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,
and must give way finally and shamefully before
   all the victorious substitute products
in which the sperm of all the artificial insemination
   factories
will make a miracle
in order to produce armies and battleships.
No more fruit, no more trees, no more vegetables,
   no more plants pharmaceutical or otherwise and
   consequently no more food,
but synthetic products to satiety,
amid the fumes,
amid the special humors of the atmosphere, on the
   particular axes of atmospheres wrenched violently
   and synthetically from the resistances of a nature
   which has known nothing of war except fear.
And war is wonderful, isn't it?
For it's war, isn't it, that the Americans have been
   preparing for and are preparing for this way step
   by step.
In order to defend this senseless manufacture from
   all competition that could not fail to arise on all
   sides,
one must have soldiers, armies, airplanes, battleships,
hence this sperm
which it seems the governments of America have had
   the effrontery to think of.
For we have more than one enemy
lying in wait for us, my son,
we, the born capitalists,
and among these enemies
Stalin's Russia
which also doesn't lack armed men.
All this is very well,
but I didn't know the Americans were such a warlike
   people.
In order to fight one must get shot at
and although I have seen many Americans at war
they always had huge armies of tanks, airplanes,
   battleships
that served as their shield.
I have seen machines fighting a lot
but only infinitely far
                behind
them have I seen the men who directed them.
Rather than a people who feed their horses, cattle,
   and mules the last tons of real morphine they have
   left and replace it with substitutes made of smoke,
I prefer the people who eat of the bare earth the delirium
   from which they were born
I mean the Tarahumara
eating peyote off the ground
while they are born,
and who kill the sun to establish the kingdom of black
   night,
and who smash the cross so that the spaces of space can
   never again meet and cross.

And so now you are going to hear the dance of the T U T U G U R I.
                                  Antonin Artaud (1947)

Trans. by Helen Weaver

Also:
http://www.ubu.com/sound/artaud.html

Poets for Peace, Poets Against the War and Poetry Is News invite all poets
to read poems against the war on the steps (near the lion) of the main
branch of The New York Public Library at 42nd St and 5th Ave on Friday March
28 at 1pm. Rain or shine. Look for the "Poets for Peace" banner.

We also invite all poets to an open reading on the steps of St. Mark's
Church at 131 E 10th St (on the corner of 2nd Ave) on Wednesday April 2 from
noon to 2pm. This is an open call for poets to bring their own and others'
anti-war poems.

For more info: www.poetsagainstthewar.org

This image is from the second piece of pro-war spam I've received in two days; both were offers for crap-ass jingoistic t-shirts (presumably, this is what you wear while learning how to enlarge your penis, buy Viagra online and and invest in African pyramid schemes). I heartily recommend Spamsieve or any Bayesian filtering system for dealing with this problem (Bayesian filtering is built into the new Mac mail application) -- it kills spam dead.

(Gothic News Service, 03/25) Viz-Ops ­ the White House/Pentagon organization in Iraq responsible for still photography and cinematic site management - has withdrawn its Cecil B. De Mille group from Media control of ground operations. The De Mille group - with an expertise in ancient Biblical and desert landscapes - was responsible for training and embedding network and cable film crews to shoot from inside Bradley tanks as they rolled into Iraq.

In off-the-record remarks, Jay Cagney, Viz-Ops new Director, revealed that the DeMille group achieved exactly what Command wanted in the visual capture of sublime and enduring patriotic views of hundreds of American tanks cruising in formation across the desert towards Baghdad ­ while no doubt simultaneously terrifying possible enemy resistance. These lead caravan images paired spectacularly with T.V. images of the golden clouds that lifted and hung radiantly over Baghdad during the first Air Force strikes on the City. Like a great symphony, it was a first class overture and feed to networks around the world."

Replacing the DeMille Group is B-Movie Enterprises (B-ME), a Culver City, California Group noted for its expertise in re-mixing fresh 35MM Prints of Thirties classics with remakes that already include Angels with Dirty Faces, Little Caesar, The Public Enemy and Dead End - titles that Viz-Ops suggests prophesy conflict conditions and prospects in cities through out Iraq.

"As troops now face house-to-house urban warfare," Cagney continued, "Viz-Ops has asked B-ME to provide Network and Cable film crews with review training in panning roof jumps, interior black and white shots, up-close weapon manipulation, and, most important, the skills required to portray urban combat personnel with a sophisticated, non-stressed appearance of accomplishing immediate objectives while keeping an overall grasp of their difficult mission. Viz-Ops is also studying the Bruce Lee¹s Kung Fu film techniques as well as the urban feel of Spike Lee¹s works ­ though it is already understood approaches of both these filmmakers may present problems for Fox Network's viewers at the white male right and center."

When asked about the finale of the war, particularly images of surrender and liberation, Cagney said, "That will require another kind of expertise and represents the huge challenge to balance the arrest of combatants with Iraqi joy at liberation from the grips of Saddam. We obviously have to make the Iraqi surrender as cordial as possible. Soldiers will have to do a quick turn around from fight-mode to a stance of generous care including medical and nutrition support. Viz-Ops is currently studying community scenes in Broadway Musicals ­ everything from West Side Story to Chorus Line. The War Finale and it's opening to U.S Occupation has to be uplifting, hopeful and optimistic for everyone."

The Pentagon refused to characterize Cagney's off-the-record remarks other than to say, "It would be totally erroneous to have Viz-Ops' work interpreted in a cynical manner. These are the lives of young American men and women soldiers who are at war with a ruthless dictator bent on creating harm and terror across the world. Media Images of this conflict and the portrayal of our peaceful objectives remain at the heart of our business."

Hundreds of chanting anti-war demonstrators lined Manhattan's Fifth Avenue on Thursday and dozens lay down in the street to begin a day of planned civil disobedience actions.

Officers, some in riot gear, clamped plastic handcuffs onto protesters and loaded them into police vehicles.

Anti-war groups had called for a day of widespread civil disobedience, including blocking busy intersections and staging a ``die-in'' to protest media and corporate ``profiteering from the war.''

As helicopters hovered overhead, the protesters -- chanting ``Hey-hey, ho-ho, Bush's war has to go!'' and ``Peace now!'' -- jammed police pens along Fifth Avenue between 49th and 50th streets, near St. Patrick's Cathedral and the Saks Fifth Avenue store.

One lane of traffic was reopened on that block 25 minutes later.

Police and security officers placed a web of barricades at adjacent Rockefeller Center, home of the GE Building, NBC and The Associated Press, to prevent a planned ``die-in'' there.

