(original photo 1)
(original photo 2)
(composite photo)
On Monday, March 31, the Los Angeles Times published a front-page photograph that had been altered in violation of Times policy. Following is their retraction note:
The primary subject of the photo was a British soldier directing Iraqi civilians to take cover from Iraqi fire on the outskirts of Basra. After publication, it was noticed that several civilians in the background appear twice. The photographer, Brian Walski, reached by telephone in southern Iraq, acknowledged that he had used his computer to combine elements of two photographs, taken moments apart, in order to improve the composition.Times policy forbids altering the content of news photographs. Because of the violation, Walski, a Times photographer since 1998, has been dismissed from the staff.
The altered photo and the two photos that were used to produce it (the first two), are shown above.
Michael Kelly, the Atlantic Monthly editor-at-large and Washington Post columnist, has been killed in a Humvee accident while traveling with the US Army's 3rd Infantry Division. Kelly, the first American journalist killed in the war, was 46.
The Post writes that "As a columnist, Kelly was a caustic conservative who was merciless in his criticism of Bill Clinton and Al Gore and was generally supportive of President Bush, especially on foreign policy. In 1997, New Republic owner Martin Peretz, a close friend of Gore, fired Kelly as the magazine's editor over his continuing attacks on the Clinton administration."
(Gothic News Service, 03/04) The White House and Rupert Murdoch¹s Fox TV
Networks have both become sensitive to International popular perceptions that the President's War Council and the station¹s Anchormen and women lack compassion for Iraq's war dead.
"There¹s been just too much glee expressed by staffs from both quarters," Psych-Ops spokespersons for both Government and Fox privately and jointly expressed. "We need to tone it down. Eliminating entire Iraqi divisions with uranium enhanced tank shells and Moab cluster bombs is fine in terms of meeting military objectives. But we and that means the Secretary of War Rumsfeld, the Pentagon Press Office and all our Fox Anchors and ex-Military Experts all look too full of glee at our success. The joint enthusiasm at these unanimous kills works to cloud the perception of the real goal in liberating and caring for the Iraqi people. The foreign press Arab and European - is actually hitting us with the WMD word."
Fearful of militarily winning and, at the same time, internationally losing the war psychologically, Psych-Ops for the White House, the Pentagon Pressroom and Fox have created "Onion Closets." These are special way-stations that function to give a more tender and compassionate appearance to White House, Pentagon staff and Fox Anchors before they appear on the media. Each closet is stocked with boxes of onions, a knife rack, and lit with a singular yellow, low wattage, light bulb. Before going on the air, White House and Pentagon Staff, and Fox Anchors either together or alone may sit on a bench and cut onions into small pieces. Ample amounts of tissue are supplied for the onset of tears.
"If one of our guys or gals is going overboard on a particular kill, we call out "Code Onion" and get them into the room as quick as possible. "Yes, sometimes it is true that some can¹t stop crying. We have to do everything short of calling their mothers to get them back on program."
Asked if "Code Onion" is working, Psych-Ops suggested success in the more frequent use of the word "regrettable" particularly for unintended and large Iraqi civilian casualties, and to "Keep an eye on Fox's O'Reilly. Astonishingly, he's got an amazingly quick tear factor." No one would say if the President had yet to report to the Closet. When asked about the origins of the Onion solution, Psych-Ops said, "It¹s an old German device. Ex-Military personnel and citizens both spent much time in their onion cellars after Hitler fell."
Legendary soul singer Edwin Starr (b. Charles Hatcher), one of the first artists signed to the Motown label, died yesterday (April 3) after a heart attack. His biggest hit was "War (What Is It Good For?)", which has been covered by hundreds of musicians, including Frankie Goes to Hollywood, DOA and Bruce Springsteen. Starr was 61.
The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.
—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing
Slate has posted this toothsome little lyric, along with a few other examples of the poetry of "D.H." Rumsfeld. The critics rave (at least, I think it's raving; there seems to be a tongue firmly wedged in -- or possibly between -- someone's cheek[s]): "Rumsfeld's poetry is paradoxical: It uses playful language to address the most somber subjects: war, terrorism, mortality. Much of it is about indirection and evasion: He never faces his subjects head on but weaves away, letting inversions and repetitions confuse and beguile. His work, with its dedication to the fractured rhythms of the plainspoken vernacular, is reminiscent of William Carlos Williams'. Some readers may find that Rumsfeld's gift for offhand, quotidian pronouncements is as entrancing as Frank O'Hara's."
April 4, 2003 4 In late January, Sam Hamill called upon writers to "reconstitute a Poets Against the War movement like the one organized to speak out against the war in Vietnam." He asked writers, “to speak up for the conscience of our country and lend your names to our petition against this war” by submitting “a poem or statement of conscience to the Poets Against the War web site.”
The response was overwhelming. Over 13,000 poems were submitted including work by Adrienne Rich, W. S. Merwin, Galway Kinnell, Robert Bly, Marilyn Hacker, Grace Schulman, Shirley Kaufman, Wanda Coleman, Yusef Komunyakaa, Katha Pollitt, Hayden Carruth, Jane Hirshfield, Tess Gallagher, Sandra Cisneros and former Poet Laureate Rita Dove. Poets Against the War collects some of the best poems submitted to the website. This anthology is both a cry against impending war and a celebration of the long and rich tradition of moral opposition and dissent by American writers and artists.
Thanks to the outpouring of support from founding supporters of the VoteToImpeach movement, the first full page ad of the impeachment campaign was placed in the New York Times on March 19 - Bush's ultimatum day - in the front section of the paper, page A23.
The political impact of the New York Times was far-reaching. The circulation of the New York Times extends all over the country and all over the world. In turn, the response of people across the country to the ad was magnificent. The office was flooded with thousands of letters from people who filled out a VoteToImpeach ballot. Tens of thousands more immediately went on line and voted to impeach Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Ashcroft for their criminal conduct in waging a war of aggression against the people of Iraq, wantonly sacrificing the lives of U.S. servicemen and women, and for the assault on our civil rights and civil liberties at home.
The VoteToImpeach newspaper ad campaign is expanding.
With your help, we are now seeking to place the full page ad in the San Francisco Chronicle in the next week.
The ad campaign is letting millions of Americans know about the constitutional mechanism of impeachment to remove from office elected officials who commit high crimes and misdemeanors, who violate the trust of the people and engage in abuse of power. The campaign for an impeachment process is building at the grassroots level. Let's do everything within our power to make it grow, in our neighborhoods, in our communities, and in Congress.
You can also help spread the word about the impeachment campaign by encouraging your favorite websites to place the VoteToImpeach graphic link. This is easily done, click here for instructions.
People around the country are also making efforts to place the ad in their local newspapers. The pdf of the ad is available at the www.VoteToImpeach.org website, and we can also assist if your paper needs any additional camera-ready files. Please let us know if the ad has been placed in a local newspaper in your area.
On Sunday, March 23 the full page ad appeared in the Madison Capitol Times (Wisconsin). We are interested in placing the ad in newspapers read by different communities around the country in large and smaller cities and towns.
We have had many requests for VoteToImpeach materials and are happy to announce that signs and stickers for the VoteToImpeach campaign will be available at the peace demonstrations taking place on Saturday April 12 in Washington, DC (12 noon at the Washington Monument) and in San Francisco (12 noon at the Civic Center - Polk & Grove). Many VoteToImpeach members are coming as contingents to these April 12 national demonstrations calling for an end to the war in Iraq, which will be part of a world-wide day of rallies for peace across the globe. The VoteToImpeach contingents will be saying that a significant step towards peace is the impeachment of George W. Bush and Co.
Congratulations on such a successful campaign launch -- lets keep the pressure building!
- All of us at VoteToImpeach.org
The war with Iraq continues. No one knows if it will last weeks, months, or years. Even after the fighting stops in Iraq, the fallout from this war could span decades. We can only hope that it ends quickly, with an absolute minimum loss of life.
Even as the troops march towards Baghdad, a big controversy is brewing over what will happen when the war does end. The neoconservatives like Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle envision a longer U.S. occupation of Iraq, directed entirely by the Pentagon and with only minimal participation by other countries and the U.N. Their scheme calls for setting up a provisional government in which Americans head each of the 23 ministries. In essence, they want to win the peace the way the U.S. has pushed for war: alone.
The U.S. State Department, the C.I.A., Prime Minister Tony Blair, the major humanitarian relief organizations, France, Germany, and most of the rest of the countries in the world disagree with this plan. They'd like to see the reconstruction of Iraq as a collaborative, international effort lead by the U.N. And many of them believe the Pentagon plan is a recipe for disaster.
The decision on how post-war Iraq is to be managed will be made in the next several days, and the Administration is split. The consequences will play out in Iraq and around the world for generations. By writing a letter to the editor of your local newspaper, you can help to sway the balance away from the unilateralism that has done so much damage and toward a collective rebuilding process.
We've made it easy for you to send a letter by providing some detailed talking points below. Here are some tips on how to make the most of them:
1. Your newspaper's letters page should give you an email address or fax number to use, or you can try this website.
2. Your own words, written from the heart, are always best.
3. Brevity is the soul of wit.
4. The key to publication is to pounce on something specific you've seen in the newspaper -- especially an editorial or op-ed article. The issue of post-war Iraq has been in the news a lot lately -- try to cite a specific article when you write.
5. Be sure to include your name and address, and especially your phone number when submitting your letter. Editors need to call you to verify authorship before they can print your letter. They don't print your phone number.
6. Please let us know when you've sent your letter by pasting it into the form below:
If that doesn't work, go to:
http://www.moveon.org/futureofiraq.html
Here's why big parts of our own government, and the governments of many other countries, oppose having the Pentagon reconstruct Iraq:
Many major relief organizations believe that it will be difficult or impossible to help starving or malnourished people in a Pentagon-controlled Iraq. Relief has never been a priority for the Pentagon, and in many cases the U.S. simply lacks the expertise to distribute food and medical aid effectively. (For more info, go here.)
At the State Department, officials worry that not including the U.N. in post-war planning could heighten tensions between the U.S. and other important allies. A recent L.A. Times article quoted one Administration official as saying, "We're on the verge of further alienating allies. . . And it looks like we're going to do exactly what we promised we wouldn't -- take small groups of exiles with limited influence in Iraq and bring them in as the bulk of a transition government." (The article is linked to below.)
Many Administration officials worry that a U.S.-led reconstruction effort will be regarded with suspicion or even hostility by Iraqis, who have already shown that they do not welcome foreign intruders. (Washington Post, April 2, 2003) In other words, if lead by the U.S., an Iraqi government may simply fail. That could leave Iraq in the hands of another Saddam Hussein.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair worries that if post-war Iraq is not in the hands of the U.N., other countries may be reticent to play a significant role in the reconstruction of the country. According to the L.A. Times, "Blair sees the move as critical to winning support from donor nations and to preventing a political backlash and new terrorism from an increasingly angry Arab world."
Your letter doesn't have to go into these details. Here are some key points you can touch on:
A U.S. occupation of post-war Iraq could incite anti-American hatred in the Arab world, and could breed more terrorism.
Major humanitarian organizations believe the Pentagon's leadership could put relief workers and starving and malnourished Iraqis at risk.
U.S. control of the reconstruction process will further alienate our already estranged allies, and could create a permanent rift between us and the countries we rely upon for cooperation in the war on terrorism.
The amount of money available for the rebuilding of Iraq will depend on the degree to which other countries feel included in the decision-making process. A U.S.-only process could lead potential donor countries to drop out.
The U.N. is equipped to build democracies; the United States government has neither the expertise nor the long-term political will to see such a process through.
Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon want a U.S. occupation of Iraq. That could have disastrous consequences, not only for the U.S., but for the future of democracy in Iraq. As Prime Minister Blair said, "Iraq in the end should not be run by the Americans, should not be run by the British, should not be run by any outside force or power. It should be run for the first time in decades by the Iraqi people."
Sincerely,
--Carrie, Eli, Joan, Peter, Wes, and Zack
The MoveOn Team
April 3rd, 2003
P.S. Here's a great L.A. Times article that sums up many of these issues.
P.P.S. If you're interested in taking more media-related actions on a more frequent basis, please join our Media Corps
by Lee Douglas
PORTLAND, Oregon -- An Oregon antiterrorism bill would jail street-blocking protesters for at least 25 years in what critics consider a thinly veiled effort to discourage antiwar demonstrations.
The bill has met strong opposition, but lawmakers expect a debate on the definition of terrorism and the value of free speech before a vote by the state Senate judiciary committee, whose chairman, Republican John Minnis, wrote the proposal.
Senate Bill 742 identifies a terrorist as a person who ''plans or participates in an act that is intended, by at least one of its participants, to disrupt'' business, transportation, schools, government, or free assembly.
The bill's few public supporters say police need stronger laws to break up protests that have created havoc in cities like Portland, where thousands of people have marched and demonstrated against war in Iraq since last fall.
''We need some additional tools to control protests that shut down the city,'' said Lars Larson, a conservative radio talk-show host who has stumped for the bill.
Larson said protesters should be protected by free speech laws, but not be able to hold up ambulances or frighten people out of their daily routines, adding that police and the court system could be trusted to see the difference.
''Right now, a group of people can get together and go downtown and block a freeway,'' Larson said. ''You need a tool to deal with that.''
The bill contains automatic sentences of 25 years to life for the crime of terrorism.
Critics of the bill say its vagueness erodes basic freedoms in the name of fighting terrorism under an extremely broad definition.
''Under the original version, [terrorism] meant essentially a food fight,'' said Andrea Meyer of the American Civil Liberties Union, which opposes the bill.
Police unions and minority groups also oppose the bill for fear it could have a chilling effect on relations between police and poor people, minorities, children, and ''vulnerable'' populations.
Some legislators said the bill stands little chance of passage.
''I just don't think this bill is ever going to get out of committee,'' said Democratic Senator Vicki Walker, one of four members on the six-person panel who have said they oppose the legislation.
Bill in Oregon Seeks to Jail War Protesters as Terrorists
An extraordinary communication from the United States to UN representatives around the world has been leaked to Greenpeace. (Full text of the leaked document here). In it, the United States warns that the simple act of support for a General Assembly meeting to discuss the war will be considered "unhelpful and directed against the United States." They further threaten that invoking the Uniting for Peace resolution will be "harmful to the UN."
Greenpeace has been actively lobbying at the United Nations against the war, and many delegates have expressed both publicly and privately their distaste for what they see as US attempts to "strongarm" the world community to do as it is told. One delegate was so incensed with the memo circulated by the US that he leaked the full document.
The Uniting for Peace resolution, which the US is trying to head off, has a long history of stopping conflict. Ironically, it has most often been invoked by the US to overcome vetoes by the Soviet Union during the cold war. Under its terms, the full 191 member United Nations General Assembly can gather to make recommendations for restoring the peace when the Security Council is deadlocked or unable to take action. Somewhat hilariously, one of the reasons the US says the General Assembly should not take up the issue of war in Iraq is that the "Security Council remains seized of this matter." Seized is certainly the correct term: the engine of peace is simply not turning.
There are those who say that the United Nations has been harmed by the Security Council debate on Iraq and the US coalition action without authorisation. However, it can also be said that the UN showed extraordinary strength in withstanding the pressure to rubber-stamp an illegal invasion. The only course of action open now to the global community is to demand the immediate end of hostilities and a return to UN-sanctioned disarmament measures. It's the right thing to do for world peace, it's the right thing to do for the future of the United Nations.
In the past two weeks, Greenpeace Cyberactivists have been part of the global outcry for an emergency session of the UN. We've sent a record 60,000 appeals to United Nations representatives calling for the General Assembly to denounce the war in Iraq and to call for an immediate cease-fire. And despite the fierce US pressure, it looks like our global demand will be met.
A press announcement by the Arab League Monday confirms that they will be invoking the "Uniting for Peace" resolution to bring all 191 member nations of the UN together. "The point of the request is to save the lives of Iraqi civilians," one Arab diplomat said to the Associated Press. "We will ask for a cease-fire and a return to peaceful disarmament in Iraq."
Dozens of other nations have already gone on record saying they will support the call for an emergency session. We urge the General Assembly to meet swiftly and give shape to the global voices that are demanding an end to this illegal war.
Vows To Oppose Supplemental; Offers Amendment to Bring Troops Home
Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich (D-OH), who leads opposition to the war in Iraq within the House, spoke today on the House floor in opposition to the war supplemental and offer an amendment to bring the troops home.
Kucinich issued the following statement:
“I support the troops. But, this war is illegal and wrong. I do not support this mission. I will not vote to fund this Administration’s war in Iraq...
“This war is not about defending the United States from a foreign threat in Iraq. This war is not about the U.S. trying to save or liberate the Iraqi people. This is not about an Iraqi nuclear threat. Iraq did not attack the United States. The United Nations (UN) did not approve this war as being necessary to protect international security. In addition, this Administration did not provide evidence for its claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) prior to military conflict. And, several key pieces of evidence have been shown to be fraudulent.
“This war is killing our troops. This war is killing innocent Iraqi civilians. This war must end now. It was unjust when it started two weeks ago, and is still unjust today. The U.S. should get out now and try to save the lives of American troops and Iraqi citizens.
“Many members of the Republican Leadership have demonstrated how to vote against war funding and support our troops. On December 13, 1995, the House, under the control of Speaker Gingrich, considered HR 2770. This bill, a “prohibition of funds for deployment of Armed Forces in Bosnia,” was introduced by Rep. Bob Dornan (R-CA). Many leading Republicans, such as Tom DeLay, Dennis Hastert, Bill Thomas, Duncan Hunter and Henry Hyde, voted to cut-off funds for the military action while troops were deployed in Bosnia. In fact, 82% of Republicans voted to cut off the funds while troops were deployed in Bosnia.
“Ending the war now and resuming weapons inspections could salvage world opinion of the United States. The greatest threat to the United States at this time is terrorism, which this war will breed.”
During debate, Kucinich offered an amendment to bring the troops home immediately. The Kucinich amendment would cut $19.3 billion from Operation Iraqi Freedom Fund. The amendment would leave $30.3 billion to fund the war to date, plus $10 billion to get the troops out of Iraq. The amendment would save taxpayers $19.4 billion or could be used for increased homeland security, education, healthcare, or veterans funds.
Kucinich will vote ‘no’ on final passage of the war supplemental.
It's pretty amazing when the White House starts producing artwork critical of the Bush regime, but all these and more are available at:
whitehouse.org/initiatives/posters/
There's also a lot of news there, such as:
"I don't profess to understand your courage, or the modest backgrounds most of you tried to escape when you fell for the slick military advertisements promising a life of confidence, civilian skills, and violent death – but I know that you are America's best: shining examples of our diversity, blood-thirstiness, and utter expendability..."
Worse I fear by far than this obscene war – just yesterday the world was treated to hearing a mother’s tale of seeing her two daughters, ages 15 & 12, decapitated by U.S. firepower as it ripped through their vehicle that failed to heed what may have been an unclear warning to stop at a “U.S. checkpoint” – will be the “peace” that follows.
(Petaluma, California, Gothic News Service, 04/03) The descendants of radical and progressive chicken farmers of America - including many of Petaluma's new and anti-war citizens - gathered today for a public sendoff of Uncle Sam's corpse on a bicycle propelled pilgrimage across America. Destined for an August revival celebration on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, crowds gathered around the float at the intersection of Main and Washington to witness the open wounds on Sam¹s large red, white and blue body which lay crumpled upside down on a large float - his haggard, sad and open eyes barely able to look out on the crowds that stopped City traffic for miles around.
Petaluma, now a mainly white suburb north of San Francisco, spent most of the first half of the 20th Century known as the chicken and egg capital of the nation. Founded and sustained by secular socialist, Yiddish speaking chicken farmers, the community was internationally known for its contriubtions to the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti, the Scottsboro Boys and the Spanish Republic, including the participation of some of its members in the famed anti-fascist Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
"Much of the leadership was threatened and quieted during the McCarthy period, including the executions of the Rosenbergs," said Eileen Fishman, one of the daughters and organizers. "We¹ve come back to revive our roots as well as join with our fellow citizens. Our pilgrimage is to send a message of defeat to the neo-McCarthy/Ashroft alliance and to revive and protect our Constitutional liberties."
