized hardware of the language of war apart—by locating alternate evidence in multiple media, by questioning the pseudo-objectivity of its delusional conclusions, by unpacking its embedded metaphors and narrative frames, by thinking otherwise. Creative use of non sequitur: “War—what is it good for? Absolutely nothing.” We need to place our critical negativity in the language that surrounds us, as Allen Ginsberg did 37 years ago, as it is obvious the situation of language we are now in has grown even worse. Critical intervention: “The war is not the war; it is language.” To dismantle this war, in its causes and consequences, we must begin with language itself.

Read at a Day of Reflection on the War on Iraq, Wayne State University, 26 March 2003.

Before yesterday my worst worry was a Germany 1939-type scenario, but the protests of March 27 have reduced my worry to something like Pinochet’s Chile or present day China. Yesterday marked, for me, the return of street activism to New York City and to the evolving and now very real, anti-war (or as Betsy insists anti-Imperial Invasion) movement. All over people are organizing in trust-worthy cells and yesterday, ( in addition to the massive die-in and subsequent arrest of 215 activists) in several places along Broadway and other places, we shut down Business-As-Usual by shutting down traffic with banners, garbage, tape, chants (No More War) and cyclists circling preventing cars--at one point at the busy intersection of Broadway and Prince for at least 10-12 minutes. Cops were everywhere and paranoia can be debilitating. But the success of an action, the solidarity of the group, and the kindnesses we show each other, move us forward. -- Rachel Levitsky

Jason Christie, currently of Calgary, Alberta, ruminates on world and personal issues in the following poetre-mail transmission.

Good Day

When I woke up today. The phone rang. My friend said you can't use the word punctilious in a poem. It has most certainly been tity-one mondays since we last discussed Stompin' Tom Connors. That it was the phone when it rang. What I've been trying to say. Is that you can't use the word poem in a poem. Anymore, or over the phone early in tehe morning; that certain prisoners of war are or once were our friends, bastards, themselves outshined by the sun, even the sun that now shines through my bedroom window, past the little bonsai leaves and rubber alligator, over the blue sheets, the dark bluee sheets, the dark blue sheets which you have pulled up over your head and it is at least seven am.
Punctilious.

Good Day

Our hands were so tired from changing the lightbulbs that we saw above all those people's heads. Donald Rumsfield won't even be a name we'll recognize in an hundred years. Not even Americans. With their eye flashes. It happened when you threw the lard into the frying pan, the third degree burns all up and down my arms. And that makes my hands tired too, I guess.

Good Day

Today it ruins. You've got 48 hrs without Nolte and Murphy. Black droplets; tears rend the sky into what appears to be a beach replete with driftwood. Our hour.

Good Day

Once is has passed upon a time, cloaked Wagner, quick institute bellows our youngsters, gifted or otherwise accidental. No one was badly hurt. Control blasts across the room and the weather chinooks it should be said. Beasts rifle the pages and further the blue on blue aphasia. How come your legs work. Against understanding in such plain talk as this. Rooms move past confederate Canadians, evolution beyond mourning: one against many should reveal itself as a Bruce Willis sort of construct and therefore false; a storm out of nowhere, see how semi-colons work, that is, a reading...

Good Day

Spin it clicks awake, and the blue as in sheets, rewind, that it said humble returns, eternally yours, and the kerning got all fucked up so fast between us. The US and the rest. That's them's the breaks I guess. This windows platform expertise makes lines break, little green hashes advance up the column till they drive from dark green, evergreen, central intelligence to red, bright red, with a little element to heat it all up from the center, between the screens, those blue screens. A several thing. Multifold. Many are folded into a discussion of kitchen sinks and their relationship to poetry, the porcelain wasn't always nontoxic. Who doesn't have a problematic relationship to such an overwhelming colonizing force? The english language? What we do is squat, rent some ideas, turn the sound down, enliven. The green movement against the whalers. Interviews would suggest that even the grass is fed up with growth because of the latent incorporations of so many natural metaphors by business. Add vert i sing. The fundamentals changed teams. Damn carpet pulled itself out from under my feet. To sleep at some point later. Find William Carlos Williams' Pictures from Cavanaugh under my pillow since my girlfriend has a group project on his poem the fall of Mike Harris. It goes unnoticed. Bellows in the annals of history. While the market seems to be on an upward swing. Technologies on the front lines aching for just a few more feet of desert. In advance.

Good Day

Mannerists matter mostly to muttering mothers on mondays. My mother. It was around this time that her mother died from complications that arose during some 'minor' surgery. My grandmother. Chrome graves risen, stand the blades of grass above the stiff; caught in the wind that also moves the elm's leaves far above. Scarborough to Capitol Hill. A granite key scrapes between the lines on my front door for you to let yourself in, and in hindsight you made breakfast before I even got out of bed around noon. That sentence is dead. Money is information. Water doesn't have a wallet. Or a shed. Something like language. You said be patient and I probably muttered something like I will if you are the doctor. If I could go back, I'd make breakfast before you got to my place, and I'd also most likely not say that thing about you being a doctor. It is all economics at our feet, the rubble of war over the airwaves, where I discover even you have succumbed to the dynamics of pressure, water wears down, erodes, new lines of slight, it builds on all of our shoulders, that snow as if flakes to the ground again, through the goddamned streetlight that slipped itself right into the poem by virtue, by virtue of it having no idea about the war, or about this poem, or about the fact it is unnatural; a mockery even of the UN in all of its patience. Standing tall out of the clouds, those clouds that roll across the ocean, charging steeds, steelheads billows sails out front over the wild drops, deep wells between the waves, deep wells somewhere and then gone. Gone just as fast between the ebb and flow of what my mother said the other day about leaving her husband; the graveyard is the brightest landmark back home, in Milton. Then there's this wind again. You find the key between the lines at my front door, let yourself in, and to my belated surprise make blueberry pancakes, some coffee, wake me softly out of a deep sleep asking whether or not I slept well through the night, through the storms.

Good Day

I watched television at work today and wanted to scream at CNN and BBC world news that they were capitalizing on the suffering of millions. But then, why is this poem any different?

kré                                                 puc te
kré               Everything must             puk te
pek               be arranged                  li le
kre                to a hair                      pek ti le
e                   in fulminating               kruk
pte                order.                    

I learned yesterday
(I must be behind the times, or perhaps
   it's only a false rumor, one of those pieces
   of spiteful gossip that are circulated between
   sink and latrine at the hour when meals that
   have been ingurgitated one more time are
   thrown in the slop buckets),
I learned yesterday
one of the most sensational of those official
   practices of American public schools
which no doubt account for the fact that this
   country believes itself to be in the vanguard
   of progress.
It seems that, among the examinations or tests
   required of a child entering public school for
   the first time, there is the so-called seminal
   fluid or sperm test,

which consists of asking this newly entering
   child for a small amount of his sperm so it
   can be placed in a jar
and kept ready for any attempts at artificial
insemination that might later take place.
For Americans are finding more and more
   that they lack muscle and children,
that is, not workers
but soldiers,
and they want at all costs and by every possible
   means to make and manufacture soldiers
with a view to all the planetary wars which might
   later take place,
and which would be intended to demonstrate by
   the overwhelming virtues of force
the superiority of American products,
and the fruits of American sweat in all fields of
   activity and of the superiority of the possible
   dynamism of force.
Because one must produce,
one must by all possible means of activity replace
   nature wherever it can be replaced,
one must find a major field of action for human inertia,
the worker must have something to keep him busy,
new fields of activity must be created,
in which we shall see at last the reign of all the fake
manufactured products,
of all the vile synthetic substitutes
in which beautiful real nature has no part,