Organizers of the loose coalition, which calls itself M27, said the ``die-in'' was intended to symbolize Iraqi war victims.

One Fifth Avenue protester held a sign showing a picture of parrots and the words, ``Don't Parrot the Right-wing Propaganda.''

``There's a long-standing tradition of nonviolent witness, which we're enacting today,'' said the Rev. Patricia Ackerman, of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and Code Pink.

Another protester, Lee Whiting, 44, held up a sign that said, ``Embedded? or In Bed?'' Embedded, she said, means that ``journalists are presenting almost exclusively the military view of this war.''

``We're seeing glorification of technology. We're seeing heartwarming moments. We're not seeing much in the way of the real casualties inflicted on the Iraqis,'' said Whiting, a teacher from Manhattan.

The anti-war demonstrations are costing the city millions of dollars in police overtime and drawing resources away from crime-fighting and anti-terrorism operations, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said Wednesday.

``This is more than protest, more than free speech,'' Kelly said. ``We're talking about violating the law.''

The traffic-blocking technique was used in recent protests in San Francisco, which led to thousands of arrests and complaints that police used excessive force.

Hundreds Protest in New York's Anti-War 'Die-In'

Anyone who's ever wondered why blogs are crucial alternatives to mainstream news sources need only look at an item from Monday's PRWeek on the White House plan to not only "disseminate, but also to dominate news of the conflict around the world."

Each morning, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer sets "the day's message" in an early-morning conference call to his British counterpart Alastair Campbell, White House communications director Dan Bartlett, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher, Pentagon spokesperson Torie Clarke, and White House Office of Global Communication (OGC) director Tucker Eskew.

PRWeek says "The OGC, an office born out of post-September-11 efforts to combat anti-American news stories emerging from Arab countries, will be key in keeping all US spokespeople on message. Each night, US embassies around the world, along with all federal departments in DC, will receive a'Global Messenger' e-mail containing talking points and ready-to-use quotes."

Further, "administration officials have made it clear they'll rely on independent journalists, 'embedded' by the Pentagon with military units, to act as one of their most reliable PR vehicles."

From Politech: a sudden price drop in the market for predictions on Saddam's date of demise indicates that gamblers think he may be able to hang onto power well into June.

Sites like Tradesports allow gambling on world political future events as well as sports. Clicking on the site's "Trading Screen" tab presents a set of odds on whether or not Hussein will be president of Iraq into April, May or June. In the last few days the graphs have shown a sharp decline in the percentage chance that he will be gone soon. The numbers change by the minute, just like stock futures.

War-hungry bettors can also trade on the colors for the monthly US national Security Alert Level March 2003 -- red, orange, yellow, blue and green.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Nicole Maestri reports that following a ban earlier this week from airing live market reports from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Arabic-language television network al Jazeera has also been turned down by the Nasdaq Stock Market Inc.

Nasdaq spokeswoman Silvia Davi said Al Jazeera asked Nasdaq on Tuesday for permission to broadcast live reports from its building in Times Square, but the request was denied. She would not expand on why the Nasdaq refused. Earlier this week, the NYSE revoked the rights of al Jazeera reporters to broadcast from its trading floor, saying its credentials were for networks that provided "responsible" coverage.

"This is ridiculous," said Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a media watchdog group in Washington, D.C. "Clearly, it is a violation of press freedom."

Thursday, March 27th 2003 8:00 AM

conduct civil disobedience or go give your support in legal protest!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

NO BUSINESS AS USUAL
MASSIVE NON-VIOLENT CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
DIE-IN AT ROCKEFELLER CENTER: 5th Ave. at 50th St. NYC

This direct action will target the media/government collusion that is promoting the war to further corporate interests. The Rockefeller Center area was chosen as the target since many media giants and corporations have offices there or nearby.

The plan is for a massive die-in on 5th Avenue at Rockefeller Center, with coordinated actions planned by affinity groups throughout the city.

There will also be space for a legal protest at the action.

Location:
5th Ave. at 50th St. New York New York
http://www.M27coalition.org

REM weighs in with the growing number of musicians producing antiwar songs with The Final Straw. The band's site currently features the song's complete lyrics as well as a rough studio mix in both streaming Quicktime and Windows Media formats. "This is the strongest voice I could think of to send out there" -- Michael Stipe.

[This just in from Musicians for Peace.]

www.protest-records.com

(as curated by Thurston Moore and Chris Habib)

exists for musicians, poets and artists to express LOVE + LIBERTY in the face of greed, sexism, racism, hate-crime and war

FIGHT THE GOOD FIGHT

All songs on this site are free to share, not to sell

Please forward

Mike Gerhardt's site features a series of screenshots of a Japanese TV show called Kodomo News ("Kids' News") that was "using toys and cartoons to show a trio of very glum-looking kids what was happening in Iraq. It was too bizzare to pass up, so I grabbed my camera and started snapping photos." The caption for this screenshot (there are 15 on the site) reads "Hussein in the middle of his Baghdad defenses."

When five captured US soldiers were paraded in front of the Iraqi television cameras on Sunday, Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, immediately complained that "it is against the Geneva convention to show photographs of prisoners of war in a manner that is humiliating for them".

George Monbiot of the Guardian responds "This being so, Rumsfeld had better watch his back. For this enthusiastic convert to the cause of legal warfare is, as head of the defence department, responsible for a series of crimes sufficient, were he ever to be tried, to put him away for the rest of his natural life."

Monbiot goes on to detail the following breaches of the Geneva Convention for which Rumsfeld is responsible:

[Rumsfeld's] prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, in Cuba, where 641 men (nine of whom are British citizens) are held, breaches no fewer than 15 articles of the third convention. The US government broke the first of these (article 13) as soon as the prisoners arrived, by displaying them, just as the Iraqis have done, on television. In this case, however, they were not encouraged to address the cameras. They were kneeling on the ground, hands tied behind their backs, wearing blacked-out goggles and earphones. In breach of article 18, they had been stripped of their own clothes and deprived of their possessions. They were then interned in a penitentiary (against article 22), where they were denied proper mess facilities (26), canteens (28), religious premises (34), opportunities for physical exercise (38), access to the text of the convention (41), freedom to write to their families (70 and 71) and parcels of food and books (72).

They were not "released and repatriated without delay after the cessation of active hostilities" (118), because, the US authorities say, their interrogation might, one day, reveal interesting information about al-Qaida. Article 17 rules that captives are obliged to give only their name, rank, number and date of birth.