In the morning crown many concerned citizens lined up around the float to cover Sam's costume with fresh and familiar stickers, including:
Take Back America
Rage Against the Coup
Resist Repression
Democracy Not Hypocrisy
If You Are Not Outraged
You Are Not Paying Attention
Others took turns to place painted eggs, chicken feather pillows, as well as other procreative symbols under and around Sam's body and face.
At eleven o¹clock, the float - pulled by the "Abe Wheeler Brigade", its volunteer members drawn from Bicycle Peace Coalitions up and down the West Coast slowly pedaled out of town. The cross-continental trip will stop to rally citizens in town rallies across the country including a major July 4th stop in Wichita, Kansas on July 4th. There, in a nocturnal gathering, 100 poets will join in a rare choral reading of the "Wichita Vortex Sutra," considered by many as one of Allen Ginsberg's major poems.
"Allen was the visionary baby of our elders," is all Ms. Fishman would say as to why the poem was chosen. "You might go read it or get the recording of Allen," she told reporters. "The work is really quite tender."
In addition to providing muscle power, the bicycle coalition forces expect to fend off attacks from O¹Reilly and other Fox Network Cable SUV brigades, some of whom have already publicly promised to threaten the highway pilgrimage.
"When we get to the Lincoln Memorial, there will a public celebration in which we crack fresh eggs, revive Sam with feather ticklers, stand him up, show off his stickers and let him dance and sing a little to the bike coalition brass band - nothing too corny while we let Lincoln¹s shrine invoke the bravery of our Petaluma elders and this country¹s many other progressive ancestors," Ms. Fishman said, just before hopping on her bike to leave town.
[I'm sure a lot of you know about Salam Pax already but this is an angle that has been largely ignored.]
by Doug Windsor
March 29, 2003 12:01 a.m. ET/+5GMT/-3PT (New York City) A website by a mysterious gay man is attracting tens of thousands of readers around the world seeking updates on the situation in Baghdad.
He calls himself Salam Pax, a nom de plume which means "peace" in Arabic and Latin.
His site (http://dear_raed.blogspot.com) is a web log called a blog, a sort of online diary. His entries not only criticize Saddam Hussein but also the U.S. led invasion of Iraq.
While little is known about Salam Pax, it appears he is a 28 or 29-year-old Iraqi architect who lived as a teenager in Europe. His writings provide an eerie look at a city under seige.
"Our brightest and most creative minds fled the country not because of oppression alone but because no one inside Iraq could make a living, survive," he wrote of economic sanctions, telling the U.S. government to "get a clue."
"There are no waving masses of people welcoming the Americans nor are they surrendering by the thousands. People are ... sitting in their homes hoping that a bomb doesn't fall on them," he wrote.
In yet another entry he writes: "Houses near al-salam palace ... have had all their windows broke, doors blown in and in one case a roof has caved in," Salam wrote in his journal. "I guess that is what is called 'collateral damage' and that makes it OK?"
"How could 'support democracy in Iraq' become to mean 'bomb the hell out of Iraq'? ... Nobody minded an undemocratic Iraq for a very long time, now people have decided to bomb us to democracy? Well, thank you! how thoughtful," he wrote.
Before the invasion began several of his entries detailed persecutions against gays in Iraq.
Some of his entries are witty, others profoundly disturbing glimpses at Saddam's regime and the fears of Iraqis about the bombing campaign.
The site has become so popular that exceeded the amount of bandwidth he was allotted.
Google, the company which operates the company that hosts his blog has upgraded his account last weekend gratis so he could continue writing and posting photos. This week it added a mirror site to keep up with the ever growing traffic. (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gulfwar-2/)
Salam Pax has his detractors who believe he is actually an American or Israeli agent - and may not even be in Baghdad. But his supports point to the meticulous detail in his postings which even include the price of vegetables. One internet sleuth tested the code behind the Internet address of his blog and determined it most likely came from Iraq.
The site was knocked off the air on Monday prompting fears that Iraq's secret police may have discovered him, but it came back up on Friday night.
©365Gay.com LtdÆ 2003
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
We have been in discussions to activate and invite others to organize some actions, activities and events in relation and response to the "war on terror", the war in iraq, the ongoing attacks on civil liberties, responsibilities as "citizens", responsibilities as cultural workers, culture & politics, cultural politics, censorship, dissent, etc, ? . The time frame we were thinking about for the the events (which can range from creative protests, to public art works, online projects, screenings, discussions and panels) would be the weekend of April 26.
To open this call to as many people as possible, we need to collaborate with others artists, activists, groups, and organizations. We are writing this letter to seek your participation, and assistance in organizing, initiating events, but most importantly connecting and finding other partners/collaborating bodies.
We are aware that many people are already in the mindset and preparing such actions, we just want to try to create a density of these activities to coincide together and create a level of critical mass and hopefully public resonance.
We have been encouraged by the anti-war movements and the level of "resistance" that has been organized in nyc and cities around the world. We would like to involve and implicate in a more precise fashion, the role, responses, and strategies of cultural workers or others utilizing/employing artistic/creative approaches.
Our idea is to create a horizontal structure in which there is no approval of what can and cannot fit within its framework. We only propose a title, a date, an open set of ideas, themes and questions. It is up to the individuals and groups who participate to decide and organize the specific scope and nature of their projects.
Related to that weekend, we will generate a map of this cultural field of resistance and along with that a calendar of all the related events that will take be taking place.
Let us know what you think, ideas you may have or had, what you may already be working on that could coincide with these events, and if you would like to be involved (organizing, networking, creating).
At this point, Rene and I are gathering the names of people who will be organizing and doing "outreach", we really hope that this event is not just in New York, but will be in other cities as well.
For the interim, please write to info@16beavergroup.org (subject: Action). We have already set up an e-mail list that people who will be involved can subscribe to (subscribe_hownow@16beavergroup.org).
Ok, looking forward to hearing back from everyone.
Ay + Rene
United for Peace & Justice NYC
http://www.unitedforpeace.org/nyc 212-603-3700
====================================
In this update:
* April 3: Nonviolence/Civil Disobedience Training
* April 4: Riverside Church Anti-War Funeral Procession
* April 5: Harlem Anti-War March & Rally
* April 7: Direct Action Against War Profiteers
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was our country's foremost spokesperson for peace and justice. He understood how immoral war abroad fueled racism and injustice at home. For this he was vilified and eventually assassinated on April 4, 1968. (A year earlier, on April 4, 1967, Dr. King had delivered a major speech against the war in Vietnam.)
From April 4 to 7 of this year, in commemoration of the death of Dr. King and in celebration of his legacy, United for Peace and Justice has made a national call for local antiwar actions throughout the country. Visit http://www.unitedforpeace.org for more information about the national initiatives we are supporting this weekend.
In New York City, there are several key anti-war actions this weekend that we urge you to support and publicize. You can also view a complete calendar of New York anti-war events -- or list your group\'s event -- at
http://www.unitedforpeace.org/calendar.php?area=33
*April 3: Nonviolence/Civil Disobedience Training
Sponsored by United for Peace & Justice NYC
Thurs. April 3rd, 7-10pm; 330 W. 42nd St., 9th Fl. (bet. 8/9 Aves.)
For more info: UFPJcd@hotmail.com | 212-603-3759
*April 4: Riverside Church Anti-War Funeral Procession
Riverside Church in NYC will hold a symbolic funeral procession on Friday -- the anniversary of Dr. King\'s April 4, 1967 anti-war speech at Riverside Church -- to remember Dr. King, and to mourn both those who have been killed and those who will be killed as a result of the war in Iraq.
Assemble 9AM at Grant\'s Tomb, Riverside Dr. & 122nd Street for a 9:30AM service followed by a march to Bryant Park
More details: http://www.theriversidechurchny.org | 212-870-6853
*April 5: Harlem Anti-War March and Rally
A Call to African Americans and All People of Color: We must show the world that we stand in opposition to this racist war in Iraq. Assemble this Saturday at 11:00AM at Marcus Garvey Park, 124th Street & Fifth Avenue, for a march to the Harlem State Office Building.
Organized by the Black Solidarity Against the War Coalition
More info: http://www.unitedforpeace.org/calendar.php?calid=4185
and http://www.blacksagainstwar.com
*April 7: Direct Action Against War Profiteers
The M27 Coalition -- organizers of last week\'s Rockefeller Center die-in -- will participate in a national day of direct action against war profiteers on Monday, by organizing a mass civil disobedience outside the offices of The Carlyle Group. The Carlyle Group, with offices at 58th & Fifth, is a politically connected investment firm that stands to profit greatly from both the war itself and the postwar reconstruction.
For more details and info about upcoming planning meetings, visit:
http://www.m27coalition.org/
Sunday, April 6
(programmed by Marianne Shaneen)
Sunday April 6, 8:30pm: Ocularis presents
BAGHDAD: HOME MOVIES (PREMIERE!)
A Presentation by New York City video/web/installation artist Paul Chan, who spent the month of December 2002 in Baghdad, as a member of Voices in the Wilderness, a Nobel Peace Prize nominated group working to end the sanctions against Iraq. At Ocularis, Chan will present for the first time his video footage from Baghdad, offering a glimpse into the cultural, political, and everyday life of Iraqi citizens living under the weight of the UN sanctions and the chaos of another war. Chan will be joined by members of the Ruckus Society and United for Peace and Justice to talk about alternative and utopian visions and radical change.
Paul Chan is a 2003 Rockefeller Foundation New Media Art Fellow and director
of an online political/aesthetic think tank at:
www.nationalphilistine.com.
For more information on the Iraq peace team project:
http://www.iraqpeaceteam.org
DIRECTIONS:
Ocularis screenings are at Galapagos Art & Performance Space
in Williamsburg, Brooklyn
70 North 6th Street (between Wythe and Kent)
Tel: 718.388.8713
By subway: L line to Bedford Avenue stop, first stop in Brooklyn. Walk one block south to North 6th street and two and a half blocks west.
As Well As Disobedient, Fluxus, Humorous, Intelligent, And Situationist
Through the grapevine I hear of problems some have with Act Now to Stop War & End Racism (A.N.S.W.E.R.) This morning on W.B.A.I I listened to a discussion about the New York Times, ironically, accusing United For Peace and Justice of not supporting civil disobedience.
Even Taylor Meade--Andy Warhol superstar, downtown nightclub denizen, and raconteur--the evening of March 22, 2003, the day of a big anti-war march down Broadway from Times Square to Washington Square Park, says, "The anti-war movement is redundant!" Poet Frank Sherlock wittily replied, "Maybe but only because war is so redundant!"
I have only witnessed increasing joy and savvy in the anti-war movement since the semi-legal march in New York on Saturday February 22, 2003. Unfortunately the rancor and hatred from pro-war press and public is increasingly vociferous.
In spite of comments to the contrary what I witnessed near Rockefeller Center last Thursday, March 27, 2003 was a terrific expression of democracy incorporating art, carnival, comedy, poetry, and philosophy to critique the United States’ war on terrorism in Iraq.
More than 200 people were arrested for symbolically dying on 5th Avenue in front of Rockefeller Center, ground zero of U.S. corporate media. Several hundred more people gathered in front and near the center to protest, not only the war in Iraq, but media coverage of it. The demonstration was, for lack of a better word, organized by the M27 Coalition, because many participants heard about the event from National Public Radio the night prior, as well as various other sources. Furthermore, the last several years of the growing anti-corporate globalization movement has informed the current anti-war movement--loosely affiliated affinity groups gather to create a critical mass of dissent.
The inability to identify a leader always infuriates police and especially the press. There is no one to blame nor to soundbite. For example, I travelled to the march from Brooklyn with John Coletti, unaffiliated with any group. He learned about the action on the radio. He spent 22 hours in jail. He's just this person who opposes U.S. military intervention in Iraq.
The following 13 photographs document some of what I observed.
The wounds are vicious and deep, a rash of scarlet spots on the back and thighs or face, the shards of shrapnel from the cluster bombs buried an inch or more in the flesh. The wards of the Hillah teaching hospital are proof that something illegal – something quite outside the Geneva Conventions – occurred in the villages around the city once known as Babylon.
The wailing children, the young women with breast and leg wounds, the 10 patients upon whom doctors had to perform brain surgery to remove metal from their heads, talk of the days and nights when the explosives fell "like grapes" from the sky. Cluster bombs, the doctors say – and the detritus of the air raids around the hamlets of Nadr and Djifil and Akramin and Mahawil and Mohandesin and Hail Askeri shows that they are right.
Were they American or British aircraft that showered these villages with one of the most lethal weapons of modern warfare? The 61 dead who have passed through the Hillah hospital since Saturday night cannot tell us. Nor can the survivors who, in many cases, were sitting in their homes when the white canisters opened high above their village, spilling thousands of bomblets into the sky, exploding in the air, soaring through windows and doorways to burst indoors or bouncing off the roofs of the concrete huts to blow up later in the roadways.
Rahed Hakem remembers that it was 10.30am on Sunday when she was sitting in her home in Nadr, that she heard "the voice of explosions" and looked out of the door to see "the sky raining fire". She said the bomblets were a black-grey colour. Mohamed Moussa described the clusters of "little boxes" that fell out of the sky in the same village and thought they were silver-coloured. They fell like "small grapefruit," he said. "If it hadn't exploded and you touched it, it went off immediately," he said. "They exploded in the air and on the ground and we still have some in our home, unexploded."
Karima Mizler thought the bomblets had some kind of wires attached to them – perhaps the metal "butterfly" that contains sets of the tiny cluster bombs and springs open to release them in showers.
Some victims died at once, mostly women and children, some of whose blackened, decomposing remains lay in the tiny charnel house mortuary at the back of the Hillah hospital. The teaching college received more than 200 wounded since Saturday night – the 61 dead are only those who were brought to the hospital or who died during or after surgery, and many others are believed to have been buried in their home villages – and, of these, doctors say about 80 per cent were civilians.
Soldiers there certainly were, at least 40 if these statistics are to be believed, and amid the foul clothing of the dead outside the mortuary door I found a khaki military belt and a combat jacket. But village men can also be soldiers and both they and their wives and daughters insisted there were no military installations around their homes. True or false? Who is to know if a tank or a missile launcher was positioned in a nearby field – as they were along the highway north to Baghdad? But the Geneva Conventions demand protection for civilians even if they are intermingled with military personnel, and the use of cluster bombs in these villages – even if aimed at military targets – thus crosses the boundaries of international law.
So it was that 27-year old Asil Yamin came to receive those awful round wounds in her back. And so five-year-old Zaman Abbais was hit in the legs and 48-year-old Samira Abdul-Hamza in the eyes, chest and legs. Her son Haidar, a 32-year-old soldier, said the containers which fell to the ground were white with some red and green sometimes painted on them. ''It is like a grenade and they came into the houses," he said. "Some stayed on the land, others exploded."
Heartbreaking is the only word to describe 10-year-old Maryam Nasr and her five-year-old sister Hoda. Maryam has a patch over her right eye where a piece of bomblet embedded itself. She also had wounds to the stomach and thighs. I didn't realise that Hoda, standing by her sister's bed, was wounded until her mother carefully lifted the little girl's scarf and long hair to show a deep puncture in the right side of her head, just above her ear, congealed blood sticking to her hair but the wound still gently bleeding. Their mother described how she had been inside her home and heard an explosion and found her daughters lying in their own blood near the door. The little girls alternately smiled and hid when I took their pictures. In other wards, the hideously wounded would try to laugh, to show their bravery. It was a humbling experience.
The Iraqi authorities, of course, were all too ready to allow us journalists access to these patients. But there was no way these children and often uneducated parents could manufacture their stories of tragedy and pain. Nor could the Iraqis have faked the scene in Nadr village where the remains of the tiny bomblets littered the ground beside the scorch marks. A crew from Sky Television even managed to bring a set of bomblet shrapnel back to Baghdad from Nadr with them, the wicked little metal balls that are intended to puncture the human body still locked into their frame like cough sweets in a metal sheath, They were of a black colour which glinted silver when held against the light.
Again, were the aircraft that dropped these terrible weapons American or British? The deputy administrator of the hospital and one of his doctors told a confused tale of military action around the city in recent days, of Apache helicopters that would disgorge special forces on the road to Karbala; one of their operations – if the hospital personnel are to be believed – went spectacularly wrong one night recently when militiamen forced them to retreat. Shortly afterwards, the cluster bomb raids began, although the villages that were targeted appear to have been on the other side of Hillah to the reported abortive American attack.
One thing was clear: there is no "front line" in the fighting around Babylon, that US forces strike into land around the Tigris river by air and then withdraw and Iraqi forces do much the same in the other direction. Only the Americans and British, of course, have air superiority – indeed there is no evidence a single Iraqi aircraft has taken off since the start of the invasion – so even the US and British officers back at Qatar headquarters can hardly claim the cluster bombs were dropped by Iraq.
The most recent raid occurred on Tuesday when 11 civilians were killed – two of them women and three of them children – in a village called Hindiyeh. A man sent to collect the corpses reported to the hospital the only living thing he found in the area was a hen. Iraqi bomb disposal officers were ordered into the villages yesterday afternoon to clear the unexploded ordnance.
Needless to say, it is not the first time cluster bombs have been used against civilians. During Israel's 1982 siege of west Beirut, its air force dropped cluster bomblets manufactured for the US Navy across several areas, especially in the Fakhani and Ouzai districts, causing civilians ferocious and deep wounds identical to those I saw in Hillah yesterday. Angry at the misuse of their weapons, which are designed for use against exclusively military targets, the Reagan administration withheld a shipment of fighter-bombers for Israel – then relented a few weeks later and sent the aircraft anyway.
It is not easy to listen to Iraqi officials condemning the use of illegal weapons when the Iraqi air force has itself dropped poison gas on the Iranian army and on pro-Iranian Kurdish villages during the 1980-88 war against Iran. Outraged claims from Iraqi officials at the abuse of human rights sound like a bell with a very hollow ring. But something terrible happened around Hillah this week, something unforgivable and something contrary to international law. One hesitates, as I say, to talk of human rights in this land of torture but if the Americans and British don't watch out, they are likely to find themselves condemned for what they have always – and rightly – accused Iraq of: war crimes.
[You can score yourself by looking at the answers below...]
by Stephen R. Shalom
1. The anti-war movement supports our troops by urging that they be brought home immediately so they neither kill nor get killed in a unjust war. How has the Bush administration shown its support for our troops?
a. The Republican-controlled House Budget Committee voted to cut $25 billion in veterans benefits over the next 10 years.
b. The Bush administration proposed cutting $172 million from impact aid programs which provide school funding for children of military personnel.
c. The administration ordered the Dept. of Veterans Affairs to stop publicizing health benefits available to veterans.
d. All of the above.
2. The anti-war movement believes that patriotism means urging our country to do what is right. How do Bush administration officials define patriotism?
a. Patriotism means emulating Dick Cheney, who serves as Vice-President while receiving $100,000-$1,000,000 a year from Halliburton, the multi-billion dollar company which is already lining up for major contracts in post-war Iraq.
b. Patriotism means emulating Richard Perle, the warhawk who serves as head of the Defense Intelligence Board while at the same time meeting with Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi on behalf of Trireme, a company of which he is a managing partner, involved in security and military technologies, and while agreeing to work as a paid lobbyist for Global Crossing, a telecommunications giant seeking a major Pentagon contract.
c. Patriotism means emulating George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, John Bolton, Tom DeLay, John Ashcroft, Lewis Libby, and others who enthusiastically supported the Vietnam War while avoiding serving in it and who now are sending others to kill and be killed in Iraq.
d. All of the above.
3. The Bush administration has accused Saddam Hussein of lying regarding his weapons of mass destruction. Which of the following might be considered less than truthful?
a. Constant claims by the Bush administration that there was documentary evidence linking Iraq to attempted uranium purchases in Niger, despite the fact that the documents were forgeries and CIA analysts doubted their authenticity. b. A British intelligence report on Iraq's security services that was in fact plagiarized, with selected modifications, from a student article. c. The frequent citation of the incriminating testimony of Iraqi defector Hussein Kamel, while suppressing that part of the testimony in which Kamel stated that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction had been destroyed following the 1991 Gulf War. d. All of the above.
4. White House Press Secretary Ari Fleisher stormed out of a press conference when the assembled reporters broke into laughter after he declared that the U.S. would never try to bribe members of the UN. What should Fleisher have said to defend himself?
a. It wasn't just bribery; we also ordered the bugging of the home and office phones and emails of the UN ambassadors of Security Council member states that were undecided on war.
b. Oh, come on! We've been doing this for years. In 1990 when Yemen voted against authorizing war with Iraq, the U.S. ambassador declared "That will be the most expensive 'no' vote you ever cast."
c. Why do you think the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act makes one of the conditions for an African country to receive preferential access to U.S. markets that it "not engage in activities that undermine United States national security or foreign policy interests"?
d. All of the above.
5. George Bush has declared that "we have no fight with the Iraqi people." What could he have cited as supporting evidence?
a. U.S. maintenance of 12 years of crippling sanctions that strengthened Saddam Hussein while contributing to the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians.
b. The fact that "coalition" forces have indicated that they will use cluster bombs in Iraq, despite warnings from human rights groups that "The use of cluster munitions in Iraq will endanger civilians for years to come."
c. By pointing to the analogy of Afghanistan, which the U.S. pledged not to forget about when the war was over, and for which the current Bush administration foreign aid budget request included not one cent in aid.
d. All of the above.
6. The Bush administration has touted the many nations that are part of the "coalition of the willing." Which of the following statements about this coalition is true?
a. In most of the coalition countries polls show that a majority, often an overwhelming majority, of the people oppose the war.
b. More than ten of the members of the coalition of the willing are actually a coalition of the unwilling - unwilling to reveal their names.
c. Coalition members - most of whose contributions to the war are negligible or even zero - constitute less than a quarter of the countries in the UN and contain less than 20% of the world's population.
d. All of the above.
7. The war on Iraq is said to be part of the "war on terrorism." Which of the following is true?
a. A senior American counterintelligence official said: "An American invasion of Iraq is already being used as a recruitment tool by Al Qaeda and other groups....And it is a very effective tool."
b. An American official, based in Europe, said Iraq had become "a battle cry, in a way," for Al Qaeda recruiters.
c. France's leading counter-terrorism judge said: "Bin Laden's strategy has always been to demonstrate to the Islamic community that the West, and especially the U.S., is starting a global war against Muslims. An attack on Iraq might confirm this vision for many Muslims. I am very worried about the next wave of recruits."
d. All of the above.
8. The Bush administration says it is waging war to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Which of the following is true?
a. The United States has refused to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, viewed worldwide as the litmus test for seriousness about nuclear disarmament.
b. The United States has insisted on a reservation to the Chemical Weapons Convention allowing the U.S. President the right to refuse an inspection of U.S. facilities on national security grounds, and blocked efforts to improve compliance with the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention.
c. Vice Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby, Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, testified on Feb. 11, 2003, "The long-term trends with respect to WMD and missile proliferation are bleak. States seek these capabilities for regional purposes, or to provide a hedge to deter or offset U.S. military superiority."
d. All of the above.
9. The Bush administration says it wants to bring democracy to Iraq and the Middle East. Which of the following is true?
a. If there were democracy in Saudi Arabia today, backing for the U.S. war effort would be the first thing to go, given the country's "increasingly anti-American population deeply opposed to the war."
b. The United States subverted some of the few democratic governments in the Middle East (Syria in 1949, Iran in 1953), and has backed undemocratic regimes in the region ever since.
c. The United States supported the crushing of anti-Saddam Hussein revolts in Iraq in 1991.
d. All of the above.
10. Colin Powell cited as evidence of an Iraq-Al Qaeda link an audiotape from bin Laden in which he called Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party regime "infidels." Which of the following is more compelling evidence?
a. An FBI official told the New York Times: "We've been looking at this hard for more than a year and you know what, we just don't think it's there."
b. According to a classified British intelligence report seen by BBC News, "There are no current links between the Iraqi regime and the al-Qaeda network."
c. According to Rohan Gunaratna, author of Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror, "Since U.S. intervention in Afghanistan in October 2001, I have examined several tens of thousands of documents recovered from Al Qaeda and Taliban sources. In addition to listening to 240 tapes taken from Al Qaeda's central registry, I debriefed several Al Qaeda and Taliban detainees. I could find no evidence of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda."
d. All of the above.
Answers and Sources
1. d (a) Cong. Lane Evans, "Veterans Programs Slashed by House Republicans," Press Release, 3/13/03, http://www.veterans.house.gov/democratic/press/108th/3-13-03budget.htm. (b) Brian Faler, "Educators Angry Over Proposed Cut in Aid; Many Children in Military Families Would Feel Impact," Washington Post, 3/19/03, p. A29. (c) See Veterans' for Common Sense, letter to George W. Bush, 3/20/03 http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/print.asp?id=563; Melissa B. Robinson, "Hospitals Face Budget Crunch," Associated Press, 7/31/02; Jason Tait, "Veterans angered by marketing ban," Eagle-Tribune (Lawrence, MA), 8/2/02, http://www.eagletribune.com/news/stories/20020802/FP_003.htm
2. d (a) Warren Vieth and Elizabeth Douglass, " Ousting Hussein could open the door for U.S. and British firms. French, Russian and Chinese rivals would lose their edge," Los Angeles Times, 3/12/03, p. I:1; Robert Bryce and Julian Borger, "Halliburton: Cheney is still paid by Pentagon contractor, Bush deputy gets Dollars 1m from firm with Iraq oil deal," Guardian (London), 3/12/03, p. 5 (which notes that Halliburton "would not say how much the payments are; the obligatory disclosure statement filled by all top government officials says only that they are in the range of" $100,000 and $1 million. (b) Seymour M. Hersh, "Lunch with the Chairman," New Yorker, 3/16/03; Stephen Labaton, "Pentagon Adviser Is Also Advising Global Crossing," NYT, 3/21/03, p. C1. Perle is to be paid $725,000 for his lobbying effort, including $600,000 if his lobbying is successful. (c) New Hampshire Gazette, "The Chickenhawks," http://nhgazette.com/chickenhawks.html.
3. d (a) See the evidence collected in Cong. Henry Waxman's letter to George W. Bush, 3/17/03, http://www.house.gov/waxman/text/admin_iraq_march_17_let.htm. (b) See Glen Rangwala's report, http://traprockpeace.org/britishdossier.html. (c) See Glen Rangwala's report, http://traprockpeace.org/kamel.html.
4. d (a) Martin Bright, Ed Vulliamy, and Peter Beaumont, The Observer (London), 3/2/03. (b) Quoted in Phyllis Bennis, Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today's UN, New York: Olive Branch, 1996, p. 33. (c) Sarah Anderson, Phyllis Bennis, and John Cavanagh, Coalition of the Willing or Coalition of the Coerced?: How The Bush Administration Influences Allies in Its War on Iraq, Washington, DC: Institute for Policy Studies, 2/26/03, p. 4.
5. d (a) For background, see Anthony Arnove, ed., Iraq Under Siege: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War, Cambridge: South End Press, updated ed. 2003. (b) Paul Waugh, "Labour MPs Attack Hoon After He Reveals That British Forces Will Use Cluster Bombs," Independent, 3/21/03, p. 4; Human Rights Watch, Press Release, 3/18/03: "Persian Gulf: U.S. Cluster Bomb Duds A Threat; Warning Against Use of Cluster Bombs in Iraq." (c) Zvi Bar'el, "Flaws in the Afghan Model," Ha'aretz, 3/14/03, http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/objects/pages/PrintArticleEn.jhtml?ite mNo=272884.
6. d (a) See, for example, the revealing comment of Secretary of State Powell: "We need to knock down this idea that nobody is on our side. So many nations recognize this danger [of Iraq's weapons]. And they do it in the face of public opposition." Quoted in Steven R. Weisman With Felicity Barringer, "Urgent Diplomacy Fails To Gain U.S. 9 Votes In The U.N." NYT, 3/10/03, p. A1) (b) U.S. Dept. of State, Daily Press Briefing, Richard Boucher, Washington, DC, 3/18/03. (c) Country list: White House, Statement of Support from Coalition, 3/25/03, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/03/print/20030325-8.html; population calculated from Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2001, Washington, DC: 2001, table 1327. Total includes USA. The White House list includes countries whose leaders have done no more than state their support for the United States, and the listing changes from day to day, with some countries being added and some removed.
7. d (a) Don Van Natta Jr. and Desmond Butler, "Anger On Iraq Seen As New Qaeda Recruiting Tool," NYT, 3/16/03, p. I:1. (b) Van Natta and Butler, NYT, 3/16/03. (c) Van Natta and Butler, NYT, 3/16/03.
8. d (a) Colum Lynch, "U.S. Boycotts Nuclear Test Ban Meeting; Some Delegates at U.N. Session Upset at Latest Snub of Pact Bush Won't Back," Washington Post, 11/12/02, p. A6. (b) Amy E. Smithson, "U.S. Implementation of the CWC," in Jonathan B. Tucker, The Chemical Weapons Convention: Implementation Challenges and Solutions, Monterey Institute, April 2001, pp. 23-29, http://cns.miis.edu/pubs/reports/tuckcwc.htm; Jonathan Tucker, "The Fifth Review Conference of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention," Feb. 2002, http://www.nti.org/e_research/e3_7b.html. (c) Testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, excerpted at http://traprockpeace.org/usefulquotesoniraq.html.
9. d (a) Craig S. Smith, "Saudi Arabia Seems Calm But, Many Say, Is Seething," NYT, 3/24/03, p. B13. In fact, "Though the Saudi government officially denies it, the bombing campaign is being directed from Saudi Arabia - something that few Saudis realize." (b) On Syria, see Douglas Little, ACold War and Covert Action: The United States and Syria, 1945 1958,@ Middle East Journal, vol. 44, no. 1, Winter 1990, pp. 55 57. On Iran, see Mark J. Gasiorowski, "The 1953 Coup D'Etat in Iran," International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 19, Aug. 1987, pp. 261-86. (c) Andrew Cockburn and Patrick Cockburn, Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein, New York: HarperPerennial. 1999, chap. 1.
10. d (re audiotape, see David Johnston, "Top U.S. Officials Press Case Linking Iraq To Al Qaeda," NYT, 2/12/03, p. A1; Mohamad Bazzi, "U.S. says bin Laden tape urging Iraqis to attack appears real," Newsday, 2/12/03, p. A5. (a) James Risen and David Johnston, "Split at C.I.A. and F.B.I. On Iraqi Ties to Al Qaeda," NYT, 2/2/03, p. I:13. (b) "Leaked Report Rejects Iraqi al-Qaeda Link," BBC News, 2/5/03. (c) Rohan Gunaratna, "Iraq and Al Qaeda: No Evidence of Alliance," International Herald Tribune, 2/19/03.
Interpreting Your Score
9-10 Correct: Excellent. Contact United for Peace and Justice, http://www.unitedforpeace.org/, and work to fight the war and the system that produced it.
6-8 Correct: Fair. You've been watching a few too many former generals and government officials who provide the "expert" commentary for the mainstream media. Read the alternative media!
3-5 Correct: Poor. Don't feel bad. George W. Bush only got a C- in International Relations at College.
0-2 Correct: Failing. You have a bright future as an "embedded" journalist.
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Sorry that the nav bar above is looking so bad -- it looked fine on my two machines at work, but now that I'm home I see that it's quite awful. But functional, alas. I'll see what I can do about it today, but I've got a ton of things to do.
What it does is take the most recent entry under a particular category and features the title of that entry. These are not editorial recommendations, but are automatic. Some original pieces were getting pushed down the page a little too fast. Scrolling down the home page is still the best way to see what's been going on.
Also, Netscape users should use a different browser to look at this site. I think it works on Netscape 7, but anything below that doesn't agree with the MovableType template that I'm using. It would take me a few days to get it to really conform, but I think in the end Netscape didn't implement some of the HTML that is used in this site. My apologies for this.
http://www.wired.com/news/conflict/0,2100,58326,00.html
It can happen here -- and does.
... sorry, no idea what the text says.
[photo by Nasser Shiyoukhi, AP]
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/issue_mayjune_2003/debate.html
Chinese hacker groups are planning attacks on U.S.- and U.K.-based Web sites to protest the war in Iraq, the Department of Homeland Security warned in an alert that it unintentionally posted on a government Web site yesterday.
The hackers are planning "distributed denial-of-service" attacks, which render Web sites and networks unusable by flooding them with massive amounts of traffic. They also are planning to deface selected Web sites, according to the alert, though the government said it did not know when the attacks would occur.
The Homeland Security Department said it got the information by monitoring an online meeting that the hackers held last weekend to coordinate the attacks. The department sent the alert to government and industry officials over the weekend but accidentally posted the link on the home page of the National Infrastructure Protection Center. The alert was pulled hours later.
Homeland Security Department spokesman David Wray said the information was not supposed to be released to the public. "This was an inadvertent release and the information, while not classified, is sensitive," he said.
The messages cited in the alert were posted on several hacker Web sites thought to be affiliated with the "Honker Union of China," a cadre of Chinese hackers that launched an assault against dozens of U.S. government Web sites in May 2001 after the collision of a Chinese fighter jet and a U.S. surveillance plane on April 1, 2001. "Honker" is Chinese slang for "hacker."
The group claimed responsibility then for defacements on the Web sites of the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Navy, the Labor Department, and other government agencies and businesses.
The Homeland Security Department's warning comes amid a flurry of antiwar hacking activity. About 10,000 Web sites have been marred with digital graffiti by protesters and supporters of U.S.-led war in Iraq, according to F-Secure Corp., a Finnish Internet security firm.
As I wrote earlier, I'm not able to convert my scan of Wichita Vortex Sutra into HTML and post to this blog.
Formatting it even as much as I have is pretty tedious and I'm only getting about 3 pages of the poem done at a time before getting bleary-eyed. Here is an HTML version in a separate section of arras if the first pages of part II, and here is a nice printable .pdf version.
I'll make an effort to get the rest of it up in a 2 more installations, and then do the whole thing as one entry. Enjoy.
A commentary by Arundhati Roy
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,927849,00.html
As a group, poets have an extraordinary and just tradition of civil disobedience; the much-invoked-of-late Ginsberg was no stranger to the prison-house of prison. On April 7th, non-violent CD will be one one of many options for actively resisting an unjust and illegal war on Iraq, and the accelerating corrosion of your freedoms at home. For that Monday, a coalition including United for Peace and Justice, Direct Action to Stop the War, and Iraqi Pledge of Resistance has called for a National Day of Direct Action. See the call at ActAgainstWar; see New York-specific information at m27coalition. Join or form an affinity group; decide what you would like to do. We and our communities are the fundamental units of decision and action. Active engagement against this outrage will ease anxieties about the political nature and efficacy of poems. It will also clearly indicate that you do not support your government's actions; will not tolerate them; and will not settle for what freedoms are assigned to you according to the day's color-coding. Fight for freedom; art for art!
An excerpt:
[I]n this moment of crisis, I should not be allowed to say the following things about America:Why do we purport to be fighting in the name of liberating the Iraqi people when we have no interest in violations of human rights—as evidenced by our habit of looking the other way when they occur in China, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Syria, Burma, Libya, and countless other countries? Why, of all the brutal regimes that regularly violate human rights, do we only intervene militarily in Iraq? Because the violation of human rights is not our true interest here. We just say it is as a convenient means of manipulating world opinion and making our cause seem more just.
That is exactly the sort of thing I should not say right now.
This also is not the time to ask whether diplomacy was ever given a chance. Or why, for the last 10 years, Iraq has been our sworn archenemy, when during the 15 years preceding it we traded freely in armaments and military aircraft with the evil and despotic Saddam Hussein. This is the kind of question that, while utterly valid, should not be posed right now.
And I certainly will not point out our rapid loss of interest in the establishment of democracy in Afghanistan once our fighting in that country was over. We sure got out of that place in a hurry once it became clear that the problems were too complex to solve with cruise missiles.
That sort of remark will simply have to wait until our boys are safely back home.
Here's another question I won't ask right now: Could this entire situation have been avoided in the early 1990s had then-U.S. ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie not been given sub rosa instructions by the Bush Administration to soft-pedal a cruel dictator? Such a question would be tantamount to sedition while our country engages in bloody conflict. Just think how hurtful that would be to our military morale. I know I couldn't fight a war knowing that was the talk back home.
CNn is reporting that Fox News Channel executives and the Pentagon reached a deal Monday in which Geraldo Rivera, who raised the military's ire when he reported operational details, will leave Iraq voluntarily rather than be expelled from the country.
U.S. military officials told CNN on Monday morning that Rivera violated the cardinal rule of war reporting by giving away crucial details of military plans during a Fox News Channel broadcast from Iraq, where the reporter was temporarily assigned to the Army's 101st Airborne Division.
In the live broadcast, Rivera told his photographer to aim the camera at the sand in front of him. Rivera then outlined a map of Iraq, and showed the relative location of Baghdad and his location with the 101st Airborne. He then showed where the 101st would be going next.
"He gave away the big-picture stuff," a senior military official told CNN. "He went down in the sand and drew where the forces are going."
A Pentagon official told CNN that members of the 101st Airborne would escort Rivera to the Kuwaiti border. But Rivera appeared in another live report from Iraq hours after the official announced his expulsion, and said he knew nothing of it.
"In fact, I'm further in Iraq than I've ever been," Rivera said. "It sounds like some rats from my former network, NBC, are trying to stab me in the back [... ] MSNBC is so pathetic a cable news network that they have to do anything they can to attract attention [ ... ] You can rest assured that whatever they're saying is a pack of lies."
Nevertheless, Geraldo is packing his bags. Guess the search for the secret vault of Saddam Hussein will have to wait for another day.
The Mirror is featuring a statement from recently sacked NBC correspondent Peter Arnett titled THIS WAR IS NOT WORKING.
Some excerpts:
There is enormous sensitivity within the US government to reports coming out from Baghdad.They don't want credible news organisations reporting from here because it presents them with enormous problems.
I reported on the original bombing for NBC and we were half a mile away from those massive explosions. Now I am really shocked that I am no longer reporting this story for the US and awed by the fact that it actually happened.
That overnight my successful NBC reporting career was turned to ashes. And why?
Because I stated the obvious to Iraqi television; that the US war timetable has fallen by the wayside.
[... ]
The right-wing media and politicians are looking for any opportunity to be critical of the reporters who are here, whatever their nationality. I made the misjudgment which gave them the opportunity to do so.
[... ]
But whatever happens I will never stop reporting on the truth of this war whether I am in Baghdad or somewhere else in the Middle East - or even back in Washington.
[from Jason LeHeup]
Democracy NOW! reports that international press watchdog Reporters Sans Frontieres has accused US and British coalition forces in Iraq of displaying "contempt" for journalists covering the conflict who are not embedded with troops.
The criticism comes after a group of four "unilateral" or roving reporters revealed how they were arrested by US military police as they slept near an American unit 100 miles south of Baghdad and held overnight.
They described their ordeal as "the worst 48 hours in our lives".
"Many journalists have come under fire, others have been detained and questioned for several hours and some have been mistreated, beaten and humiliated by coalition forces ," said the RSF secretary general, Robert Menard.
The four journalists -- Israeli Dan Scemama and Boaz Bismuth and Portugese Luis Castro and Victor Silva -- entered Iraq in a jeep and followed a US convoy but were not officially attached to the troops.
US military police seized the journalists outside their base and detained them even though they were carrying international press cards.
The group claimed they were mistreated and denied contact with their families.
Thursday, April 3, 7pm - 10pm
United for Peace and Justice Office
330 W. 42nd St, 9th Floor
This is one in a series of workshops being given to help New Yorkers understand the history and strategies behind civil disobedience in preparation of another round of protests and direct actions coming up in NYC. Interested parties contact me (manwichartist@yahoo.com) or Chris of United for Peace (uspjcd@hotmail.com) for more info. First come first serve basis.
###
BAGHDAD HOME MOVIES
--> (NOTE: I'll be showing for the first time video footage from Baghdad)
Sunday, April 6 at 8:30pm
OCULARIS, Brooklyn
www.ocularis.net
A Presentation by New York City artist Paul Chan, who spent the month of December 2002 in Baghdad, as a member of Voices in the Wilderness, a Nobel Peace Prize-nominated group working to end the sanctions against Iraq. Chan will present slides and video about his work and experience in Baghdad, offering a glimpse into the cultural, political, and everyday life of Iraqi citizens living under the weight of the UN sanctions and the chaos of another war. Chan will be joined by members of the Ruckus Society and United for Peace and Justice to talk about alternative and utopian visions and radical change.