[...]

The US government claims that these men are not subject to the Geneva conventions, as they are not "prisoners of war", but "unlawful combatants". The same claim could be made, with rather more justice, by the Iraqis holding the US soldiers who illegally invaded their country. But this redefinition is itself a breach of article 4 of the third convention, under which people detained as suspected members of a militia (the Taliban) or a volunteer corps (al-Qaida) must be regarded as prisoners of war.

Hot on the heels of the US Ambassador to Canada Paul Cellucci's statement that "security will trump trade," implying possible implications for cross-border traffic, comes a story on Wired News indicating that CompAtlanta, a company selling computer equipment on eBay, is refusing to "ship to, or accept bids from, Canada, Mexico, France, Germany or any other country that does not support the United States in our efforts to rid the world of Saddam Hussein. If you are not with us, you are against us."

EBay spokesman Kevin Pursglove said CompAtlanta was the only eBay merchant he knew of that is boycotting buyers for reasons related to the war. He said sellers can decide with whom they want to do business, but eBay frowns on posting overtly political messages. Pursglove said eBay ordered CompAtlanta to remove the auction item and to modify its message to bidders from Canada, Mexico, France and Germany.

By Reshma Kapadia

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Hacker attacks and technical glitches caused a string of headaches on Tuesday for a new English-language Web site launched by Arab satellite TV network Al Jazeera.

The Qatar-based network, already controversial in the West for airing messages from Osama bin Laden (news - web sites), has faced a storm of criticism in the United States for broadcasting Iraqi footage of five U.S. prisoners of war and at least eight corpses.

Its new site (http;//english.aljazeera.net) went live on Monday, but was quickly hit by hacker attacks -- as was the Arabic-language site (www.aljazeera.net).

Staff were unable to update the English site for about four hours on Tuesday, said it managing editor Joanne Tucker.

"We've had a lot of obstacles thrown in our way," Tucker said. "I thought the launch of this site would be quite smooth and wouldn't make too many waves, but the reaction has been amazing. It has been almost surreal."

Al Jazeera's information technology manager Salah Al Seddiqui said the company was also told by its Qatar-based vendor that U.S.-based DataPipe could no longer host its site from the end of the month. Al Seddiqui said the company was moving its servers to Europe.

Tucker said war sensitivities may have been behind the decision, but DataPipe said in a statement it was ending its relationship with a company that manages Al Jazeera's site on March 31. It said it had no direct ties with Al Jazeera.

The new English-language site has no multi-media capability but carried photos from the footage showing the U.S. prisoners of war. The Arabic-language site had the video, prompting a flood of traffic on Sunday.

Lycos cited that video as the factor that made Al Jazeera the most searched term on search engine, generating three times as much search activity as anything else.

The surge traffic badly hit the site's performance. Product manager Roopak Patel of performance tracker Keynote Systems said the site's performance "went to hell" on March 23.

Tucker said the new site, which for now is devoted exclusively to the war on Iraq (news - web sites), was a temporary operation pending a full launch tentatively set for mid-April.

"Every story on the site now has a byline. It should have been (that way) from the first day but it was just one of the glitches," she said.

Yahoo! News - New Al Jazeera Web Site Runs Into Headaches

[Transcription of a very good radio interview with Robert Fisk in Bagdhad.]

Live From Iraq, an Un-Embedded Journalist

Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! Host: Set the scene for us in Baghdad right now.

Robert Fisk, The Independent: Well, it’s been a relatively—relatively being the word—quiet night, there’s been quite a lot of explosions about an hour ago. There have obviously been an awful lot of missiles arriving on some target, but I would say it was about 4 or 5 miles away. You can hear the change in air pressure and you can hear this long, low rumble like drums or like someone banging on a drum deep beneath the ground, but quite a ways away. There have only been 2 or 3 explosions near the center of the city, which is where I am, in the last 12 hours. So, I suppose you could say that, comparatively, to anyone living in central Baghdad, it’s been a quiet night.

The strange thing is that the intensity of the attacks on Baghdad changes quite extraordinarily; you’ll get one evening when you can actually sleep through it all, and the next evening when you see the explosions red hot around you.

As if no one really planning the things, it’s like someone wakes up in the morning and says, “Let’s target this on the map today”, and it’s something which sort of characterizes the whole adventure because if you actually look at what’s happening on the ground, you’ll see that the American and British armies started off in the border. They started off at Um Qasr and got stuck, carried on up the road through the desert, took another right turn and tried to get into Basra, got stuck, took another right at Nasiriyah, got stuck—it’s almost as if they keep on saying, “Well let’s try the next road on the right”, and it has kind of a lack of planning to it. There will be those who say that, “No it’s been meticulously planned,” but it doesn’t feel like it to be here.

The Onion continues its history of devastating political satire this week with almost-too-real-to-be-funny items like U.S. Forms Own U.N. (Dick Cheney: "I can't tell you how much easier it is to achieve consensus when you don't have to worry about dissent") and Sheryl Crow Unsuccessful; War On Iraq Begins ("In spite of recording artist Sheryl Crow's strong protestations, including the wearing of a 'No War' guitar strap, the U.S. went to war with Iraq last week. 'Making the decision to go to war is never easy, but it's that much harder when you know Sheryl Crow disapproves,' White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said at a press conference Monday").

WASHINGTON - The US army said it gave the main Iraqi oil well firefighting contract to a unit of Halliburton Co., a firm once run by Vice President Dick Cheney, without any bidding.

Kellogg, Brown and Root, a unit of Houston, Texas-based Halliburton, was handed the contract by the Army Corps of Engineers, which has been placed in charge of fighting the blazes.

The contract had not been put out to tender, said the Corps spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Gene Pawlik.

Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) had already been asked by the Pentagon to draw up plans for extinguishing oil well fires in Iraq, Pawlik noted.

"It made the most sense to engage them in the near term as the company to get the mission done because they were familiar with the details of the fires themselves and what would be needed," he said.

The value of the contract would depend on the scale of the work.

The chief of Britain's armed forces, Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, said Friday that Iraqi forces had set fire to seven oil wells in the south of the country.

KBR would claim the cost of its services plus two to five percent depending on how it executed the job, Pawlik said.

Shares in KBR parent Halliburton rose 54 cents or 2.68 percent to 20.66 dollars.

"KBR was selected for this award based on the fact that KBR is the only contractor that could commence implementing the complex contingency plan on extremely short notice," the company said in a statement.