Paul Chan is a 2003 Rockefeller Foundation New Media Arts Fellow and director of an online political/aesthetic think tank www.nationalphilistine.com.
For more information on the Iraq peace team project:
http://www.iraqpeaceteam.org
-Programmed by Marianne Shanneen.
For more information, please visit www.ocularis.net
[This one's been making the rounds...]
Welcome to collectiblestoday.com! Home to All Things Collectible
Here's a radiant tribute to all those who serve in the United States military. This sparkling, exclusive collectible figurine portrays a brave (and adorable) defender of freedom sheltered in God's loving hands. Editions are limited, so Hurry. Order Now!
WE THE BLOG
"In order to form a more Artistic Union"
wetheblog.org
Washington, D.C. - The Experimental Party today announces "We the Blog," a bold, new initiative to re-activate the ideals of democracy through discussion among artists, cultural critics and other creative people who are "repositioning themselves as new leaders in the governance of this planet, particularly in these times of crisis," according to Founder Jeff Gates.
"We the Blog" offers information and dialogue - from artistic expression to political activism - as a tool for facilitating the artist's need to extend aesthetic inquiry into the broader culture where ideas become real action.
"As technology fuels new ways of communicating, the blog (web log) is resulting in certain kinds of human actions that were never possible before," said Gates, a Principal Artist of the Experimental Party. He adds, "We the Blog will offer an artistic alternative to the spin-doctors of the Republican and Democratic parties. "We the Blog" will be the virtual community to participate in as the War rhetoric ramps up."
Under Secretary of the Office of Freedom of Speech, Mark Amerika, comments, "True blog, then, is not blog as we know it, but as we un-know it. It incites creation - more invention - so that you yourself have to get down and dirty into the developmental process activating the network with your own mixillogical discourse. This is blog as inventive remix machine placing value on what it sees, what it links to, how it appropriates the Other and strips it of its isolation."
Abe Golam, Director of the Office of Economic and Homeland Insecurity of the US Department of Art & Technology has declared, "Under the banner of the Experimental Party, 'We the Blog' is guaranteed to stir up controversy in the global computer networks, that 'non-place' place where the true battle for democracy in America will be fought and won."
Since September 11, an existential darkness has possessed our government, grips its soul, threatening the American way of life. In defending our homeland, artists must now fight to protect the democratic ideals and principles of freedom on which our nation was founded. People increasingly are forgetting what shaped their past. When a people fails to know why it exists and what it stands for, it cannot be expected to long endure.
According to Secretary Randall M. Packer: "We are artists united by common purpose - freedom of expression. Our strength lies in our shared artistic ideals. The Experimental Party is activating "We the Blog" for the very survival of participatory democracy. As James Madison said 'the diffusion of knowledge is the only true guardian of liberty.'"
******
We the Blog Founding Statement:
In order to form a more Artistic Union, to enhance the Social Condition, and to provide for the Avant-Garde; to prevent Homeland Insecurity; and to promote the Artist Voice in reshaping public policy; to guarantee Creative Freedom for the Old, the Young and the Disenfranchised.
The Experimental Party's "We the Blog" is located at:
http://www.wetheblog.org
*******
The Experimental Party
http://www.experimentalparty.org
The Experimental Party - the "party of experimentation" - is an artist-based political party that has been formed to activate citizens across the country in an effort to bring the artists' message to center stage of the political process. This is a political awakening, 'representation through virtualization' is the major political thrust of the Experimental Party, it is the driving force.
The US Department of Art & Technology
http://www.usdept-arttech.net
The US Department of Art and Technology is the United States principal conduit for facilitating the artist's need to extend aesthetic inquiry into the broader culture where ideas become real action. It also serves the psychological and spiritual well-being of all Americans by supporting cultural efforts that provide immunity from the extension of new media technologies into the social sphere.
*****
Contact:
Experimental National Committee | Washington, DC
Fax: 202.342.1293 | E-mail: info@experimentalparty.org
[We get another plug (a ways down) in this very informative article that pretty much covers almost anything having to do with poetry and the war, at least in publishing.]
Poets assert their role in the national discussion
Publishers Weekly | Reed Business Information
by Michael Scharf
On March 5, the group Poets Against the War, hastily but determinedly set up by Copper Canyon publisher Sam Hamill, presented members of the U.S. Congress with a sheaf of 13,000 poems, in conjunction with a day of readings all over the country. To say that this was an unprecedented publishing event is putting it mildly. It may have been the beginning of a sea change—not only in the way that poems are published and circulated, but in the way that they are thought of in terms of their cultural role.
The presentation capped off the most visible organized poetic protest against war with Iraq. The story of how it was touched off is by now a familiar one: First Lady Laura Bush invited Hamill, among other poets, to a discussion of the work of Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman. Hamill declined and sent out an e-mail calling for poems, and he asked that February 12 (the date of the White House event) be made "a day of poetry against the war." Bush subsequently canceled the event, but Hamill's call burgeoned into a Web site (www.poetsagainstthewar.org) and into the group's massive anthology, which has just been published in an abridged edition.
Just as the United for Peace.org marches on New York City of February 15 and March 22 were word–of–e-mail based, the immense poetry protest certainly couldn't have happened without the Internet. The passionate debates that have been taking place through poetry have addressed not only the war, but the cultural role of poetry itself and the means for its dissemination. Drawing attention to that role is something that National Poetry Month, now in its eighth year and beginning this week, was designed to do from its inception. As publishers prepared for NPM, we asked them how, or if, all the attention focused on poetry by the antiwar movement was affecting their plans.
Though their answers vary, most agree with Tree Swenson, executive director of the Academy of American Poets—the group that originated and remains a major sponsor of NPM—that "poetry is much more visible in the culture right now, and part of that is because this program has been enormously successful in making poetry a more important part of the fabric of American life."
Shut Up, Poets!
The academy is kicking off NPM with a New York gala designed to demonstrate how deeply those poetic threads have insinuated themselves. Entitled "Poetry & the Creative Mind, an evening celebrating the role of poetry in American culture," the event will feature prominent, nonpoet writers and performers celebrating poetry's impact on the culture at large. Those invited include Laurie Anderson, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Kitty Carlisle Hart, Caroline Kennedy, Frank McCourt, Jessye Norman, George Plimpton, Natalie Portman, Zadie Smith, Frank Stella, Meryl Streep and William Styron.
While proud of NPM's successes in promoting poetry in the past, Swenson affirms that it is the antiwar movement that has bought unprecedented attention to poetry over the past few months. "In the '60s during the Vietnam War, poetry did draw people together who were concerned about the war and wanted to make a statement. They found the voices of poets and [the poets] rose into public visibility, but I don't think at nearly the level that they have this time."
While a media stir (and bitter acrimony on all sides) resulted from recent work and remarks by New Jersey's poet laureate, Amiri Baraka, and by Tom Paulin, a British poet and Columbia University visiting professor, Hamill's work captured the most column inches and generated a surge of activity. That attention has brought greater cognizance of the poet's traditional role within public discourse, to the point where a recent screed by Neal Pollack, frequent McSweeney's contributor and ardent blogger, was capped with the injunction: "Shut the hell up, poets."
Asked why U.S. poets don't normally play a more visible role in public debates, Dan Halpern, v-p, editorial director of Ecco Press and copublisher of Fourth Estate books, finds the situation "very complicated. The poets of Latin America—Neruda, de Andrade, Vallejo—and the great Eastern European poets, especially in Russia, speak to the people. When a new book comes out in Russia, it sells 100,000 copies, and they're lined up the day it's released. The poets somehow connect with the population. Our poets don't do that. I'm not saying they're better or worse poets, but for whatever reason, they clearly don't connect. A book of poetry typically sells a couple thousand copies, aside from Billy Collins, or Louise Glück, Jorie Graham, Seamus Heaney."
One might even quibble about (Ecco authors) Graham or Glück's numbers, reportedly very much in the several thousand range themselves, though, as with most sales figures in publishing, almost impossible to verify, short of asking the poets themselves. But despite all of the antiwar activity, and NPM, Halpern still finds "poetry always has this core group of readers, and it hasn't changed that much over 30 years."
Still, Halpern finds NPM useful, "because it makes people think about poetry in a focused way—it makes readers aware that there's still poetry being written" and that it can even be a regular part of people's lives: "In times of crisis, and we saw it after 9/11, people turn to poetry. In terms of rites of passage, people always turn to poetry. And if it's good enough for these key moments of life, then what's the matter with the everyday?"
Margarita Donnelly, director of Calyx Books, the small press based in Corvallis, Ore., that recently released A Fierce Brightness: 25 Years of Women's Poetry, concurred. "I come from a different culture—I'm from an Irish-American family from South America, where poetry causes revolutions, where poets are often leaders of political movements, and works of poetry are treated much differently than the way we treat things in the U.S., which is this white tower, sort of separate from reality."
Donnelly finds that such perceptions have a direct impact on Calyx's mission. "We're a feminist press. In the very word 'feminism' there's a political connotation given to it automatically by society at large, and who knows how many interpretations [of feminism] there are. For us, it's simply about giving women a voice." So even if the poems Calyx publishes don't carry an overt, issue-based message, "poetry is political whether it's 'political' or not."
The split between "political" and "nonpolitical" in public consciousness wasn't always so absolute, as Farrar, Straus & Giroux's Jonathan Galassi notes. Watching many of the poets on his list react to world developments, he finds the recent transformation "reminiscent of the '60s. It's bringing out a vein of poetry that has been sort of underground. When I was young, from Robert Lowell to Allen Ginsberg, that was one whole string to the lyre." Lowell, while taking part in Stalin-era red-baiting, was imprisoned as a conscientious objector to WWII and was outspoken during Vietnam, as was Ginsberg, who is perhaps the last U.S. poet with mass appeal who was consistently outspoken in his work and life.
New World Order
But it may be that the lyre has simply been re-tuned. Along with Ginsberg came Bob Dylan and Gil Scott-Heron; Grandmaster Flash and Public Enemy followed not too long after that. And this year saw the smash opening of Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, more Grammys for Eminem and packed performance poetry reading spaces across the country.
Clearly, as poet Eileen Myles recently put it in an open letter to Slate editor Judith Shulevitz (who had dismissed poetry readings as "uncomfortable" in a New York Times Book Review piece), "[T]he happy meeting of live poetry with a very impoverished human need to hear any speech live, but particularly rhythmic speech is unstoppable. Judith, people just like it. They really do. They like to sit communally and hear messages that aren't tinkered with by the government, or intended to sell a product, or gauged to spin some denatured piece of information that's already been stripped of dangerous and alarming content. Poetry is and has been for a while where lots of citizens get the real and irregular news of how others around them think and feel. What is so discomforting about that?"
Shulevitz and Myles were arguing about poetry readings of page-based work, rather than performance poetry, but there is often little separating the two, beyond the poet and audience's affects. If one classifies rap and hip-hop as genres with slightly different demands than conventional or performance poetry, then recorded poetry readings on CD have not yet had sales that noticeably surpass books (despite Shulevitz's enthusiasm for recorded poets, who are preferable because "you can always turn them off"). It may be that cheap, high-quality digital recording devices—both audio and video—are just starting to infiltrate performance venues and that recorded poetry's full competitiveness is still a few more years away.
What this year has seen is a remarkable spate of excellent poets in translation, bringing the news from other corners.
Graywolf, a small press based in St. Paul, Minn., recently published Without an Alphabet, Without a Face: Selected Poems by Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef, a socialist who has been in exile for years and now lives in London. Poetry editor Jeff Shotts makes it clear that "we accepted and put this book under contract about a year and half ago, before Iraq was something everyone wanted to talk about." But the press thought Youssef perfect for its Lannan Translation series. And Shotts strongly believes that Youssef's work can affect people's thinking on the situation. Indeed, he says, "Anyone who cares about complicated thinking about Iraq should be reading this book. As with all of our books, publishing it was primarily an aesthetic concern, but certainly a political one as well."
The awareness level of what Laura Cerruti, who recently took over as poetry editor at the University of California, calls "global poetics" seems generally heightened. "A lot of times you're talking about poets who are very involved politically with what's going on in their countries. We're interested in African poets, and when you start to delve in, it just comes up."
While not basing her decisions solely on aesthetics, Cerruti looks for the kind of connection that Halpern spoke of. "We're not going to publish someone solely because they have a particular political view; we're going to publish really influential poets. That can mean the strength of the language, but it can also be the message," Cerruti says. In doing so, the house takes care to approach from a variety of angles. "We've always published on both sides of every issue: this spring we have [Palestinian poet] Mahmood Darwish and we have [Israeli poet] Yehuda Amichai." Both are deeply engaged with the political questions facing Israel and Palestine, and even know each other. "And we publish both."
"Balance" in such undertakings was a theme struck repeatedly. Suzanna Tamminen, editor-in-chief at Wesleyan University Press, spoke of the press's mission as "try[ing] to represent as broadly as possible the best of what is going on in contemporary poetry. We really try not to become too closely aligned with any one school or type or mode or poetic presentation, but Wesleyan itself has such a liberal history, and I definitely feel that the press reflects that as well."
As well as the excellent international work available, there is still plenty of poetry being published by U.S. writers that might not sell 100,000 copies, but which is connecting through various means, some of them grassroots and some unabashedly partisan.
Poets like Wanda Coleman, Juan Felipe Herrera, Alice Notley, Adrienne Rich and Barrett Watten have written careers' worth of work that deeply interrogates lives and sociopolitical systems. Their publishers are, respectively, Black Sparrow (now distributed by Godine), the University of Arizona, Penguin, Norton and Sun & Moon.
In April, Atelos press will release Rodrigo Toscano's Platform, a blistering, aesthetically supercharged poetic critique of politics as currently practiced by much of the right and the left. Atelos was founded by poets Lyn Hejinian and Travis Ortiz; their mission statement notes the press is "devoted to publishing, under the sign of poetry, writing which challenges the conventional definitions of poetry, since such definitions have tended to isolate poetry from intellectual life, arrest its development, and curtail its impact." The correlation between formally innovative work and political thinking is something that has been clear at least since Blake and Shelley.
But such interrogations don't have to be experimental or samizdat. Soft Skull, now in Brooklyn, published the notorious Bush biography Fortunate Son and recently released the book version of David Rees's explosive Web comic Get Your War On, both of which got a lot of press. Two of Soft Skull's main titles for spring are 100 Poets Against the War, an international anthology of poems in English, French and German originally compiled in a week by the force of the Web, and Off the Cuffs: Poetry By and About the Police.
But as Soft Skull's publicity director, Shanna Compton, noted, a lot of how the press gets the word out has little to do with the books: "For outreach, the Web site and the e-mail list have been amazing, and we now do almost all of our press releases online. And we are focusing much more on webzines to get our books reviewed."
As Hamill's project demonstrated vividly, the major way in which poets connect with readers, and with other poets, may now be the Internet. And it's not just smaller houses that are working the medium.
Unencrypted Messages
One of Knopf's major National Poetry Month activities is its "Poem a Day" project, where anyone signed up for the Knopf e-newsletter is e-mailed a daily poem. In addition to bringing poetry to people in a way that highlights its daily availability, the project helps the house cope with the April glut of the market. For Knopf editor Deborah Garrison, NPM is "a blessing and a curse, because there's just so much, you worry that certain books might get lost. On the other hand, it's nice to have the focus, and it's nice to have the front table in some stores. I still like it as a reminder to people, 'Don't forget you like poetry, and here it is, and we've got it, and there's plenty for the taking.' " In fact, they're giving it away on their Web site as well.
The Academy of American Poets' Web site (www.poets.org), which features searchable caches of poems and poet biographies, had 28 million hits and 380,000 unique visits last April, and expects more this year. Beyond the huge amount of poetry on or linked to the site, the academy is set for an NPM launch of a clickable map of the United States that will serve as a nationwide clearinghouse for information on poetry events.
There are also many recent smaller-scale projects, including niche archives of poetry from a variety of eras, modes and languages. ECLIPSE: An Archive of Enthused Writing recently came online via Princeton University (www.princeton. edu/eclipse), offering PDFs of out-of-print books by poets like Clark Coolidge and Lorenzo Thomas. The Electronic Poetry Center, out of SUNY Buffalo (epc.buffalo.edu), remains a staple, with tons of material and links to sites like the Brazilian Visual Poetry site (www.imediata.com/BVP). And then there are the blogs.
Weblogs by poets have proliferated along with blogs from other walks of life. One of the most prominent, now approaching 20,000 unique visits, is that of poet and former Socialist Review editor Ron Silliman (ronsilliman.blogspot.com). For Silliman, the blog has meant a level of accessibility that was not possible with books. "I suspect that more people read my blog on any given day than read my poetry," Silliman says seriously. "Only 800 copies of Ketjak [one of Silliman's most acclaimed books] were ever published. More people read my blog in one week, approximately 1,200, than ever had copies of Ketjak."
Primarily a place for daily critical posts, rather than an outlet for his poetic work, the Silliman blog prints and discusses the work of other poets and is now getting approximately 200 visits per day. But beyond his own blog, Silliman looks to its effects on other poets. "In 2001, there were only a few thousand bloggers in the world and virtually nobody using the form to focus on poetry. Now there are hundreds of thousands of bloggers, and a growing number that focus on poetry. May a thousand blogs bloom!"
Brian Kim Stefans, a poet, media artist and blogger, used Weblog technology to put up Circulars (www.arras.net/circulars), a site that he hopes will "focus some of the disparate energy by poets and literary critics to enunciate a response to U.S. foreign policy, most significantly the move to war with Iraq." After attending a Poets Against War event at St. Mark's Poetry Project in New York, Stefans came away "believing that poets could write speeches for our public spokespersons that would be equally as compelling" as what was coming out of the White House. "I see the site as describing a possible culture that probably just doesn't exist yet in a real-world space."
The Circulars blog brings together posts from poets mainly in the U.S., Canada and the U.K., but Stefans gets regular reports from other countries, such as Turkey; and "people also submit things out of the blue." The Circulars site was a little over a month old in March, yet Stefans had 53,000 hits in a recent week and has been logging close to 3,000 unique visitors a day. Compared with the figures Halpern cited for printed poetry volumes, that seems fairly staggering.
Yet Web work is not limited to poets who are against the war. In a reaction to Poets Against the War, Circulars and other sites, a Web site under the name of Poets for the War (www.poetsforthewar.org) was "created out of pure frustration at seeing a bunch of poets get publicity for supporting terrorism and a murderous tyrant like Saddam Hussein al Tikriti," as its home page notes. The group was founded by Charles L. Weatherford, proprietor of AKA Wordsmith, a Web-based company "created to provide custom poetry and creative writing for all occasions." The site features numerous poems critical of the antiwar movement.
And beyond free archiving, blogging and anthologizing on the Net, commercial activity continues apace. Launched last September, Bigsmallpressmall.com brings together four publishers—Fence, McSweeney's, Open City and Verse Press—with the "shared interest in promoting new and unusual writers outside of the mainstream publishing system."
Keeping People Involved
As the poet and critic Alan Gilbert noted in an essay posted on Circulars, "There's a difference between a now in which one's range of political and artistic choices are primarily immediate reactions to a current situation, and a present that draws upon a culture and politics of resistance rooted in the past, present, and future."
We are at the moment deep within a pressurized, reactive "now," where many poets and readers are struggling to define and cope with events and to find a voice within them. Whether or not we move into a reflective, responsive "present," where it is assumed that poets play an active role in public life, will be a measure of poetry—and of publishing—in the years to come.
But for now, as Alice Quinn, poetry editor of the New Yorker and executive director of the Poetry Society of America, remarked, "I think it's okay what's going on, don't you?" The last few months, Quinn finds, have produced work and readings that are "answering the highest obligation of poetry, to wake people up to life in its fullest terms."
Thanks to the idiots at Microsoft, I'm not able to convert my scan of Wichita Vortex Sutra into HTML and post to this blog. The special Word coding -- more complicated with every new version and requiring a special degree to figure out -- gets in the way of the blog formatting.
I'll put an HTML version on a separate page of the site, and here is a nice printable .pdf version. Please don't tell Harper Perennial I'm putting these up. If you find any typos, please email them to me and I'll make corrections. The much longer part II of this poem is on the way.
Ginsberg's poem has been referenced frequently elsewhere on this site, especially in the comments section to Barrett Watten's War = Language piece, where David Perry has posted many lines from the poem already.
[More of Tom Raworth's doodles can be found on his website.]
Britain's artists have always responded to war. Here, we preview the work of the two official artists sent to record the Afghanistan war - images that seem all the more chilling in light of the current conflict
by Sean O'Hagan
In a pristine artist's studio in Whitechapel, I am being given a guided tour of the former house of Osama bin Laden.
It is small and makeshift, just three rooms made of earth and stone, with an external kitchen. Close by, there is a bunker and a small mosque that the most wanted man in the world had built while he stayed there from May 1996 until September 1997. Inside the house, one room has a large electric fan and a huge pile of onions. It looks like a conceptual art installation.
Which, in a way, it now is. Courtesy of Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell, two east London-based conceptual artists, you, too, will soon be able to visit the former home of Osama bin Laden, when it is transported, via virtual technology, from rural Afghanistan to a room in the Imperial War Museum in London. As if playing a computer game, visitors will be able to navigate their way through these rooms using a joystick to manipulate the images projected before them. You will be able to wander around the promontory near the town of Daruntah where it was built, and look out over the nearby reservoir to the mountains beyond, as bin Laden must have done many times until the presence of American operatives in nearby Peshawar forced him to decamp to the safer, less isolated environs of Kandahar. You will be able to see the small mosque made for his personal use, and examine his bunker built from used ammunition boxes filled with stones, its ceiling beams made from the chassis of an old Russian army truck. As art installations go, this is a ghostly and disturbing one, made all the more surreal by being created from the same software utilised by the computer game Quake .
'We have been working closely with the architect Tom Barker, who developed a technique of building a virtual architectural model, then fitting photographs into it to give it a particular sense of reality and verisimilitude,' explains Langlands. 'What sets it apart is that most architectural modelling techniques are predicated on notions of construction and engineering, while this thinks of architecture more in terms of perception. Visitors will be able to explore the terrain, enter the house and go into the bunker, all by using a joystick.' When I viewed this work in progress, projected on to their studio wall, that landscape was incomplete but still oddly disorienting. I kept waiting for action figures and onscreen explosions to occur followed by a flashing GAME OVER! sign.
As events unfold uneasily in the wind-blown deserts of Iraq, The House of Osama bin Laden is both a timely and provocative reminder that the man who isn't there any more is still a dark and foreboding presence in the West's collective consciousness. 'In a way, it's about bin Laden's absence more than anything,' says Langlands, the more voluble half of the dapper, fortysomething duo. 'He is now this unseen presence who, in many ways, is more powerful now than when he was visible. In a way, the house is a metaphor for bin Laden, a Scarlet Pimpernel figure.'
Nikki Bell takes over, warming to one of the themes at the heart of the work. 'People are always interested in visiting places where certain people lived. They want to go to a house where someone lived in order to somehow explore that life.'
This, though, is a long way from Keats's house. Or, for that matter, Turner's studio, the setting for Langlands & Bell's last virtual artwork, The Artist's Studio, which recreated just that at Petworth House, where Turner often stayed as a guest of his patron, the third Earl of Egremont.
And, if we are talking about architecture as a metaphor, it would be hard, too, to imagine anywhere more antithetical to the towering presence of the World Trade Centre than these few makeshift buildings in Daruntah. After 11 September, bin Laden's house and bunker were partially bombed by American B-52s. There are still rocks and missile shells strewn over the dusty terrain today.
When Langlands & Bell visited the house last year, it was home to a group of Afghani militia men. 'They were pretty non-committal when we arrived there,' says Bell. 'It was only when we started measuring the distances between buildings that they suddenly got very twitchy. We left soon afterwards before they started asking questions. It would have been too difficult to explain what we were trying to do.'
What they were trying to do, say the artists, was create a work of art that showed 'things that hadn't been looked at before, that made connections between the local and the global'.
When the news media moved on from Afghanistan, aid agencies and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) moved in to try to make sense of the fallout. It was the presence of these international groups, says Langlands, 'that alerted us to the fact that everywhere is connected to everywhere else; that no matter how beleaguered or broken down a place is, it is still part of a global network'.
The pair flew into Kabul last year as the Imperial War Museum's official war - or should that be post-war? - artists, along with photographer Paul Seawright. Langlands & Bell had a brief to provide work that tackled the aftermath of the war in Afghanistan. From the off, they were an odd, if brave, choice: conceptualists who did not fit into the traditional role of the war artist as illustrator of the rigours of battle. For a long time, Paul Nash's Second World War painting, Totes Meer (Dead Sea) - wrecked planes against an ominous sky - was the model for that kind of bearing witness, albeit a biased one: the planes had German insignia, while, in reality, the terrain was littered with aircraft from both sides.
As war grows more hi-tech, and jour nalists are on hand everywhere to record the horror as it happens, the role of the artist has had to change, though the idea of bearing witness remains. Both John Keane, who went to Iraq in 1991, and Peter Howson, who visited Bosnia in 1994, responded to the remit with suitably graphic imagery. No one has yet been chosen by the Imperial War Museum to go to Iraq, which suggests that the nature of the job is changing again. As, too, does the choice of Langlands & Bell to comment on Afghanistan. One would not immediately associate their clinically precise artwork with the chaos of battlefields. They have, though, been prescient in their preoccupation with the invisible, and often ominous, global 'connections' - a term they use constantly - that underpin society at the start of the new millennium. While Seawright chose to document the big, empty tracts of rural Afghanistan, which remain no-go areas because of unexploded land mines, Langlands & Bell went with no clear agenda in mind except, as the latter puts it, 'to be intuitive and travel to the places we thought should be looked at'.
They based themselves in Shari Naw, a residential district of Kabul, where they found a proliferation of foreign embassies and NGOs, the presence of which had ironically made this the most exclusive area in what remained of a ravaged city. 'Seventy per cent of the city had been destroyed,' says Bell. 'You'd see people emerging from the ruins every day, trying to get on with their lives. Everywhere we went, there were signs for aid agencies. We began to collate them through photographs with a view to making a work similar to Frozen Sky, a previous project that used the acronyms of the world's airports.'
A large white artwork from the Frozen Sky series, containing all the airport acronyms arranged in a circle - including FRO (Floro, Norway), ZEN (Zenag, Papua, New Guinea) and SKY (Sandusky, Ohio) - takes up one wall of the top floor of their studio. On it, they project this new work, a video loop where the acronyms of one aid agency blend slowly into another - CARE becomes HOPE becomes WIN becomes ECHO - with a strange graphic poetry emerging out of all the random juxtapositions.
As part of the exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, a series of flags designed from these acronyms will hang from the ceiling above bin Laden's virtual house, like regimental flags that hang from the naves of churches and cathedrals. The idea, according to Bell, is to create 'a single, intense space that people can wander through or just sit still in'.
By far the most chillingly powerful work in this already intense space will be the only non-silent work, Zardad's Dog, a short film of a murder trial that took place in Kabul's supreme court while Langlands & Bell were there. The title of the piece was the nickname of the accused, Abdullah Shah. He served in the Hezb-i-Islami faction under the infamous commander Zardad, and earned his chilling sobriquet for savagely biting travellers who crossed his territory before murdering them.
The five-hour trial, filmed with a single hand-held camera in an overcrowded and tense courtroom, has been edited down to 12 minutes. It cuts between the evidence of the accused and the testimony of his victims' relatives, all delivered under the nervous gaze of armed soldiers. Langlands & Bell have chosen not to subtitle the film though the shouts of 'Allah Akbar!' ('God is great') when Shah is found guilty are unmistakable. If the court's decision is upheld, Shah's will be the first judicial execution since the fall of the Taliban.
'The trial was a very strange and humbling event to witness,' says Langlands. 'The whole atmosphere was a mixture of fear and hope. These people were willing to testify even though the commander is still at large, and there was the risk that Shah could appeal and maybe get off. We still haven't found out what was the final outcome.'
I ask if they encountered any suspicion or hostility as they travelled around the beleaguered country. 'Surprisingly little,' replies Langlands, 'given that we were part of this huge network of Western professionals who were travelling around in smart clothes and jeeps while most Afghani people had nothing.
'Once we overheard an Afghani woman describing a school where local girls were learning to sew to two Americans. The school had no electricity, like most of Kabul, so half the girls powered the other half's sewing machines by cycling on old Chinese bicycles rigged up as generators.
'When we asked her if we could visit, she rounded on us, eyes blazing, and with a look of utter contempt said, "The Afghani people are sick to death of outside investigators and researchers. We need help and money, not more investigations." She pushed her chair back and stormed out of the hotel. But, how could you argue with that? She made complete sense.'
Langlands & Bell are uncertain about what will happen to their work after it leaves the Imperial War Museum. The House of Osama bin Laden could well end up as a website accessible to every corner of the globe from Daruntah to Durham. Maybe even bin Laden himself will log on, if he is still alive, to revisit his old abode, view the mosque he built on the edge of the reservoir and see again the humble wood-and-stone bunker that protected him from the infidels' missiles.
Though one can only wonder what he would make of this appropriation of his former dwelling in the name of conceptual art.
· The House of Osama bin Laden will be at the Imperial War Museum, London SE1, 10 April-26 May
Yahoo! News - Bombings kill 48 more civilians south of Baghdad
HILLA, Iraq (AFP) - Forty-eight more civilians, including women and children, have been killed and 310 wounded in US-British bombings around this town south of Baghdad in the last 24 hours, a hospital director revealed.
The deaths brought to 73 the number of Iraqi civilians who have died under allied bombings since Monday.
Thirty-three civilians, including women and children, were killed and 310 wounded in a coalition bombing on the southern province of Babylon on Tuesday morning, a hospital director said.
Murtada Abbas said the bombing targeted the Nader residential area at the southern outskirts of the farming town of Hilla, 80 kilometres (50 miles) south of the capital.
He was speaking at the Hilla hospital where a large number of children lay wounded under blankets on the floor due to a shortage of beds.
At the scene of the bombing, dozens of what seemed to be parts of cluster bombs equipped with small parachutes were peppered over a large area, an AFP correspondent at the site said.
Iraqi soldiers were seen collecting the debris, which witnesses said coalition warplanes had dropped over the neighborhood. The soldiers poured fuel on the bombs before setting them on fire to explode the ordnance.
Dozens of homes were destroyed in the bombing that also killed donkeys and chickens, the correspondent said.
Fifteen members of a family were killed late Monday when their pickup truck was blown up by a rocket from a US Apache helicopter in the region of Haidariya near Hilla, the sole survivor of the attack told AFP on Tuesday.
Razek al-Kazem al-Khafaji said he lost his wife, six children, his father, his mother, his three brothers and their wives.
Khafaji, sitting among the 15 coffins at the local hospital, said the family was fleeing fierce fighting in Nasiriya, further south, when they were targetted by a US helicopter in Haidariya.
US troops admitted killing seven women and children when they opened fire Monday on a civilian vehicle at a military checkpoint manned by the US Army's Third Infantry Division at Najaf, 150 kilometers (95 miles) south of Baghdad.
On Monday, eighteen civilians were also killed in coalition bombings on Baghdad, according to Information Minister Mohammad Said al-Sahhaf.
[The following was sent to Circulars by Ammiel Alcalay.]
Below is a letter from a friend of mine, Elliott Colla, a professor of Arabic at Brown University; the letter is about the outcome of a case involving a friend of his, Gamal Eid, an Egyptian human rights lawyer who was picked up in the recent demonstrations in Cairo and tortured. While it is crucial for us to keep up the pressure on our selected and even elected officials here, the demonstrations taking place around the Arab world in the next few weeks are of enormous importance. I am working with a group of ex-pats in Cairo who can be our eyes and ears, and I also have contact with various other people in other countries, not to mention Human Rights Watch. It is very important for people there to know that we will do whatever we can to speak out about their situation, particularly when a country like Egypt, a recipient of much US aid, is in question. I will keep you posted as other cases emerge. Below is Elliott's letter:
Thank you all for faxing in letters and for asking more about Gamal Eid
-- there's no doubt that our efforts have been helpful, not only for
Gamal's case, but also for those of the others also held with him. I'm
sending along three bits of news for you.
The first is an upbeat 4-line email I got from Gamal last night (1,
below), and the second is an email from Gamal's wife, Clarisa Bencomo
(2, below), explaining the terms of Gamal's release -- which remains
temporary, until a hearing that will take place on Saturday. Clarisa's
letter explains Gamal's request that the case is far from over -- and
that the state prosecutor may press for more serious charges. A third
piece, which I've attached, is an update on the case from Amnesty
International, forwarded to me by another friend of Gamal's, Avner Gidron.
In my rush to contact friends, I did not stress enough that Gamal was
one of hundreds -- from old men and women to college students to
teenagers, from activists to middle-class passersby -- who were picked
up by the Egyptian state security police. Protests broke out in Egypt
last week following the start of the US war on Iraq, as they have in
most every capital city throughout the world. In so-called "moderate
Arab regimes" (such as Egypt and in Jordan) state repression of these
protests has been especially fierce and brutal, mainly because of the
fragility of regimes in those countries, whihc are both corrupt and
allied tacitly with the US war plan. Protesters in Cairo were attacked
with water canons and clubs by state police. Of the hundreds arrested,
about seventy (including Gamal's group) were held longer. This group
includes a number of children (being held in adult criminal prisons,
where they are often preyed upon). Detainees have complained of being
beaten with sticks, which has resulted in injured eyes, internal
injuries and broken limbs. Women detainees complained of being
threatened with rape.
These practices -- torture, housing children with adult convicts, and
rape of female detainees -- are a regular part of life in Egyptian
prisons, and well documented by groups like Amnesty International and
Human Rights Watch. In recent years, since it was mainly Islamists who
were suffering under these conditions, few in the West or in Egypt,
besides human rights activists (like Gamal), paid much attention to
their suffering. But the people protesting the war in Egypt, and the
people detained with Gamal -- professionals, workers, members of
Parliament, secularists, Islamists, nationalists, liberals,
internationalists -- represent a huge range of backgrounds and political
leanings in Egyptian society. That the state is willing to mistreat (and
torture) all sorts of people from so many different classes and
political backgrounds does not bode well for Egyptian society. It also
points to how precarious Mubarak's rule really is. Moreover, since the
Mubarak regime, ruling by martial law for decades, forbids even peaceful
demonstrations, there's good reason to fear a vicious pattern occurring
over the next months: more popular protests, which are violently
repressed, more arbitrary detentions and more instances of torture and
ill-treatment.
People unfamiliar with Egypt should bear in mind that Egypt is America's
showcase "moderate ally" in the Arab and Muslim world. Americans
knowledge of modern Egyptian politics is largely limited to Anwar Sadat,
revered in the US as the man who dared to make peace with Israel. He is
not remembered that way in Egypt, and his successor, Hosni Mubarak, has
even less popularity. In the 80s, Egypt was an important test case for
exporting American free market ideology -- privatization of industry,
making the labor force "efficient and competitive," and freeing up
restrictions on international capital under IMF management: the result
has been an economic and social disaster, as people found growth
stalled, resources controlled by foreign interests and economic safety
nets gone. In recent years, Egypt has been regularly represented in the
US press as a country that is liberalizing politically, even as the
state continued to forge elections, harass, imprison and assassinate
political opponents. For most Egyptians, this does not feel like the
kind of liberalism they dream of, and which used to exist in the
country. Finally, Egypt is also the recipient of huge amounts of US aid
(second only to Israel), most of which goes to support the bloated
Egyptian military. Egyptian officers, including State Security officers
who torture political prisoners, are routinely trained in the US. For
most Egyptians, these dots are not difficult to connect. Because of the
extent of US involvement in propping up the unpopular, corrupt and
brutal Mubarak regime, the US appears as a crucial player in these sad
legacies.
These connections are important to keep in mind these days. As we oppose
the current war in Iraq, we must not forget that the US has been in the
business of regime change, regime maintenance, and regime rehabilitation
for many years in the Arab world. The example of Egypt is unique -- but
it is also not so distinct from that of other "US allies" in the region:
Jordan, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait and so on. Unfortunately
for the hawks running this war, people in the region continue to
remember their history -- and continue to remember what values the US
has traditionally fostered among its allies -- which is why few, if any,
are now running out to welcome US troops as liberators.
All of this is to say, that our opposition to the policies driving this
current war is far broader than the war effort itself, simply because
this war, though radical and extreme, is not "outside" the history of US
intervention and influence in the Middle East.
Likewise, our opposition to the hawks in this country is more than a
purely negative position: it's also a positive affirmation of solidarity
with social justice and peace activists in the region itself. People
like Gamal or the thousands of others who ask that their countries
belong to their peoples, not just to ruling cliques propped by
Washington. People in the Middle East who are asking that those slogans
under which Bush launched the war -- democracy, economic prosperity, and
social justice -- be retaken by progressives and put into real practice.
If after reading all this, you would like to continue helping those
Egyptians still being held by the Mubarak regime, I have two
suggestions: the first is from the attached report from Amnesty
International, which contains practical advice for how to continue a fax
campaign about prison conditions in Egypt. It is also important to note
in our letters that US aid to Egypt is tied to Egypt's respect of human
rights treaties. Second, this point about US aid should also be made to
our own congressional representatives -- there is no good reason why the
US military should be training Egyptian state torturers and why US
taxpayers should foot the bill. Since US rule in Baghdad will be based
to some extent on previous experiences, like our alliance with the
Egyptian regime, now is a good time to speak out critically on this history.
My brother Phil has supplied me with the (correct) fax info for Egyptian
consulates, etc -- in case you want to continue on. I've pasted them
after Gamal's and Clarisa's emails. (3, below)
Thanks again to everyone who wrote on Gamal's behalf -- please feel free
to forward to anyone else who has been following Gamal's case.
In peace and solidarity,
Elliott
(1)
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 15:12:26 -0800 (PST)
From: gamal eid
Subject: I'm Free Now
To: 2clary m 2ben
Cc: elganob@yahoo.com
X-Brown-MailScanner: Found to be clean
X-Brown-MailScanner-SpamScore: s
Hi All,
I'm free, and i'm at home.
Thank you all.
Gamal
----------------------------------------
(2)
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 19:37:17 -0500
From: clarisa bencomo
X-Accept-Language: en
To: Clarisa Bencomo
Subject: Gamal Eid update
X-Brown-MailScanner: Found to be clean
X-Brown-MailScanner-SpamScore: s
As of about midnight Cairo time, Gamal and some of the other detainees
are out of detention (I hope to have a full list tomorrow), although
this is not an official "release," but rather something akin to a
furlough based on an undertaking from the Egyptian Bar Association it
would ensure they appear before the al Azbekiya prosecution office on
Saturday morning. In Gamal's case, even if that set of charges
eventually is suspended, he still must appear before the State Security
prosecution office on Saturday to be interrogated on a separate set of
more serious charges. It isn't clear yet if he will remain out on bail
or be returned to detention after he goes to the State Security
prosecution office. He is in good spirits and was very appreciative of
all the calls and faxes people have sent on behalf of the detainees. He
asks that people continue to pressure the govenment to drop the
prosecutions, stop the tranfer of case to state security prosecution
offices, and release all the detainees.
--
Clarisa Bencomo
Researcher
Children's Rights Division
Human Rights Watch
350 Fifth Avenue, 34th Floor
New York, NY 10118-3299, U.S.A.
Direct line: 212 216-1232
Fax: 212 736 1300
Email: bencomc@hrw.org
website: http://www.hrw.org
--------------------------------
(3)
Ambassador Nabil Fahmy
The Embassy of the Arab Republic of Egypt
3521 International Ct. NW
Washington DC 20008
By facsimile to (202) 244-5131, (202) 244-4319
The Egyptian Consulate General, Los Angeles
3001 Pacific Ave.
San Francisco, CA 94115
By facsimile to (415) 346-9480
The Egyptian Consulate General, New Yord
1110 Second Avenue
New York, NY 10022
By facsimile to (212) 308-7643
The Egyptian Consulate General, Chicago
500 N. Michigan Ave., Suite # 1900
Chicago, IL 60611
(312) 828-9167
The Egyptian Consulate General, Houston
1990 Post Oak Blvd. Suite # 2180
Houston, TX. 77056
By facsimile to (713)961-3868
[This may be a first... but glad to see my hometown newspaper is creating some waves. Waiting for the pictures to come in.]