KBR said it had teams of well control and engineering contractors preparing the initial phase.

The company was given a free hand to choose subcontractors for the work, the Corps spokesman said.

KBR chose Houston-based Boots and Coots International, with which it has a services and equipment partnership, and Wild Well Control Inc. as firefighting subcontractors.

President George W. Bush's spokesman, Ari Fleischer, said he did not have the details.

"I think the question that people will want answered is: Do we have a plan in place to put out the oil fires, and is it a good plan to put out the oil fires?," he told a news conference.

Bush asked lawmakers on Tuesday to approve some 3.5 billion dollars in aid to get Iraq back on its feet, including nearly half a billion for oil field repair.

In a statement late Monday, the Defense Department said the Army Corps of Engineers would rely largely on contractors to extinguish the oil well fires and assess the damage to facilities.

Halliburton Handed No-Bid Iraqi Oil Firefighting Contract

If news is the first casualty of war, the first victor is government. It is ironic that every war fought by Britain in the past century, justly in the cause of freedom, has led directly to a curtailment of freedom in favour of state control. The history of war runs in tandem with that of higher taxes, greater regulation and more government.

... an excellent op-ed piece from day 1 of the war outlining the UK history of income tax (invented to pay for hostilities against Napoleon), growth in officialdom ("The first surge in officialdom occurred in the Great War. By the time of the Second World War there were roughly 200,000 civil servants. Fifteen years after it had ended there were 375,000 and rising"), and regressive homeland security legislation ("After an IRA attack in 1974, the supposedly liberal Roy Jenkins introduced the Prevention of Terrorism Act, pledging in public that it was a “strictly temporary measure”. It gave the police extensive discretion to spy on, intern and deport citizens without trial. It has never been repealed").

MSNBC.com reports that a Taiwanese company is selling rice crackers wrapped in images of U.S. President Bush and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. If only they had instituted some sort of polling system based on purchases.

And over on the Far Right is Star-Spangled Ice Cream, a self-described "conservative alternative to Ben & Jerry's" for Americans who "enjoy ice cream but do NOT enjoy seeing your money funneled to wacko left-wing causes". 76 bucks will get you four quarts of I Hate The French Vanilla, Iraqi Road, Smaller Governmint, and Nutty Environmentalist ...

USATODAY.com

Very good story by Angela Gunn with links to varoius blogs related to the war, such as this one by CNN journalist Kevin Sites -- it's been shut down temporarily by his employers but with luck will be up soon -- and the English language version of Al Jazeera (it seems to be quite slow, probably tons of traffic).

A crowd gathered in Louisiana to watch a 33,000-pound tractor smash a collection of Dixie Chicks CD's, tapes and other paraphernalia. To those familiar with 20th-century European history it seemed eerily reminiscent of . . . . But as Sinclair Lewis said, it can't happen here.

So begins a new op-ed piece by Paul Krugman for the Times, who uses the incident to segue into a discussion of the string of pro-war rallies that have been organized across the US by Clear Channel Communications, a key player in the radio industry with strong ties to the Bush presidency.

Krugman argues that "we're now seeing the next stage in the evolution of a new American oligarchy", where big business interests have an increasing say in government policy as "scores of midlevel appointees [...] now oversee industries for which they once worked." More depressing yet, he ends by noting that the role of the press as a watchdog for such matters has also been severely eroded, because "these days, the scandalmongers are more likely to go after journalists who raise questions."

Declan McCullagh's Politech is carrying a story stating that YellowTimes.org, a Canadian website, was shut down for two hours until they removed a photo of an American POW and a photo of a dead Iraqi child.

McCullagh says "YellowTimes told me that their hosting provider, Vortech Hosting, pulled the plug because of pressure from its upstream provider, Level3.net. Ogrish.com has posted a far more disturbing video clip and hasn't received any threats yet (at least as of mid-afternoon [March 24th])".

At one point, YellowTimes had posted an article on the incident here, but their hosting has been suspended entirely.

[from Samantha Sigler]

The Not in My Name Music project is a collaboration of artists (begun by DJ Spooky, Coldcut and DJ Goo) dedicated to forwarding a culture of resistance worldwide. The Not In My Name EP will soon be for sale worldwide, on Ninja Tune in Europe and the rest of the world and on Synchronic Records in the US. They are also providing MP3s of their music for free download on their home page, as well as on the Ninjatune and Synchronic Records sites.

All DJs and mashup aficionados should note that the Not in My Name home page also provides a vocal acappella track for the the Pledge of Resistance tune; the site says "Feel free to throw this into your mix whenever possible! For remix requests beyond live mixing, please contact us and we'll send you to the right people to discuss this further."

Some people hate lame subway poetry as much as they (um, "we") hate the Oil War. The following poem was spotted by not so soft on a London District Line tube this past weekend:

Sing a song of Esso
A packet full of lies
and oily greasy dollars
to help the climate fry
When the wallet opened
George Bush began to sing
"The planet may be burning
but I don't see a thing"

According to Viralmeister, several different poems were deployed; full text can be downloaded here.

March 23, 2003

Tonight I attended a planning meeting for direct action in NYC at Washington Square United Methodist Church. Over 33 groups were represented and over 150 showed up (I counted everyone but lost count after 152). The group was consensus based and made no decisions without every person in the room agreeing to it. United For Peace was there, Not in our Name was there, Act Now ws there, No blood For Oil, The Green Party was there, automous more anarchist oriented groups were there, and church groups.

The consensus was that Thursday, March 27th will be "NO BUSINESS AS USUAL" and will be a day that will rival San Fransicso in the scope of civil disobedience and direct action. The main mass action will be at 8:00 am at the Rockefeller Center and will be a die in. People will lay down in symbol of the dead in Iraq. Rockefeller Ctr. was chosen because GE is there who makes much of the military equipment, and several news organiztions are there, and this is the center of many other businesses like the NY Post, Lockheed Martin, and many other corporations that stand to benefit and support this war in many ways. That general area will be targeted heavily with massive civil disobedience. But the main call is for Rockefeller Ctr. at 8am in the morning. To go there and there will be a cue to lay down. This will be an act of civil disobedience and will be an arrestable offense, a misdemeanor. Most people will be issued a citation and released. The massive numbers of people that will likely turn out will preclude the police from detaining anyone for long (exactly what has happened in San Fran.)