Friends, a fellow snapshotter has asked us to let you know about a, well... uh, Puke-In at Fox tomorrow, Tuesday at 2:30pm to protest the media's, and fox's in particular, coverage of the war. If you feel similarly queezy when you hear O'Reilly et al beating the drums of war then join us while we let Fox know how much we appreciate their un-biased coverage of the war. find out more about Fox bias here:
Details of Puke In:
Tuesday, April 1st 2:30pm meet in park at 6th ave and 48th, and move to warm dining area. Bring 2 bottles of water, one for colored KoolAid, one for rehydration purposes. Wear business attire, but dress warm as it will be in the 20s. Also wear a bright orange ribbon on your lapel so we can identify one another. We will supply cherry, apple and blueberry pie for your consumption in addition to the koolaid. Ipacac will also be provided if thinking about Geraldo Rivera (at least they dumped him) doesn't make you vomit. please contact 718.857.4413 to coordinate.
[This is from the Freedom Road site: www.freedomroad.org/. Stan Goff is a retired Special Forces Master Sergeant.]
I am a veteran of operations gone bad, and right now I am experiencing a powerful sense of vicarious deja vu.
Four days ago, I couldn't watch CNN for more than ten minutes at a time or I was risking my own mental health. Now, I watch it with the perverse fascination one experiences when seeing a fifteen car pileup on the freeway.
Obviously, the parade of aging white Generals - even including my old commander Dave Grange - who simultaneously know that the US will prevail militarily through sheer force and that this entire operation is going terribly, terribly wrong, do not understand the wider political implications of what they are witnessing.
Still, they seem discomfited. They have been converted into cheap propagandists, and for me it's a lot like seeing a formerly tyrannical Sergeant Major who's retired and become an oily insurance salesman, reduced to haunting the barracks, kissing up to his own former troops to earn his way in the real world by selling them policies.
How the mighty can fall from great heights! Perhaps that's too majestic. The Haitians say, the higher the monkey climbs the tree, the more you see nothing but his ass.
Watch Wesley Clark, the CNN military star, who reputation in the Army was that of an inveterate ass kisser. He harbors presidential pretensions, and he's smooth as a baby's butt. Watch how the worry lines now come right through the pancake makeup.
Donald Rumsfeld has become positively humble - a first in his lifetime - during his Pentagon briefs.
George W. Bush is nearly absent. No one will risk his extemporaneous gaffes. Might he be medicated? His two-line appearances are hoarse and fatigued.
What's happening?
What's happening is that the superpower came face to face with its new counterpart: an international popular movement, focused against this war, but increasingly targeting US global hegemony itself. Our world-wide movement has become a material force on the battlefield, and has midwifed a deep crisis of legitimacy for the US military-political junta.
The whole adventure is rooted in systemic crisis, a reality that so far only the left wing of the movement itself understands. (For a longer discussion of that, see Military Matters #5: Overreach) How has the antiwar movement become a material force on the Iraqi battleground?
Let's take a snapshot of the tactical situation, as least can be gleaned from different accounts.
The original battle plan was scrapped. Let's start here. The complexity of planning a military operation of this scope is simply indescribable, and it takes months to do it right. But the unexpected loss of ground fronts, in Turkey in the North and Saudi Arabia in the South, forced a complete reconstruction of plans in a matter of days. The operation could be put off no longer. The aggressor's back was against the weather wall. The pre-summer sandstorms had already begun, and by late April the heat index inside a soldier's chemical protective gear will be 140 degrees Fahrenheit.
The international antiwar movement had firmed up political opposition around the world and forced the delays that culminated in the UN Security Council becoming a key arena of struggle. For all the infantile leftists who dismissed the UN on moral and ideological - and therefore idealist - grounds, I would say look now at Iraq and see how politics translates into military reality.
We stalled the Bush Administration to push to war where we could stall, and there is an effect.
The entire 4th Infantry Division is sitting in the barracks now waiting for their equipment to steam around the Arabian Peninsula in cargo ships because the Turkish parliament denied them their battlefront. Medium and short range tactical aircraft that could have struck dozens of key targets are sidelined because they are forbidden to take off from Saudi Arabia to deliver their "payloads."
Inside the Department of Defense there has been another war raging, that between the Generals of the Army and Marine Corps and the clique of doctrinal "revolutionaries" pushing Rumsfeld's crackpot theory of Network Centric Warfare (NCW), the methodological offspring of a strategic doctrine called Full Spectrum Dominance (FSD). The Rumsfeld Doctrine is cyberwar combined with commandos. Rumsfeld and his mentors have an absolute faith in the power of technology as the primary determinant of military outcomes, and a complete ignorance of politics as a force of war. (This will be the subject of a book due out this December, War Lies.)
Suffice it to say here, the combination of the failure of this new "doctrine" is creating a military debacle in Iraq. It is important to note that in war, which is an extreme form of politics, success is not measured empirically as it is in a sports competition. It is not measured in body counts or inventories of destroyed war materiel. In fact, it is not perfectly measurable at all. But success has to be gauged against the expectations of the military operation and its final objectives - which are always political. The US inflicted a terrible empirical toll on Southeast Asia and ultimately lost the Vietnam War. The US never grasped the political character of that war.
The US loss in Vietnam became the basis of the Powell Doctrine, which combines avoidance of decisive ground combat (and therefore avoidance of US casualties) with control over public perceptions of the war through the press. Rumsfeld's NCW attempts to assert that logic onto the battlefield with extremely complex technology that has displaced decision-making from human commanders to computerized hardware/software. I have referred to this in the past as "the organic composition of the military;" the relative weight of technological to cognitive process.
Every strength carries with it a corresponding weakness, and once military leaders perceive the strengths and weaknesses of their opposition, they can avoid the strengths and exploit the weaknesses.
The Iraqis are doing just that.
Accusations by the United States that the Russians are providing material assistance may very well be true. The Russians have now thrown in their lot with "old Europe" and China, and they are aiming to undermine US power at every opportunity. I suspect they have not only provided equipment and training on that equipment, but advisory assistance on the reorganization of the Iraqi military.
Someone sure has.
The Iraqi military has abandoned its former Soviet-style doctrine, predicated on armor, mass, and centralized command. It has seemingly now adopted tactics more suited to Special Operations; agile and decentralized. Such a switch requires a very intentional and systematic reorientation from top to bottom. This is an "asymmetrical" response to the high-tech doctrine the US developed to overcome the doctrine of its own predecessor. This Iraqi doctrinal reorientation is proving stunningly effective.
Rumsfeld's notion that he might "decapitate" the Iraqi military has led to an incessant and inane press speculation about whether on not Saddam Hussein is dead or alive. As the reports rolled of one setback after another, he was asked by the press whether there was any evidence to show that Saddam Hussein is dead. His response: "The word evidence is a hard word."
Less ridiculous and more telling was the statement by a Pentagon official, now dissing his boss Rumsfeld: "This is the ground war that was not going to happen in his plan."
Rumsfeld's computers told him that the Iraqis would be shocked and awed into capitulation within two days. Instead we have the (suppressed in the US) spectacle of ground troops in disarray as they attempted to cross their initial lines of departure, columns being stopped by urban resistance, ambushes of logistics tails, advances halted by blinding sandstorms, and captive American youngsters on television.
These first American prisoners of war were not Navy Seals or Delta Force, but military maintenance people and cooks, kids who signed up for an enlistment bonus, some college money, and a saleable skill. Now they stare hauntingly back at us all, with their fear almost an aura in their photographs.
The earlier uncomplicated advances, however, were remarkable. In set-piece war, Rumsfeld's impressive display of new battle software worked perfectly. Tank commanders could keep their lines dressed by simply referring to a digital display, and no one was pulling ahead into an adjacent unit's gunsights. Gee whiz.
The Generals are preoccupied now with retrieving their tactical victory from the chaos, a retrieval that will cost treasure, lives, and careers. But they are almost certainly also sharpening their knives and fantasizing about the spaces between Donald Rumsfeld's ribs.
The first images of the war were supposed to be the "liberation" of Basra, where jubilant crowds of Shi'ite Muslims would welcome the conquering American heroes. Instead, Basra fought back with a spectacular ferocity.
Now US ground forces are attempting to bypass every urban center on the road to Baghdad, but they are in the restricted terrain of the east, where bypass is not always an option. In Al Nasiriya, victory toasts turned to vinegar in their mouths.
City by city sieges have now become a real possibility, and the longer this war goes, the sharper will be the reaction throughout the region.
Aside from stalling, antiwar forces and the naked self-interest of the US regime have given us another multi-faceted victory. The US, fearing further erosion of its wounded legitimacy, has set out to genuinely limit civilian casualties. We have to be honest and clear about this. It is happening. There are certainly civilian casualties, but not nearly the mass slaughter many predicted.
One factor at play here is the need to avoid great damage to the infrastructure of their new prize. The other is the heat from the flames of an erupting international rebellion that they can illafford to fan any higher.
We must also be honest that this will cause the costs to American troops to go up, in lives. Basra can be conquered in a matter of hours, given a willingness to reduce it to rubble. So the US regime is caught between a rock and a hard place. The rock is international rage, including the ever more explosive rage of the Arab and Muslim masses in the region, and the concomitant certainty of further international isolation. The hard place is Colin Powell's nightmare - a parade of flag-draped coffins.
Given this choice, the US will probably be forced to abandon its precise target discrimination, and the bloodletting that has been thus far limited will likely happen after all. This underlinesthe urgency of the anti-war movement keeping up its unrelenting pressure.
Perhaps the most brilliant aspect of the US strategy - prior to recent developments - was the "embedded journalists" program. This is a masterpiece of Powell Doctrine: controlling public perceptions.
The criticism of the military "pool" system from the first Gulf War was checkmated. Reporters were put directly on the battlefield, and integrated into the actual military units. Those reporters are then dependent on the troops around them for their daily human contact, and grow quickly to identify directly with the people in those units.
Overt censorship is no longer needed.
But as the campaign goes further and further awry, these embedded journalists will see some of their new friends wounded and killed, and then the Powell anxiety becomes realized, the war is in our living rooms again, just like Vietnam. This fear of graphic audio-visual images of war is why there was such outrage at Al Jazeera showing dead GIs.
The bet that this would be a quick war with images of triumph is about to break the bank.
In the North, far from the most visible action, the Turkish military has already begun its incursions. The Kurds, in response, are already signing onto yet another Faustian deal with the Americans, now mostly Special Operations - Rangers to seize airheads and Special Forces to establish relationships with the Kurdish fighters. Without its Northern Front, the US is more dependent than ever on using Kurdish combatants to fight the Iraqis around the rich oilfields near Kirkuk.
Fragile Turkey is beset by a severe economic crisis. Its majority Muslim population has just elected a moderate Islamic Party, and the popular opposition to the war is overwhelming.
The Turkish ruling class cannot afford another insurrection from Kurdish nationalists, and the Turkish military has no intention of watching a Kurdish state take form to their South. Turkey, inside its stable exterior, is becoming a powder keg, and Kurdistan is a furnace.
The political implications reach deep into Europe, where one year ago the US saw the admission of Turkey as advancing in the EU. Germany, for instance, has a substantial population of Turks and Kurds, and the German government has a real and justifiable fear that open warfare in Iraqi Kurdistan will spill over into the streets of Germany.
To mollify the Kurds, the US must hold back the Turkish military, and the Kurds will certainly not abandon their dream for an independent Kurdistan. To appease the Turkish military, the US will have to disarm the Kurds. And the Kurds, even as they sign the deal with the devil, know it. The Kurds have no intention of relinquishing their weapons, their autonomy or their dream of an independent nation. The Turks have no intention of allowing it. The US cannot have it both ways.
Stay tuned.
This diplomatic minefield has been fobbed off on Colin Powell. If he doesn't feel a trickle of sweat between his shoulder blades, he's not paying attention. Once this is all over, heads will roll, and the visceral enmity between Powell and Richard Perle is well-known. It's Powell, the Kissinger-style realist and brilliant bureaucrat, versus Perle, the racist, right-wing visionary. There are already whispers that Powell will be scapegoated after the war, and other rumors that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Perle will be handed walking papers, and Powell will run for VP.
This fragmentation is another material result of popular resistance around the world, and for some it was the goal–the political destruction of the Bush junta.
That objective is now within sight. What comes after remains to be seen.
While we have riveted our attention on the blazing guns, a quieter weapon of mass destruction has been unleashed against the US working class - a trillion-dollar tax cut for the rich that will torch the tattered remains of our social infrastructure. The political crisis that is now almost certain in the wake of the war will settle on the United States.
Then there are the soldiers.
Bear in mind that these are still the most pampered soldiers in the world. Their morale was already eroded by waiting. They were already faced with basic erosions of benefits at home. The sense of dislocation due to the doctrinal shift under Rumsfeld (that translates to a lot of confusion and turbulence in day-to-day operations), to increases in operational tempo, to the tripling of average time deployed away from home in the last decade, are taking a toll. Divorces are filed. Homesickness. Superiors who are assholes are now constant companions. A substantial number of troops - particularly Black soldiers - who really see this as a job and not some deep patriotic commitment.
Now, with the war is going badly, as they say in the Army, shit rolls downhill, and when things go wrong at the top, there is a lot of blame-shifting and carrying on that percolates down.
On a cautionary note, I will mention the incident (about which I don't know much yet) of the soldier who fragged his officers. Hasan Karim Akbar, 31, a sergeant in the 101st Airborne Division apparently attacked his own tactical operations center in Kuwait with hand grenades. Akbar is Black and a convert to Islam, according to reports.
What we in the movement don't know could hurt us. I want to warn against the natural desire to turn this into a cause celebre. We don't know what Akbar's motives were, and the conditions simply do not yet exist for a Vietnam-style epidemic of fragging. Sharp us-versus-them class consciousness has not yet developed in the military and there appears to be zero sympathy for Akbar's attack in the armed forces. There are already murmurings across the right-wing web of purging the armed forces of "black muslims."
Rather than a being a catalyst for generalized class struggle in the military, the fragging will more likely result in polarization between Black and white, given the latent racism in the military that reflects all of American society. This will emerge over time, and must be navigated very delicately by the left. Before more-militant-than-thou types make this sergeant a hero or martyr, and they should do some investigation. When the facts are sorted out, we will have to reckon with them.
Social polarization of all sorts - outside the military - will emerge in the coming period. It has already started, with the competing street mobilizations of anti-war and pro-war forces. And there is polarization beginning within the anti-war movement as some forces argue for moral censure and others argue for disruption. This too presents a challenge for anti-war forces, and for anti-imperialist forces within the anti-war movement.
Part of developing a critical stance on these issues, and figuring out what our role is in the context of this war is understanding the connections and consequences of what we do here, what others do around the world, and what the regime continues to do. I, for one, still see the political destruction of the Bush government as a strategic priority.
But we have to ensure that our movement is thinking strategically as well, that we are not attacking our adversaries at their strong points but exploiting their weaknesses. We have to ensure that we can function in ways that are agile and often decentralized, even as we keep the same enemy in sight.
This means that the wing of the movement, as it moves toward disruption instead of protest, will have to carefully calculate its own tactics to ensure that - even as we hold the movement accountable and preserve our own goals and identities - we do not split the movement or detach ourselves from the masses. That means that audacity and patience must reside in the same space together. Now is a time for discipline.
One thing is clear. The counter- counter-propaganda war is vital. We must begin to aim incessant, clear, rigorous, systematic, and dispassionate logic at the Bush Junta's every thinner rationalizations.
Leadership is perceived as leader-like only as long as it is respected. The content of the leadership certainly helps determine whether it is accepted, but impressions are also critical. People will take leadership from someone who is wrong, but they balk at being led by someone who is ridiculous.
We can exploit the absurdities of this administration that are now reproducing like rats.
Waving around the Geneva Conventions when our POWs get put on camera, and we've been broadcasting footage of Iraqi prisoners on for days. Invoking a UN resolution to violate a UN charter. Rumsfeld's comment that, "The word evidence is a hard word." Examples are legion.
They are down, and we dare not let them back up.
I'm dusting off an old Bob Dylan record. Hard rain's a gonna fall.
--Stan Goff
by Ruben Navarrette Jr
DALLAS -- I KNOW the saying dictates that to the victor go the spoils. But there are serious questions emerging over the process by which US companies are hired to put out oil fires, build roads and bridges, restart oil production, and do whatever is necessary to ''reconstruct'' Iraq after allied forces deconstruct it. Some answers need to come from Vice President Dick Cheney, a major architect of the war with Iraq, according to many newspapers and columnists around the country. That's the same Dick Cheney who was, until 2 1/2 years ago, chief executive officer of Halliburton Co., a Houston-based oil field services firm that takes in nearly $20 billion annually.
It is a Halliburton subsidiary -- Kellogg, Brown & Root -- that landed on a short list of companies invited by the US Agency for International Development to bid on what could grow to be a $900 million contract to rebuild Iraq. That's the same Kellogg, Brown & Root that was recently awarded, by the Defense Department, the contract to put out fires at oil fields in Iraq.
Good work if you can get it. Oil-field firefighting firms fetch up to $50,000 per day, and it can take weeks to cap a single well. There's no telling how much work there will be in Iraq, but experience says there could be plenty.
In the first Gulf War, Iraqis torched more than 700 oil wells in Kuwait. About half the fires were extinguished by Halliburton.
There's that name again.
And just to prove what a small world it is, the man who was secretary of defense in 1991 was later himself awarded a choice position: CEO of Halliburton. His name: Dick Cheney.
The Halliburton gig, from 1995 to 2000, was a cash cow for Cheney. During his final 8 1/2 months on the job, he pulled down a salary of $806,332 and collected another $100,000 in benefits.
And, mind you, all this was occurring while he was directing George W. Bush's search for a running mate.
Not only did Halliburton not seem to mind that its CEO was moonlighting as a headhunter, it gave Cheney a $1.5 million bonus. But that was cookie jar money compared with what Cheney pocketed when Bush made him his running mate. Cheney then sold his stock options and pocketed another $22 million and change.
Now $22 million and change isn't just a golden handshake. It's a wet, sloppy kiss. And that brings us to the questions. Are the new contracts for Halliburton Cheney's idea of reciprocity? If not, why was the process done by invitation only and not opened to other bids? And why was all this done in relative quiet?
Moreover, why hasn't the vice president's office been more forthcoming in trying to clear up any confusion about any benefit that Halliburton might derive from having its former CEO now sitting to the right hand of the president? Why has Cheney's office typically referred inquiring reporters from The Washington Post to Halliburton, only to have Halliburton refer them back to the vice president?
And given that these are tax dollars we're talking about (lots of them), why isn't there more transparency in the whole process?
Americans may never learn the answers. After howls of protests from competing firms around the world that were aced out of the Iraqi reconstruction bidding process, the government has now shifted the responsibility for overseeing the oil-field contracts to the Army Corps of Engineers and stamped the matter ''classified.''
And why is that, exactly?
Here's the big question: Did the vice president of the United States use his influence to help make his wealthy friends at his old company wealthier?
No one knows. And it's mighty hard to find out when no one is talking and folks are giving reporters the run-around. That has to stop. Cheney should speak up and settle once and for all these questions about how his private sector experience may be affecting his public service.
AMMAN, Jordan - Bruised and bleeding, in need of medical care, the Americans stranded in Iraq's western desert approached the mud-brick town and found the hospital destroyed by bombs.
"Why? Why?" a doctor demanded of them. "Why did you Americans bomb our children's hospital?" Scores of Iraqi townspeople crowded around.
The American peace activists' account was the first confirmation of a report last week that a hospital in Rutbah was bombed Wednesday, with dead and injured. The travelers said they saw no significant Iraqi military presence near the hospital or elsewhere in Rutbah. The doctor did not discuss casualties, the Americans said.