This action is meant to be the mass action, and there will be break off groups throughout the city doing civil disobedience in many ways (all them at this group were committed to nonviolence). They are also calling for strikes or taking the day off work to have no business as usual. The goal is to literally shut this city down and not allow people to go on with normal routines as we drop bombs on others (bombs are dropping while you're shopping...we are going to prevent the shopping).

That is basically the what came of the meeting by consensus, and it is supported by all the major organizing groups in this city. And will be advertised starting tonite on email lists and fliers. Please distribute this information to everyone you know... We only have three days to organize this massive effort...but it can and will be done.

Hope this information was helpful and I am sure it will delight you as much as it did me while we were planning it

Dave Schamuch daveschmauch@hotmail.com

Monday March 24, 2003
The Guardian

A 29-year-old, middle-class man somewhere in the suburbs of the Iraqi capital has become one of the most intriguing stories on the internet. Known simply as Salam Pax, his online diary has fascinated the web's myriad users with its sharp observations of a tumultuous six months for the beleaguered Iraqi nation that has included a presidential election, yet another UN resolution, its resulting weapons inspectors and, of course, the approach of war.

Story continues below; here's the blog Where is Raed ?

As the build-up to conflict intensified, more and more people became drawn - through forwarded emails, weblogs, or message boards - to the compelling musings of what appeared to be an educated, if cynical, young man in Baghdad waiting for war. His diary, mysteriously titled Where is Raed?, has recorded, with humour and in eloquent detail, the anxieties of the Iraqi capital's besieged citizens as they awaited attack - their rush to tape up windows, the stockpiling of groceries, the increased presence of menacing Ba'ath party officials on the streets. By last Friday, as American B52s finally homed in on Baghdad, the website had become the most linked-to web diary on the internet as visitors, in fear of his safety, eagerly awaited his next posting. At the time of going to press, Salam hadn't posted again since Friday.

But is he real? It has been one of the most popular and debated questions on the internet for weeks. What has been troubling many visitors to the site is the question of whether Pax is who he claims he is. Never ones to spurn a conspiracy theory, internet users have queried whether he is an ordinary Iraqi man located in a Baghdad suburb, as he vehemently says he is, and put forward wild claims that he could be anything from a Mossad agent to a Saddam stooge intent on pumping out misinformation for the gullible masses.

To start with, there is the mystery of his cryptic name. It doesn't take long to realise that "Salam Pax" is a simple play on words meaning "peace" and "peace" in Arabic and Latin respectively. This mirroring motif is reflected in the website's address, www.dear_raed.blogspot.com, with its palindromic "dear" and "Raed". There has also been a lot of chatter about the true identity of the eponymous "Raed" from the website's title, Where is Raed? Is "Raed" a euphemism for a family member in trouble with the Iraqi authorities? Or is he Salam's gay lover? Speculation has been rife. But isn't he just understandably protecting his identity?

But the doubters seem to ignore the most compelling evidence that Salam is who he says he is - the detail of his day-to-day life. Those who know Baghdad well, and who have read the diary closely, say there is no doubt in their mind that whoever is writing it is currently resident in the Iraqi capital. The author may display evidence of spending time in the west (possibly Britain, though he does use Americanisms) with his cynical sense of humour and love of David Bowie lyrics, but the reams and reams of fascinating detail about domestic and street life in Baghdad are highly convincing. After all, why would he make it all up, especially for the long period before it even became the internet phenomenon it is today. As Salam himself said last Friday: "Please stop sending emails asking if I were for real. Don't believe it? Then don't read it. I am not anybody's propaganda ploy. Well, except my own."

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Baghdad calling

The following is a message from Amy Partridge, who was arrested in Chicago under the Patriot Act while exercising her constitutional rights. Press accounts of these arrests last Thursday are inaccurate: please help us get this message out. -- Matthias Regan

Dear all,

I want to warn you all about what happened to hundreds of peaceful protesters, myself included, at the rally and march on Thursday night in downtown Chicago.  Both the rally and march were entirely peaceful.  I saw not one instance of civil disobedience or aggro behavior.  Police escorted us on the March and onto Lake Shore Drive.  We were never asked to disperse or threatened with arrest.  When police prevented us from marching on Michigan Ave marchers moved on.  We were, however, surrounded by hundreds of police a few block later and prevented from leaving.  No one around me intended to or wanted to be arrested.  Everyone asked to be allowed to leave and disperse.  I have since heard this was not how the media reported it but more than once the crowd chanted “let us go” and “we will disperse.”  The police told individuals who asked that they could leave from some other side of the crowd but in EVERY instance I witnessed this was not the case and no one was allowed to leave, including a 17 year old boy and his 14 year old sister.  At first police rushed the crowd and pulled out 10 people at a time.  I and everyone around me was arrested despite the fact that we were standing on the sidewalk (not in the street) and that we asked again and again to be allowed to leave since we had done nothing illegal.  A cop grabbed me, put me in cuffs, and told me I was being charged with mob action and that I should be glad I was not in Iraq.  I have since heard that people were allowed to leave much later but we were told that everyone would be arrested sooner or later.

Close to 300 (at least) women were held in custody for hours.  I was in custody for over 20 hours.  Despite the fact that we were told that we be released as soon as we were processed, I was held in a jail cell from midnight until 4:00 pm the next day.  During this time I was not allowed a phone call, not read my rights, and my charge was not explained to me.  We were all told numerous times that we would be released on I-Bonds, meaning once we were processed (mug shots taken and finger prints sent to the federal registry) we could sign ourselves out.  A friend of mine came to get me at 8:00 am and was told I would be released by noon.  By 2:00 she was told I had been “lost” and might not be “found” or released until Monday.  When she offered $100 cash at 4:00 (despite the fact that we had been told explicitly numerous times that we did not require bail money) I was “found” and released.  Only because a cell phone had been smuggled into my cell block was I able to contact this friend or to hear the news that they were suddenly and inexplicably requiring $100 bail to release us.  The police allowed no one to call friends and family to arrange this payment.  We were all told that if we got arrested again within 24 hours of signing our bond we would be charged with a FELONY.  Waiting parents and friends were told that if we SO MUCH AS SHOWED UP AGAIN AT ANOTHER RALLY we would be charged with a felony.  This, of course, cannot be right.  But this is the mood of Ashcroft’s America.

The average age of the arrestees as far as I could tell was between 17-25.  No one I met had ever been arrested before or had had any intention of being arrested for civil disobedience Thursday night.  At least 3 women that I met were tourist that had gotten trapped in the crowd.  This fact was explained both by the women themselves and many of the protesters but they were treated no differently and as far as I know held for the same amount of time as the rest of us.  While some the cops were fine, a number threatened us and many ridiculed us.  They treated us with disdain and disgust and booked us as though we were terrorists under the new Patriot Act and not peaceful protesters.  It was a miserable and shocking experience.  This may have been the most egregious response and it may be that no other peaceful protesters will be trapped and arrested as we were.  But I recommend if you intend to go to any future protests that you make sure you have a number of a lawyer or the ACLU memorized.  I would also suggest that you let someone know you are going and that if you do not call them upon your return that they should check to see if you have been arrested. Those of us that had it worst and were held the longest did not have anyone waiting for us and demanding our release.

All the best,
Amy Partridge
PhD Candidate Performance Studies
Northwestern University

Michael Moore: Whoa. On behalf of our producers Kathleen Glynn and Michael Donovan from Canada, I'd like to thank the Academy for this. I have invited my fellow documentary nominees on the stage with us, and we would like to — they're here in solidarity with me because we like nonfiction. We like nonfiction and we live in fictitious times. We live in the time where we have fictitious election results that elects a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons. Whether it's the fictition of duct tape or fictition of orange alerts we are against this war, Mr. Bush. Shame on you, Mr. Bush, shame on you. And any time you got the Pope and the Dixie Chicks against you, your time is up. Thank you very much. [video here.]

Zack de la Rocha, ex vocalist of Rage Against the Machine, and the one and only DJ Shadow have released a new protest tune, "March of Death," on the subject of the current war. It's available for download on de la Rocha's website. "Artists, be they painters, actors, writers or musicians, have a responsibility to reflect and interpret the world around them. Our current administration's foreign policy strikes me as being reckless, inhumane and hopelessly out of step with the so-called 'values' it claims to defend." -- DJ Shadow

Three Squares Press is pleased to announce the Toronto launch of The Common Sky: Canadian Writers Against the War. The event will be held at The Cameron House (408 Queen Street West) on Monday, March 31, at 7:30 p.m. The book will be available for sale at a special launch rate.

Published by Three Squares Press, The Common Sky: Canadian Writers Against the War brings together the work of more than 80 Canadian writers, expressing their opposition to a U.S.-led war on Iraq. Featuring a stirring foreword by Alistair MacLeod, The Common Sky includes many of this country's most recognized writers, including: Margaret Atwood, Robert Kroetsch, Christian Bök, Canada's Poet Laureate George Bowering, Fred Wah, Nicole Brossard, Daphne Marlatt, Steven Heighton, Gerry Shikatani, Maggie Helwig, and many more. A complete list of authors can be found on the Three Squares website.

For more information, email Mark Higgins or call (416) 406-0591.

Please feel free to distribute this widely.

We knew before the illegal invasion of Iraq began that the U.S. government would be pushing legislature through Congress, and we agreed that we'd have to pay attention to that. (Please note: This is not a war; Patriot II itself states that the U.S. has not been involved in a war in more than 60 years.) While we mourn for those who are suffering and dying under weapons of mass destruction, let's remain close in our communities and active in our dialogues.

WE ARE ALL TERRORISTS
The first page alone of the Domestic Security Enhancement Act (aka Patriot II) is off-the-charts alarming. In defining terrorism, Section 101: Individual Terrorists as Foreign Powers reads, "This provision would expand FISA's definition of "foreign power" to include *all* persons, regardless of whether they are affiliated with an international terrorist group, who engage in international terrorism."

Proceeding to Section 102: Clandestine Intelligence Activities by Agent of a Foreign Power: "FISA currently defines "agent of a foreign power" to include a person who knowingly engages in clandestine intelligence gathering activities on behalf of a foreign power -- but only if those activities "involve or may involve a violation of" federal criminal law. Requiring the additional showing that the intelligence gathering violates the laws of the United States is both unnecessary and counterproductive.. Any person who engages in clandestine intelligence gathering activities for a foreign power would qualify as an "agent of foreign power," regardless of whether those activities are federal crimes."

"Clandestine"?

"Intelligence"?

So, with law out the window, how are these offenses qualified, and by whom? If detainment is at the sole discretion of the Attorney General, and detainees are not only denied the right to trial, but denied contact with *all persons*, then this administration is indeed positioned to detain anyone perceived to be an Other, be it an international resident or a domestic dissident.

"Terrorist"?

You can download Patriot II at
www.public-i.org/dtaweb/report.asp?ReportID=502&L1=10&L2=10&L3=0&L4=0 &L5=0

RACIAL PROFILING
"Since September 11, the INS and FBI have detained over 1,200 immigrants, mainly of Arab or South Asian (especially Pakistani) origin. Most are accused only of minor immigration violations, such as overstaying a visa. Despite Attorney General Ashcroft's assurances to the contrary, many are being held without access to legal assistance or proper care."
www.drumnation.org/stopdc.html

"SEVIS is a national computer system operated by the INS.. Under SEVIS, information on every international student is automatically provided to the government via computer. Much more information on each student collected and input. SEVIS works like the Interpol database. The information is shared among federal agencies (and even other countries!), and the student has no control over what is provided."
www.stopsevis.org

SEND A FREE FAX URGING CONGRESS TO STOP THE PROFILING
www.aclu.org/ImmigrantsRights/ImmigrantsRights.cfm?ID=11561&c=95

INS DETAINEES: WHERE ARE THEY NOW?
In the two months following the attacks, the Justice Department refused to release specific information about detainees. Groups estimated that more than 1,000 people had been detained, but it was unclear who they were, why they had been detained, or whether any had been released.
www.rcfp.org/secretjustice/terrorism/detainment.html

"The Department of Justice has argued that disclosing the names and other information about post- September 11 detainees held on immigration charges and opening their immigration hearings to the public could compromise its terrorism-related investigations." Yet, "it is difficult to square the Department of Justice's contention that terrorist organizations are extremely sophisticated and could put together bits and pieces of information from hundreds of hearings around the country, with the argument that official disclosure would alert such organizations to who has been detained. Sophisticated terrorist groups likely already know through their own networks whether any of their members or allies have been arrested."
www.hrw.org/reports/2002/us911/USA0802-02.htm#P474_104537

LEGGO MY FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT!
"[T]he DSEA would revoke key elements of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), enacted to prevent government from keeping secrets from the public unless a legitimate security concern exists. Currently, FOIA gives us the right to know if a missing person is in the custody of any government agency. But under DSEA, anyone -- even U.S. citizens -- could be detained secretly in connection with any "terrorist" investigation, a term lacking legal definition.
reclaimdemocracy.org/civil_rights/patriot_act_ii_oped.html

KEEPING THE WORLD SAFE FOR HUMANITY
A NYTimes article reveals that the treatment of U.S. military prisoners at Guantánamo Bay has yielded criticism: "without individual hearings to determine the prisoners' status, without charges and trials, critics see Guantánamo as a synonym for human rights violations. While there is no indication of physical torture.. they still lack the basic legal rights that many countries, including the United States, have agreed are fundamental even to warriors."