U.S. Central Command said Sunday it had no knowledge of a hospital bombing in Rutbah. The U.S. military has said it is doing its best to avoid civilian casualties in its campaign to oust Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
For the battered band of peace activists, recounting their nerve-jarring exit from Iraq on Sunday, it was one of the worst moments in 10 days of war.
That exit had begun at 9:15 a.m. Saturday, when a dozen foreigners — eight Americans and one Irish member of the Iraq Peace Team, and three unaffiliated Japanese and South Korean activists — set out from Baghdad on the 300-mile (480-kilometer) trek to the western border with Jordan, through a nation at war.
Members of the antiwar group have shuttled in and out of the Iraqi capital for months to take part in vigils, small demonstrations and other activities to protest U.S. war plans. Since March 20, they have borne witness and compiled reports on the U.S. bombing of Baghdad.
Some who left Saturday had been ordered out by jittery Iraqi bureaucrats for a minor infraction — taking snapshots in Baghdad without an official escort. Others said they left to get out the story of the Baghdad bombing.
The journey was a straight shot through the gritty western desert, the Badiyat ash-Sham, over a divided superhighway eerily empty of traffic. American special forces and warplanes have been staging raids and air attacks on isolated targets across the west.
"I'd say we passed up to 20 bombed-out, burned-out vehicles along the way," said Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, 22, a student from Devon, Pennsylvania. Four were Iraqi tanks and other military vehicles, he said, but the others appeared to be civilian, including a bus and an ambulance.
"We had to detour around a bombed-out bridge, dodge lightpoles down across the road," said Shane Claiborne, 27, a community organizer from Philadelphia.
Three times the group — in a big white GMC Suburban and two yellow taxis — spotted bomb explosions nearby. The last, in early afternoon, occurred near the far-western town of Rutbah. Their Iraqi drivers' nerves were fraying as they sped toward Jordan at 80 mph (130 kph).
"He kept going faster, faster," Betty Scholten, 69, of Mount Rainier, Maryland, said of her driver.
Suddenly the lagging taxi, pushing to catch up, blew a tire. It careened, spun out of control and plunged down a ditch, landing on its side. "It was a heavy hit," Claiborne said. All five men inside were hurt. "We pulled each other up through the side doors."
A passing car eventually braked to a halt. The Iraqis inside got out, helped the injured into their vehicle and drove back toward Rutbah and a hospital. Along the way, Claiborne said, he spotted the contrails of a jet streaking toward the car. The Iraqis frantically waved a white sheet out a window, and the plane veered off, he said.
In poor, remote Rutbah, a burned-out oil tanker truck sat in the road, and the customs building and communications center had been wrecked by bombing. When they reached the hospital, they saw it, too, had been bombed, its roof caved in.
Claiborne said an English-speaking Iraqi doctor took them to a small nearby clinic, and 100 or so townspeople then gathered around the building. The men were worried, but the doctor told them, "We'll take care of you. Muslim, Christian, whatever, we are all brothers and sisters,'" Claiborne recalled.
The staff tended to them, stitching up a scalp laceration for group leader Cliff Kindy, 53, of North Manchester, Indiana, and doing their best for the worst hurt, Weldon Nisly, 57, of Seattle, who suffered cracked ribs and similar injuries.
The two other carloads, missing the third, eventually doubled back and found the men in Rutbah. All then ventured onward the final 80 miles (130 kilometers) to the Jordan border, and then Amman, where Nisly was admitted to a hospital early Sunday.
As they left Rutbah, said Wilson-Hartgrove's wife, Leah, 22, the villagers "said to us, `Please tell them about the hospital.'"
American Peace Activists Confirm Iraqi Hospital Bombed
Thickening
It is March 18, exactly 4:00 by my watch , which means 3:57 by the school’s clock, as I unlock my office door. The phone rings. Hello this is S. He is asking if I would be a reference for a federal job. Of course, what’s the job. The job is to assist in archiving an Islamic library in Dearborn. What have you been doing he asks. I’ve just returned from witnessing with Asa an act of non-violent civil disobedience.
We agree to meet for coffee after the war begins. Perhaps we should meet at the zoo. I am thinking about Victor Shklovsky’s Zoo or Letters Not About Love. What happens when one becomes a correspondent from a distance? Shklovsky, the herding animal, wanted above all to get back into his country. I am a migratory creature, one who has little means to travel, but I manage to see enough to bring back some news to my students confined in the unwieldy metropolis. The Middle East is not in my flight path except through the poets, faculty, and students I know here on the ground.
I would meet at the butterfly exhibit. Would you? With butterflies from all over the world. We could talk while meditating on fragility and its opposite, prolific regeneration. Within this beautiful container we could discuss the problem of violence. And the way that violence, gives us, like it did Shklovsky, poetic devices.
Let us consider, for example, the path of the butterfly crossing the path of the automobile. Let us consider the potential fragility of the automobile in the path of a bomb. Or consider a bomb, which can not regenerate in the prolific manner of the butterfly.
Or a body instead of a gun.
S. tells me about the Koran, that the intellect is more important than the heart. Is that because one doesn’t have to wait for a “good” or “powerful” feeling to make an ethical judgment? That one can act ethically toward others without having to know them or have any particular feeling for them? This begins with one’s transcending of one’s fear of Allah.
He lives in the paradox between idealism and pragmatism. This is something he considers deeply.
Then he said, there are not enough people who can act ethically. It is human nature to forget. The people who retain the memory to act correctly are too small in numbers.
Right now I am thinking about shoes and boots. Black boots laced up above the calves of a large man in a black uniform with an insignia, federal marshal, on the pocket lapel. He stands in front of a gray-haired man, who, dressed in black trousers and a black t-shirt printed with the insignia pax cristi, is lying on the Federal Building steps. There are about ten people similarly dressed lying down on the steps. Behind them more marshals and federal agents. People are stepping over the bodies. People who have business in court. Lawyers. Clients. Our lawyers also. At this entrance there are about 35 or so supporters at first, until the people, perhaps 17 of them, on the other side are arrested. Then all of the supporters are here: we’re possibly two hundred in number, watching the die-in and singing, carrying anti-war placards, and waiting for the people doing the action to get arrested. It is going to be a federal criminal charge, blocking a federal building.
Last night Bush declared his pre-emptive war on Iraq in the guise of a preposterous demand. We are at the Federal Building today announcing our non-compliance with his war and with his refusal to obey international law. We indict him for intention to commit genocide.
Also at the Federal Building is the first day of the trial of four or is it three? people accused of being terrorists. It is no accident that the jury for this historical trial is being selected the day after Bush has made his baby furious declaration.
We are all being taken care of by a furious baby. Papa baby, who decided to side with the hawks, playing the role of their commander. Where shall we go today hawks? Iraq? Iran? Saudi Arabia? North Korea? When I was quite small, I used to watch the hawks in an empty field near my house and contemplate their vast travels. How glorious it would be to be a baby in charge of hawks, and by extension the baby parent of everyone, including my own father and sister Elizabeth, who must be at least in her 80’s seated in her wheelchair abutting the steps of the federal building.
But what I want to emphasize is how ordinary everything feels and looks. It is only the mind that tells me anything extraordinary about these events. It is cold. We are shivering. Most of us didn’t wear winter coats. Time is passing. Some of us are lying down on hard steps. Some of us are singing. And time is passing. There are a lot of cameras, all sorts. No butterflies, few birds. But it is all very quiet. And no one is in a hurry to get anywhere. We are just here, being. But H., H., who wants to be a lyric poet, has already been arrested on the other side. Everything is simple. Ordinary. The day goes by. I am standing alone at a garage entrance looking out for official vehicles carrying those who have already been arrested. A federal agent in a brown suit passes me. How are you, he asks? I’m okay. And yourself? We are actors with a script, and off stage, we are simply people at work.
At last, federal marshals carefully bend over the bodies on the steps. They ask them to get up. One by one people refuse to get up and one by one they are put under arrest. It is a small ceremony. Quiet, a tap here or there, and another person in black street clothes walks up the steps slowly with a marshal or two marshals in black uniforms on either side of them. They disappear into the Federal Building one by one. Some, who refuse to get up, are carried up, gently, as a civilian casualty might be carried by a medic in a war zone. We are all at the funeral together. Goodbye Judith, goodbye Bill, goodbye Billie. And this part is over.
[from The Globe and Mail:]
Dear America: This is a difficult letter to write, because I'm no longer sure who you are.
Some of you may be having the same trouble. I thought I knew you: We'd become well acquainted over the past 55 years. You were the Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck comic books I read in the late 1940s. You were the radio shows -- Jack Benny, Our Miss Brooks. You were the music I sang and danced to: the Andrews Sisters, Ella Fitzgerald, the Platters, Elvis. You were a ton of fun.
You wrote some of my favourite books. You created Huckleberry Finn, and Hawkeye, and Beth and Jo in Little Women, courageous in their different ways. Later, you were my beloved Thoreau, father of environmentalism, witness to individual conscience; and Walt Whitman, singer of the great Republic; and Emily Dickinson, keeper of the private soul. You were Hammett and Chandler, heroic walkers of mean streets; even later, you were the amazing trio, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, who traced the dark labyrinths of your hidden heart. You were Sinclair Lewis and Arthur Miller, who, with their own American idealism, went after the sham in you, because they thought you could do better.
You were Marlon Brando in On The Waterfront, you were Humphrey Bogart in Key Largo, you were Lillian Gish in Night of the Hunter. You stood up for freedom, honesty and justice; you protected the innocent. I believed most of that. I think you did, too. It seemed true at the time.
You put God on the money, though, even then. You had a way of thinking that the things of Caesar were the same as the things of God: that gave you self-confidence. You have always wanted to be a city upon a hill, a light to all nations, and for a while you were. Give me your tired, your poor, you sang, and for a while you meant it.
We've always been close, you and us. History, that old entangler, has twisted us together since the early 17th century. Some of us used to be you; some of us want to be you; some of you used to be us. You are not only our neighbours: In many cases -- mine, for instance -- you are also our blood relations, our colleagues, and our personal friends. But although we've had a ringside seat, we've never understood you completely, up here north of the 49th parallel.
We're like Romanized Gauls -- look like Romans, dress like Romans, but aren't Romans -- peering over the wall at the real Romans. What are they doing? Why? What are they doing now? Why is the haruspex eyeballing the sheep's liver? Why is the soothsayer wholesaling the Bewares?
Perhaps that's been my difficulty in writing you this letter: I'm not sure I know what's really going on. Anyway, you have a huge posse of experienced entrail-sifters who do nothing but analyze your every vein and lobe. What can I tell you about yourself that you don't already know?
This might be the reason for my hesitation: embarrassment, brought on by a becoming modesty. But it is more likely to be embarrassment of another sort. When my grandmother -- from a New England background -- was confronted with an unsavoury topic, she would change the subject and gaze out the window. And that is my own inclination: Mind your own business.
But I'll take the plunge, because your business is no longer merely your business. To paraphrase Marley's Ghost, who figured it out too late, mankind is your business. And vice versa: When the Jolly Green Giant goes on the rampage, many lesser plants and animals get trampled underfoot. As for us, you're our biggest trading partner: We know perfectly well that if you go down the plug-hole, we're going with you. We have every reason to wish you well.
I won't go into the reasons why I think your recent Iraqi adventures have been -- taking the long view -- an ill-advised tactical error. By the time you read this, Baghdad may or may not look like the craters of the Moon, and many more sheep entrails will have been examined. Let's talk, then, not about what you're doing to other people, but about what you're doing to yourselves.
You're gutting the Constitution. Already your home can be entered without your knowledge or permission, you can be snatched away and incarcerated without cause, your mail can be spied on, your private records searched. Why isn't this a recipe for widespread business theft, political intimidation, and fraud? I know you've been told all this is for your own safety and protection, but think about it for a minute. Anyway, when did you get so scared? You didn't used to be easily frightened.
You're running up a record level of debt. Keep spending at this rate and pretty soon you won't be able to afford any big military adventures. Either that or you'll go the way of the USSR: lots of tanks, but no air conditioning. That will make folks very cross. They'll be even crosser when they can't take a shower because your short-sighted bulldozing of environmental protections has dirtied most of the water and dried up the rest. Then things will get hot and dirty indeed.
You're torching the American economy. How soon before the answer to that will be, not to produce anything yourselves, but to grab stuff other people produce, at gunboat-diplomacy prices? Is the world going to consist of a few megarich King Midases, with the rest being serfs, both inside and outside your country? Will the biggest business sector in the United States be the prison system? Let's hope not.
If you proceed much further down the slippery slope, people around the world will stop admiring the good things about you. They'll decide that your city upon the hill is a slum and your democracy is a sham, and therefore you have no business trying to impose your sullied vision on them. They'll think you've abandoned the rule of law. They'll think you've fouled your own nest.
The British used to have a myth about King Arthur. He wasn't dead, but sleeping in a cave, it was said; in the country's hour of greatest peril, he would return. You, too, have great spirits of the past you may call upon: men and women of courage, of conscience, of prescience. Summon them now, to stand with you, to inspire you, to defend the best in you. You need them.
Margaret Atwood studied American literature -- among other things -- at Radcliffe and Harvard in the 1960s. She is the author of 10 novels. Her 11th, Oryx and Crake, will be published in May. This essay also appears in The Nation.
(Gothic News Service, 03/31) The Petroleum Kids Studio -- a breakaway branch of the sculptor Matthew Barney¹s infamous film crew -- is reported about to complete a ten-minute work for Network News television. Filmed by the Studio at night on location in Monument Valley, New Mexico -- site of numerous cowboy features, including John Ford's "Stage Coach" -- the Newscast features the White House's War Counsel. Framed against one of the Monument's most dramatic high-rise cliffs, the white petroleum greased theatrical set included elaborate multi-platform scaffolds, thick ropes and pulleys, a razor sharp, leather bull whip, a free wheeling Bradley steel tank tread, and an illuminated empty missile tip. Dressed in transparent body suits -- also thoroughly greased in white jelly -members of the President's War Counsel are filmed in an intense workout that is designed to revive the Administration's commitment to roll over Iraq in an ideologically consistent and timely manner.
Consistent with the work of Matthew Barney -- a Studio statement reads -- the Petroleum Kids’ work leaves no doubt as to the ambiguities of the power relationships within the Counsel. Vice President Cheney, while being raised and lowered from platform to platform, cannot stop rubbing large gobs of petroleum jelly into his heart. War Secretary Rumsfeld -- while held upside down by General Tommy Franks -- repetitively applies little dabs of the jelly lubricant to the muscles around his squinting eyes. At the same time, the General appears to use his feet to tightly enwrap the War Secretary inside the grip of the loose and greasy tank tread. Running up and down the ladders between scaffolds, Condoleezza Rice, National Security Adviser snaps the whip with a grace and ease, the white tip apparently stinging each Member in sensitive places in ways that cause their torsos to wince into rigid and freshly familiar postures. Only the President is spared the whip. Through out the sequence, while embracing a white missile tip, he struggles not to fall off a western saddle that is raised and lowered up and down the cliff by a barely stable, but well-oiled leather harness. Ironically General Collin Powell appears wrestle with Richard Perle and Paul Wolfolitz in a jelly mountain at the bottom of the set.
Back in New York, the Petroleum Kid’s reported great satisfaction with the first round of edits. Today’s film studio statement went on to say, "The use of malleable use of the white petroleum jelly in the Western context is perfect for showing the War Counsel’s slippery oscillations between covert and overt behavior. As a Studio we realize it as our public duty to dramatize and envision the ways in which the forceful members of this particular group especially in light of battleground realities -- are working to regroup and reframe the invasion and mastery of Iraq." At Press time it is not known whether or not the News Feature will achieve domestic distribution by any of Networks, however worldwide exposure appears a sure opportunity with much international interest immediately expressed.
The National Monument Park Service -- when asked - reports that no props were found on the reported film site. "We did find some odd white filaments of what looked like grease or jelly at the bottom of one the cliffs. Nothing serious. It did not seem to have anything to with making a cowboy movie, but we did pause to wonder if some Native American Church Group had secretly got in here to re-enact a version of The Ghost Dance. The remnants did have a scary, ghostly look about them."
Today's Philadelphia Inquirer has a page of poems by Sandy Solomon, Charles Bernstein, Daniel Hoffman and Rachel Blau Duplessis (links below)...
Taking in the news
Sandy Solomon
In the stupid computer game
to which I devote myself
as the world hurls itself
at war's impersonal fires
and bright-faced youths in fatigues ...
War stories
Charles Bernstein
War is the extension of prose by other means.
War is never having to say you're sorry.
War is the logical outcome of moral certainty. ...
A Riddle
Daniel Hoffman
If all but one desire me, I am not.
The Greeks had gods for everything but me. ...
From Draft 51: Clay Songs
Rachel Blau Duplessis
Why does it begin again and again?
Why insist on the jagged line
the lightning hitting precariously clear
the flooded splashbacks of political despair?
On May 3rd, 2003, The Works on Shirts Project invites you to take part in "WEARNICA", an international exhibition of artistic reactions to war. On the day of the event, participants in cities around the world will form walking art galleries, wearing original works they've created on the backs of white dress shirts into museums and monuments, parks and shopping malls to help raise public awareness of the realities of war in our time.
On February 5th, Colin Powell stood before the U. N. to make his case for a new resolution authorizing the U.S. to take military action against Iraq. Notably absent was Picasso's "Guernica" [...]
perhaps one of the the twentieth century's greatest, most unsettling artistic images depicting the brutal, self-destructive nature of war. Under pressure from the U.S. Government, The tapestry was covered prior to the Secretary of State's speech out of concern that the painting's message might speak to historical parallels that the Bush administration and UN officials were clearly determined that the media or the public should not make.
In response, the Works on Shirts Project (http://www.worksonshirts.org) has initiated this historic event to give people in the U.S. and around the world an opportunity to follow Picasso's example by publicly expressing their own personal reactions to the war in Iraq and continuing conflicts throughout the world.
Here's what YOU can do:
By staging an event in your area, making a financial contribution or just spreading the word, you can help send a message to the Bush administration, the U.N. and the world that the power of art to reveal the horrors of war and the promise of peace cannot be covered up.
The Idea is Simple:
By creating original war-inspired artwork that can be worn as clothing, it's possible to stage an art exhibition in any location open to the public. As long as the participants conform to the standard behavior for the general public in the space, the white dress shirts will visually tie the pieces together, and the images will speak for themselves.
Toronto Star art critic Peter Goddard wrote of the Guernica coverup: "If there is a war with Iraq, there's already been the first casualty — art." We can change that. Where one image has been silenced, a thousand may drown out the drums of war forever.
Those interested in learning more about this event and how they can participate should visit: http://www.worksonshirts.org
Bus Ride and March in Washington
At 9:30 Friday night, I got on one of four Detroit departing buses, sponsored as far as I can tell by a coalition that included both the peace and anti-racist activist organization A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) and the International Socialist Party of Michigan (I wrote my $60 check to the ISP), and traveled overnight to the national demonstration against the on-going and forthcoming war in Iraq in Washington D.C. Most of the people on the bus were not affiliated with any specific organization, however. The man I sat next to was an ex-marine who used to work in the tourist industry and who hadn’t been to a demonstration since 1972, when he had been involved with veterans’ participation in the Viet Nam anti-war movement. [...]
He and I were of a small number of people traveling alone on our bus. Seated across from me was a woman with her three grown-up sons and a family friend. There were students from local high schools and the University of Michigan, and some people I took to be young Chomsky-style anarchists: one of them, or so I imagined, Corey, was a friend of Asa’s, but Asa now tells me “she doesn’t know what she is.” It was a happy coincidence that two of Asa’s friends were on the bus, as neither Asa, Barry, nor my friend Katie could make the trip. The other of Asa’s friends was Matt, who has become a committed member of the Socialist Party of Michigan. After the march on Saturday, Matt and I spent a good long time together looking for our missing bus in below-twenty degree weather.
On the bus were also a handful of “aging” street-style activists, including a new age-y radical wearing yellow ski pants and donning a head of thick bottle-enhanced deep yellow hair who claimed to be from Berkeley. I grew quite fond of this man and also to rely on his cheerful pants as a familiar fixture amongst the seas of travelers in the truck stops, all of who, like me, were bundled up against the bitter cold in similar dark clothes.