Gen. Rick Baccus of the Army, who commands the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, says, "While the public debates the technicalities of how these people should be classified," he said, "we will continue to follow the traditions of humane treatment." He added: "In other countries, these detainees would not be heard from again."

Patriot II would make it possible indeed that these detainees would not be heard from again. Even the directors of the U.S. military's most aggressive jails acknowledge that Patriot II is contrary to USAmerican concepts of justice.
www.nytimes.com/2002/09/16/international/americas/16DETA.html

PRESUMED GUILTY: ANSER MEHMOOD
Anser Mehmood came to the U.S. from Pakistan in 1989. "On [September 11, 2001], he failed to make a scheduled delivery to Washington, DC. Mehmood was taken into custody along with several thousand other men of Middle Eastern and South Asian origin. Mehmood remains here in custody although it turned out that it was his company that cancelled his September 11th shipment to Washington when they learned of the Pentagon bombing."
www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_family2.html

The official charge on Anser Mehmood are an overstayed visa and and altered security card (to secure employment). Uzma Mehmood, Anser's wife, and their children have been forced to return to Pakistan, while Anser remains in a NJ jail. "He is held without a bond on a very specious affidavit put in by an FBI agent. And put in the special housing unit otherwise known as 'The Hole'. It's solitary confinement he's locked down 23 and a half hours a day. He's fed through a slot in the door."
www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_familydivided.html Stories of other innocent detainees are here:
www.hrw.org/reports/2002/us911/USA0802-01.htm#P217_31161

"I DIDN'T SPEAK OUT"
They came for the Communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Catholic.
Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me.
-- Pastor Martin Niemoller

The climate is rapidly changing such that it is more and more likely that a good number of U.S.-born citizens might be subject to detainment. I'm sure I'm a good candidate, with the money I have given and continue to give to organizations such as MoveOn.org and ZNet, which are today considered treasonous at best.

How might they know who I've donated money to? Well for starters, a new security program to be implemented by Delta Airlines later this month will mean that when you book a flight to or from one of three undisclosed airports, you will be subject to a credit check, an investigation of your banking history, and a criminal background check. The controls on how this information will be used has not been adequately defined. This appears to be illegal. It is an egregious invasion of privacy.
www.nytimes.com/2003/03/06/business/06FLY.html?ex=1047531600&en=27fa9 893300c6439&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE

SAUDI SUSPECTS OFF LIMITS

Maybe one reason the number of detainees is so high is, they're looking for a needle in a haystack: an innocent on whom to pin a colossal, heinous crime. from an interview with journalist Greg Palast:

"In the eight weeks since the attacks, over 1,000 suspects and potential witnesses have been detained. Yet, just days after the hijackers took off from Boston aiming for the Twin Towers, a special charter flight out of the same airport whisked 11 members of Osama Bin Laden's family off to Saudi Arabia. That did not concern the White House.

"Their official line is that the Bin Ladens are above suspicion - apart from Osama, the black sheep, who they say hijacked the family name. That's fortunate for the Bush family and the Saudi royal household, whose links with the Bin Ladens could otherwise prove embarrassing. But Newsnight has obtained evidence that the FBI was on the trail of other members of the Bin Laden family for links to terrorist organisations before and after September 11th.

"This document is marked "Secret". Case ID - 199-Eye WF 213 589. 199 is FBI code for case type. 9 would be murder. 65 would be espionage. 199 means national security. WF indicates Washington field office special agents were investigating ABL - because of it's relationship with the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, WAMY - a suspected terrorist organisation. ABL is Abdullah Bin Laden, president and treasurer of WAMY."
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/events/newsnight/1645527.stm

More from Palast:

"FBI agents had wanted to check into two members of the Bin Laden family, Abdullah and Omar, but were told to stay away by superiors -- until September 13, 2001. By then, Abdullah and Omar were long gone from the United States.
www.guerrillanews.com/government/doc1148.html

"The intelligence agencies had been told to "back off" from investigations involving other members of the Bin Laden family, the Saudi royals, and possible Saudi links to the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Pakistan."
www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,589168,00.html

[Editorial Note: I want to be clear that this reporting is not anti-Saudi; it is of course offered to evidence the lack of integrity and justice in the current U.S. administration]

WHY WAIT FOR PATRIOT II? DETAIN TODAY! Sadly, even without Patriot II, immigrants are being detained on trivial charges, without recourse:

Rules on Detention Widened: FBI, Marshals Can Hold Foreigners: Attorney General John D. Ashcroft has issued orders that allow FBI agents and U.S. marshals to detain foreign nationals for alleged immigration violations in cases where there is not enough evidence to hold them on criminal charges, according to Justice Department officials and a copy of the rules.
www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A56948-2003Mar19.html

Registration Program Problems Cited: Immigrants' Attorneys Kept From Investigative Interviews: "The failure to provide clear and explicit directions to local immigration officials is inexcusable given the absolute right to legal counsel," said Lucas Guttentag, director of the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project. He charged that the "foot-dragging" could be explained only by a reluctance to dig into the matter before the registration deadlines have passed.
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55994-2003Mar19.html

HOW MUCH BAD HISTORY CAN WE BEAR TO REPEAT? Let's not forget FDR's passage of Executive Order 9066, which led to the internment of 110,000 Japanese Americans between 1942 and 1944.
www.sscnet.ucla.edu/aasc/ex9066/

WHO HOW & WHAT 2 RELAY Many thanks to contributors Natasha Dwyer, Allison Cobb, and Tom Orange.

Thanks to everyone for participating. I'm sorry to say that I'm unable to manage unsolicited content for Relay; if you find something to circulate, why not relay it directly to your own address book? We like it when those cats at Clamor Magazine say, Become the Media!

Subscription requests go to mirakove_relay@yahoo.com

TOY SURPRISE! A friend reminded me a few months ago that throughout our fighting and disgust, we need to make a world worth saving. Pursue beauty. Laughter. Celebrate our relationships. In that spirit, I encourage you to visit some terrific NYC subway graffiti from the 1970s:
www.at149st.com/

20.03.03, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey

Suddenly, after months of thinking about war but having nothing besides the media to focus our attention on it, there are signs of it everywhere we look. I returned home from school yesterday to discover notices in the lobby of our building outlining security procedures for air attacks. “Apparently there’s a bomb shelter in the next building,” Glenys said with an eghads look.

It’s highly unlikely there will be any spillover of this conflict into Turkey. Although it is possible that Turkey will soon be engaged in a conflict of its own with the northern Iraqi Kurds. We’re not hearing much about what it currently happening at the Turkey-Iraq border.

A pair of men tested the generators in a nearby building this morning. They rumbled to life with the clanky growl of an old mechanical beast that’s been hibernating. A short while later, as Euan and I were doing our usual Magpie count out the window, a jet roared over the campus at great speed heading southeast, as if to confirm that Turkey has indeed opened its airspace to coalition forces. Vanloads of Jandarma tool around the area incessantly. We start to try to interpret these signs.

Being a new dad in times like these is an uncanny and confusing experience. It’s jarring to look at my son and see so much innocence and wonder and be thinking about people dying and suffering off in the distance. I told my son what was happening because we always tell him everything that’s happening (“Daddy’s licking oatmeal off his thumb Euan!"). Again I had Oppen to put some texture to this feeling I have for my son with regard to the war:

My daughter, my daughter, what can I say
Of living?

I cannot judge it.

We seem caught
In reality together my lovely
Daughter

Meanwhile, life goes on, but in a much different way, with a much different feeling to it, naturally. I greeted one of my students yesterday and asked her how she was. “Uptight,” she said. It’s difficult to teach or sit for classes when your mind is elsewhere. I sit in my office and stare off into space for periods of time, my mind reeling. When I snap out of it, I realize I must get my act together, and I start to scurry in my head even more.

I’ve made last minute adjustments to the syllabus of my American Poetry class in an attempt to keep focus on both poetry and the war. I put Oppen’s Of Being Numerous, Williams’ Introduction to The Wedge, and selections from Reznikoff’s Testimony on for this week. This work has generated good discussion and, to the extent that they want to, has allowed my students to use class discussions as a forum for their thoughts and feelings about the war.

On Thursday’s class I read from Of Being Numerous and asked my students to listen with an ear toward the poem and with an ear toward Baghdad, to see if this poem in any way enabled them to focus on the war. When I asked them if the poem helped or hindered their attempt to focus on the war several students said they went into and out of focus about the war, but that the poem helped them focus on experience and what that is. How do you experience something you’re not experiencing? If war is meaningless, then what is poetry?

I read the Williams stuff I posted to the list on Thursday. Poetry isn’t a turning away from the war, it is the war, “merely a different sector of the field.” How can that be?

We talked about objectivism as a poetry of attention. Attention to the very facts of existence and to time, what that dialectic produces in the mind and in language.

We had also read for that day selections of Charles Reznikoff’s amazingly affecting poem Testimony. Two students introduced the poem and got a discussion going about the discrepancy between the lack of emotion in the language and the deeply emotional effect that that language produces when you read it.

Then a student named Berna compared the poems to “the media,” to news. I told the class about one of Pound’s definitions of poetry: “Poetry is news that stays news.” It turned out to be the perfect way to account for the relevance of reading a poem that was published in the 60’s, and which incorporated images of WW2 and Vietnam, to focus our attention on a war that was happening while we were talking.

I ended class about 8 minutes early, but then something very unexpected happened. None of my students got up to leave. None of them even stirred. There was a short silence and then another student picked up the discussion again, and we continued talking as if class was still in session.

But the atmosphere in the room had changed completely. I was no longer presiding and everyone was there by choice. The classroom turned into a meeting place. What a freaky feeling it was to have everything change so dramatically like that with no apparent activity to produce it. I felt a lot calmer after this class than I have in days. The two students who exited the classroom with me told me in Turkish to take good care (“kendine iyi bak”). Normally they just say, in English, “See you.”

Scott

Scores of Readings Held Around the World
Poets Vow to Continue Working for Peace

March 22, 2003

Even as bombs destroy Baghdad and other Iraqi towns, lovers of poetry have continued to gather to read poems and cry out for peace over the past 72 hours. In Karachi, Pakistan, poets, writers and intellectuals of the Arts Council gathered at the Indus Valley School of Art & Architecture in a reading titled "SPEAK OUT! Poetry for Peace," sponsored by Tehrik Khidmatunnas Secretariate, a charity organization. In Temuco, Chile, poets gathered in a Wednesday reading called "Words Against War." In Tucson, Arizona, poets held a reading and non-violent public protest against the attack on Iraq, called "Poets' Brains Chained to the Ground," at the Federal Courthouse. And in Seattle, poets gathered at the Richard Hugo House for a 4-hour poetry vigil Friday, declared World Poetry Day by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization).

Poets Against the War converged, read poetry, and lifted their voices in protest at Acqui Terme, Italy; Austin, Texas; and London, Ontario, Canada. In the remote little town of Gustavus-Glacier Bay, Alaska, the Gustavus Peace Poets met at their local library to read their own poems and selections from poetsagainstthewar.org, and to deliver a copy of the anthology of 13,000 poems to the Superintendent of the Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve.

The beat goes on. From Paris to Pisa to Philadelphia, poets are speaking out for a world in which compassion and non-violence will ultimately prevail over the Bush administration's philosophy that horrendous crimes are justifiable in the service of its unilateralist agenda. Our call for peace is more critical than ever before. Please join us. Organize a reading. Join a protest. Lift your voice.

Create a reading of Poetry Against the War.

Create a presentation to a government or organization of 13,000 antiwar poems, a roster of 12,000 poets and a showcase of 35 chapbook poems.

While it is important to record and acknowledge the deep sadness and sense of devastation so many of us feel, we must continue to channel and broaden our efforts for peace and justice. Remember that history is made by millions. Together we have created a presence on the world stage that can serve as a limit and counterweight to future wars, and the seed of a healthier world created by the conscience of the true majority.

We encourage you to read a thoughtful, eloquent article at Common Dreams by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Ian Urbina titled Antiwar Thinking: Acknowledge Despair, Highlight Progress on Moral Preemption.

-- Your friends at poetsagainstthewar.org.