I was told there were 19 buses from Michigan altogether, with one from the resort town Traverse City. At the Pennsylvania truck stops jam packed with buses from all over the Midwest, I learned there were four busses from a village in Northern Wisconsin, eleven from Ohio State University, eleven from Milwaukee and many more than that from Minnesota. Loud speakers announced the departures of the busses: the bus from Missouri is leaving. Bus number such and such from Chicago is leaving. Another bus such and such from Chicago is leaving. A woman from Chicago in front of me on line for the women’s room had never been out of Chicago. She was looking into the gift shop window and asking, are we in Pennsylvania? I just bought all these D.C. postcards thinking I was in D.C.
I ate grits and cold eggs and soft biscuits at 5:30 a.m. with two women traveling on the Northern Wisconsin bus. They said that they knew 50% of the people on the four buses from their town. One of them was a high school math teacher. One of her students had decided to go at the last minute—she laughed and said, “That’s pretty good for my conservative school.” I asked her if she was able to introduce discussion of the war crisis into her teaching. Yes, a little bit, with probability problems. She started to mumble something about how to get away with it. We talked about fear of speaking out, but as we were speaking the fear was felt as past tense. I hope that with the nation-wide demonstrations achieving a larger, critical mass, the fear will be put behind us.
Ironically, when we woke up this morning, Asa’s car windows were painted with Fear in big red letters. Around the corner of our driveway is a flag Asa mounted on Christmas Eve. It says Hope.
Back to Pennsylvania--two older white women from West Detroit had met on a tour of Italy. One of them had bent arthritic hands. I wondered how she would do in the cold. They told me, over truck-stop coffee, that they had boarded a bus in Warren because they were afraid to leave their cars downtown. They had never been to a demonstration before, but they said they had to go—what Bush is doing is too scary they said. They also said that they expected we would all be ignored.
At first, I couldn’t believe that all of these buses, herds of them, were going to D.C. Weren’t any of them vacation tour buses? In the murky light of the eating halls, I kept trying to make myself see something else, something I could have imagined—even that didn’t make sense (who would be going on a vacation tour bus at 4 a.m. in the middle of winter in this part of the world?) other than what I did see. We were all war protestors, crowding into the slushy cafeterias somewhere on the mountain passes of Pennsylvania in the middle of night—this was not 1968, it was January 17, 2003 and we weren’t supposed to be here: we were supposed to be in snug, or not so snug, in isolated enclaves ignorant of each other dreaming our neo Orwellian dreams as the world’s boundaries stretched and warped unfathomably beyond us.
Every one of us was going to D.C. A few were affiliated with Christian organizations and schools. More were traveling under the sign of Wellstone---there were Wellstone buttons everywhere. In the march, I met people from Boston and Buffalo and Alabama and Colorado who had traveled by plane. Where are you from and how did you get here and how long did it take? We asked each other in the cafeteria and rest room lines, sharing tables for meals, and while marching. We were between the ages of eight and eighty.
I met Tom at the rally. We wandered around the three squares across from the capitol and caught up with each other, mostly talking about children, work, his experiences of Pakistan, writing, and friends. How is everybody? For the most part, the speeches weren’t news, although, I had earlier been impressed by a Korean American woman critiquing the deployment of the phrase “axis of evil.” I learned later that each square, when full, held 250,000 people—this according to one of the protest organizers. Later, I heard that we were 500,000 in all. Tom and I went for coffee at Starbucks, which was filled with demonstrators, including a man seated at a nearby stool who seemed to be suffering from a terrible headache. Later, after the march, lots of people had aches—a woman on my bus had frostbitten toes and the woman seated across from me seemed to be suffering from a little hypothermia as she was shivering uncontrollably.
In spite of the cold and the problem finding buses after the event was over, the march was wonderful, a joyful and determined experience. It took hours. In some places, I’m remembering particularly the Botanical Garden building, there were so many of us there already and so many others joining us that we couldn’t walk more than ten steps a minute. When we finally stretched out making a line you couldn’t see the end of, things would speed up and then slow way down, sometimes stop. As we got out of the government area and into the shopping area, we were greeted with NO WAR signs in the windows of shops and bistros. Dressed up young Asian women working at a nails salon, waved and danced on the balcony as we passed. The march had a nice beat: there was lots of hand drumming and singing and Bread and Puppet and other agit prop weaving its way through the crowd. A group of Philippino-American performers moved to the edge of a crowd, encircled themselves with a banner. Please move around us, we are going to congregate here, they said. I was moving past: it was hard sometimes to stop for performances. When I looked back, they had melted into the crowd. Another group weaving their way through the march were dressed all in black carrying a big black banner they held like a rope to keep them connected to each other. The grim, the parodic, the quiet were gathered in a massive harmonic. People chanted this is democracy. Masked Bushes and Cheneys and Rumsfelds skipped and strutted around us, trying to shake our hands: we mocked them, laughed, and they moved on.
When I talked to my 85 year-old 88 pound mother on the phone, she said, “I wish I could have been there.” “Next time, I’ll carry you,” I said in a mock-heroic tone. She also wanted reassurance that the crowd of protestors was diverse and was happy to hear of the placard that read, “Conservatives against the war in Iraq.”
India's national newspaper, The Hindu, is reporting that the British Government is angry over the way BBC is presenting the war in Iraq.
A senior Cabinet member had last week made clear his irritation to the public broadcaster's political editor. John Reid, chairman of Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labour Party and a member of his War Cabinet, took up the issue with Andrew Marr.
Blair's office believes the 24-hour coverage is distorting the events, and Reid is reported to have accused BBC of acting like a "friend of Baghdad".
Marr is reported to have responded that the Government was "angry that they can control where reporters go but what they cannot control is what they see".
[Thanks to Christian Bök and Bill Kennedy for sending this simultaneously ... ]
The horrible truth, just in time for Terminator 3.
Are you a Commander-in-Chief who needs a name for your next military operation? Just click here to generate up to 100 at a time ...
20 Randomly Generated American Military Operation Names
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[Some good links at the end of this one, and mention of Circulars via our embedded Toronto correspondent, Darren W=H.]
By JOHN ALLEMANG
The first Gulf War did it for CNN. The new one may do it for 'blogs' -- personal Web pages of news and opinion, tracking and debating Iraq's fate by the minute. As JOHN ALLEMANG writes, they're now many people's first choice for unembedded journalism.
He calls himself George Paine, in a proud allusion to the 18th-century American patriot and pamphleteer Thomas Paine. But in every other respect, the young New York technology consultant is a man of these anxious times.
Talking into his cellphone at a patio table in a Chelsea café, keeping one eye on the darkening clouds while searching the Web for updates on the war in Iraq, the young man in his 20s is the very model of a communications revolution.
But the news George Paine accumulates and analyzes isn't just for his own peace of mind or intellectual hunger. Within minutes of finding an Arab-media contradiction of a CNN report, he will post it on his argumentative antiwar site, warblogging.com, and subversive readers who share his doubts will also share his newfound knowledge.
George Paine is what's called a blogger, a man who keeps a running log on the Web ("Web log" is contracted to "blog") of news and links of interest to him, with his own commentary. As it turns out, they are also of interest to tens of thousands of avid readers who don't believe that either government or the mainstream media have their best interests in mind.
"Seven or eight months ago," he says, "I was feeling dismayed by the direction my country was going in. I was looking for an outlet to share my feelings and maybe score some points against the authorities, and when the Patriot Act came along, I started the site."
With no formal journalistic training, he began by writing a paragraph or two about civil-liberties issues and the American war on terror. He reckons he had about 100 readers in the first month. But now, as the fog of war sweeps through Iraq, and eager reports of surrenders and uprisings disappear into the desert air, about 100,000 readers search warblogging.com for news and arguments ("I am ashamed that my country is engaged in an aggressive war") that embedded journalists can't or won't put forward.
George Paine is now writing thousands of words every day, and with the help of sympathetic readers, he is passing on hundreds of links where a wider range of war stories are told. And he is still working full-time as a technology consultant. "I post during the day, but I don't allow it to interfere with my day job," he says. "I'm blogging on breaks, or while I'm waiting for someone to call back. If I spend nine or 10 hours in the office, I'll bill for eight."
This is a large part of how the world, and especially that part of it under 40, is informing itself about the war. The truth, as they see it, is being composed on coffee breaks by people nowhere near the front lines, writers who are beholden to no one -- except perhaps the bosses in their off-line lives, who force them to use a liberating pseudonym.
Using free and relatively simple software available from such sites as blogger.com, with tools that can handle a huge amount of data, anyone with a modem can publish his views and find a following. And that following will probably grow, as younger readers numbed by the conventions of mainstream reporting and discouraged by its connections to government find a shared intimacy in the Web's daily diaries.
"I think that sort of clarity of voice and immediacy is more possible on Web logs than in any print media," says Dean Allen of textism.com. "I can't think of another broadcast medium that has such a potential for directness. Someone reporting live from the battlefield for CNN can't come close: As impressive as it can be, the reporter is still speaking though an editorial, journalistic gauze."
Of course, when anyone can do all this at low cost and with minimal technological skill, there's no shortage of eye-glazing egomania. Personal Web logs -- the daily, hourly and even minute-by-minute chronicles of lifeless keystrokers -- abound on the Web and have a terrible reputation among the serious-minded war bloggers. Yet even the war chroniclers, Mr. Allen says, seem to be getting carried away by both the recent deluge of recent media hype and the increased feedback their sites are receiving.
"These factors have led to oceans of unself-consciously hilarious self-importance on the part of people who are, after all, sitting in front of a computer typing a commentary through links on this and that."
And for all the alternative-culture myth-making that surrounds blogging, it is not the exclusive preserve of the enlightened fringe. Hard as it is to believe, one of the roots of all this harried Web activity was Matt Drudge's scandal-chasing Drudge Report. Andrew Sullivan, one of the pioneers of blogdom's public-pundit side, came to the Web from the editorship of the influential magazine The New Republic, and actually makes good money from his daily words.
Power-worshippers as diverse as David Frum and Warren Kinsella now share their thoughts with Web readers, and few mainstream news operations don't include a Web log somewhere on their site -- in the case of msnbc.com and its affiliated slate.com, that comes to means all blogs, all the time.
This mainstreaming of the Web log caused trouble for CNN's Iraq reporter Kevin Sites, whose much admired personal war blog kevinsites.net was ordered closed (temporarily, he hopes) by the people paying his salary.
Yet the most powerful blog to emerge from the war in Iraq is not from a North American networker, but from a Baghdad blogger who calls himself Salam Pax (from the Arabic and Latin words for peace). Salam is described as a worldly, 28-year-old, gay architect, who has little use for either Saddam Hussein or the war against him. But what makes his diary so affecting is the way it achieves an easy intimacy that eludes the one-size-fits-all coverage of Baghdad's besieged residents.
Humane in an inhuman environment, Salam writes of how to pack in case you have to flee, why he dislikes the self-appointed foreign human shields ("every third one of these shields will be writing an article somewhere"), what you need to buy when the Americans are coming (manual pump, 60 litres of gasoline, two kerosene cookers, particle masks), the music on the radio ("What good are patriotic songs when bombs are dropping?") and the distressing TV behaviour of Iraq's Interior Minister ("Hurling abuse at the world is the only thing left for them to do").
Like all good bloggers, once discovered, Salam has been overwhelmed by comments and questions. "Please stop sending e-mails asking if I were for real," he writes. "Don't believe it? Then don't read it. I am not anybody's propaganda ploy -- well, except my own."
For Paul Grabowicz, a professor of new media at the University of California School of Journalism at Berkeley, it's this kind of dialogue, along with the back-and-forth debates at more formal sites, that elevates Web logs into a powerful new form of communication.
"Traditional journalism can be very good at collecting information, writing great narratives and crafting a story. But that's just the starting point -- if there's no conversation, it's like making art and not showing it in a gallery. To me, the whole point is to get people talking."
Part of that conversation demands that you know what other people are looking at. Toronto writer and teacher Darren Wershler-Henry finds out through a site called Blogdex, which tracks the top stories being read on Web logs. "This way you know what everyone else on the Web is talking about," he says, "The more connectivity you can generate, the more powerful are your applications."
Mr. Wershler-Henry contributes to three Web logs when he's not writing poetry or teaching communications students at York University. At http://www.arras.net/circulars, he and New York writer Brian Stefans have brought together a blog group they title "Poets, Artists and Critics Respond to U.S. Policy."
Here, you can learn how to filter out jingoistic spam, read an eye-opening PRWeek magazine article on how the White House spins its public relations, link to a gambling site where you can bet on Saddam Hussein's future (the odds change rapidly) or follow the diary of a American teaching in Turkey. All of this, Mr. Wershler-Henry says, contributes to creating "communities of interest."
Some observers, such as Mr. Grabowicz, are critical of sites that are simply an excuse for people of like minds to agree, but Mr. Wershler-Henry resists the idea that the poets, artists and critics may be segregating themselves.
"The Internet was founded on rigorous debate," he says, "and you don't have to go far to see a lively discussion. You read one Web log and, sure, you're limited in what you're seeing. But if you read one newspaper or watch one television network, you're just as limited."
At this early stage in war-blog history, most sites are extremely wide-ranging and and almost unbearably informative (do these people ever leave their laptops?) without sacrificing the first-person approach. Eric Alterman writes an opinionated column called Altercations for msnbc.com, and his paragraphs are filled with blue-tinted links.
"I make my arguments," he says, mentioning how he had called the Bush foreign-policy team incompetent bozos. "But it's important for me to show that I'm not just talking off the top of my head."
By writing for a mainstream outlet such as msnbc.com, Mr. Alterman gets much stronger reactions than he would if he were isolated in his own private blog space. He quotes a letter he's just opened (all bloggers are unapologetic multitaskers) that calls his diary "a compendium of extremist stupidity." And yet, he says, this wider exposure of his intimate thoughts is both good and necessary.
"You judge a man by his enemies to some extent. I need to be exposed to ideas outside my own cocoon."
That will certainly happen to bloggers as more and more big media organizations pick up on the device, and many Web logs will undoubtedly lose their edge as they move upscale. But even now, reaching thousands of readers instead of dozens, many war bloggers say they can only practise their craft by treating it as the personal space it originally was.
"It really doesn't concern me whether anyone looks at this besides me," Bruce Rolston says. Mr. Rolston, who manages a university Web site by day and serves as a Canadian Forces logistics officer on weekends, writes a wonderfully detailed analysis of the war's tactics at http://www.snappingturtle.net/jmc/flit.
Though he disclaims any military expertise, Mr. Rolston's trenchant critiques of what he believes is going on are bracing to war obsessives who need to know everything -- a group that appears to be growing day by day. If you want to follow the movements of the 101st Airborne, or consider how bad the fighting in Najal might be, or conjecture why the beleaguered U.S. military might cut some ties with the embedded journalists, read the man with the laptop in Toronto.
No newspaper editor or TV producer would ever allow Mr. Rolston's work near a general reader or viewer, for fear of taxing or boring them. But war creates a need to know and the desire to share expertise, whether it's about daily life in Baghdad, antiwar poets in New York, or where the war is going on the banks of the Euphrates.
"The thirst for information on-line is remarkable now," Mr. Rolston says. "It's a defence mechanism after Sept. 11 -- people are willing to suck the information system dry."
John Allemang is a feature writer for The Globe and Mail.
Top war blogs
Some of the most popular and admired Web logs following the war, all linked with numerous other blogs and news sites:
The Agonist:
http://www.agonist.org
Renowned for its rapid reporting, this is the site many people turn to for the latest developments.
Tacitus:
A smart, generous pro-war blog specializing in strategy and deep background.
The Command Post:
Minute-by-minute war updates, and reliably rant-free.
Warblogging.com:
All-encompassing news and views, from an antiwar perspective.
Back to Iraq 2.0:
Supported by on-line donations, journalist Christopher Allbritton has been hailed as the first independent Web foreign correspondent.
Where is Raed?:
Moving accounts of daily life in Baghdad, now worryingly sporadic.
Kevin Sites:
The CNN correspondent's suspended personal site chronicles life in Northern Iraq.
InstaPundit:
Labelled the Grand Central Station of Bloggerville for its wide-ranging links, bolstered by cocky opinionizing from a Tennessee law professor.
Eschaton:
Mouthy, to-the-point observations on bad government and weak media.
-- John Allemang
U.S. intelligence officials have been spamming Iraq's generals and leaders of Saddam Hussein's ruling Baath Party via phone and email with promises of safety, asylum and a role in Iraq's new government if they defect, mount a coup or agree not to use biological or chemical weapons.
The spam, directed by the CIA, began three months ago during the buildup of U.S. and coalition forces on Iraq's borders. Initially, U.S. officials were so confident that they could persuade Iraqi leaders to surrender that they delayed the start of the war. And although those early efforts were largely unsuccessful, the communications have resumed even as U.S. forces carry out air and ground assaults inside Iraq, according to three intelligence and two military officials directly involved in the communications efforts.
United Press international reports that Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Moore is working on a documentary about the "the murky relationship" between former President George Bush and the family of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. The movie, Fahrenheit 911, will suggest that the bin Laden family profited greatly from the association.
According to Moore, the former president had a business relationship with Osama bin Laden's father, Mohammed bin Laden, a Saudi construction magnate who left $300 million to Osama bin Laden. It has been widely reported that bin Laden used the inheritance to finance global terrorism.
Moore said the bin Laden family was heavily invested in the Carlyle Group, a private global investment firm that the filmmaker said frequently buys failing defense companies and then sells them at a profit. Former President Bush has reportedly served as a senior adviser with the firm.
"The senior Bush kept his ties with the bin Laden family up until two months after Sept. 11," said Moore.
Moore said he expects the new movie to be in U.S. theaters in time for the 2004 presidential election. "I expressed exactly what was in the film and instead of being blacklisted, I've not only gotten a deal to fund Fahrenheit 911 but offers on the film after," he said.
From MoveOn.org:
"American media outlets have chosen to stifle or simply not show the most terrible and saddening aspects of this war. They are reluctant to air the voices of critics who are raising important questions about its effectiveness and purpose. And they appear to have acceded to the Bush Administration's desire to black out pictures or footage of civilian casualties.
We need to demand the full picture. The MoveOn Media Corps is a group of committed MoveOn volunteers who will mobilize to push the media to fairly cover this war. The action ideas we send you won't generally take longer than 15 minutes, but to be part of the Corps we ask that you commit to taking up to one action per day. The actions could include calling media outlets when they air especially bad coverage, pushing Clear Channel radio to stop censoring anti-war songs, or writing letters to the editor."
Interested parties can join by filling out this form. MoveOn is extending a special request to AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) users: "we especially need your help. We're developing an IM-based instant response network. By adding your handle, we'll be able to contact you with urgent, time-sensitive alerts that can make an impact more quickly than ever possible before."
The Guardian reports that General Paul Van Riper, a retired marine lieutenant-general, told the Army Times that the biggest war game in US military history, staged this month at a cost of £165 m with 13,000 troops, was rigged to ensure that the Americans beat their "Middle Eastern" adversaries.
Gen. Van Riper protested by quitting his role as commander of "enemy forces" (which bore a strong re semblance to Iraq, but could have been Iran), and warning that the Pentagon might wrongly conclude that its experimental tactics were working.
The Army Times reported that, as commander of a low-tech, third-world army, Gen Van Riper appeared to have repeatedly outwitted US forces. He sent orders with motorcycle couriers to evade sophisticated electronic eavesdropping equipment. When the US fleet sailed into the Gulf, he instructed his small boats and planes to move around in apparently aimless circles before launching a surprise attack which sank a substantial part of the US navy. The war game had to be stopped and the American ships "refloated" so that the US forces stood a chance.
After too much success, Van riper noted that "We were directed... to move air defences so that the army and marine units could successfully land," he said. "We were simply directed to turn [air defence systems] off or move them... So it was scripted to be whatever the control group wanted it to be."
[Glad to see that they're using smart bombs -- imagine this kid got hit in the eye?]
Saja Jaffar, 2, is treated by a hospital nurse after being wounded by a bomb that landed in West Baghdad Friday, March 28 2003. Five died in the blast according to local hospital sources. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay)
[I'm not sure about this one myself - I mean the organization is legit, certainly, just the concept seems troublesome. Well, it's too late for me, I filed a week ago. -- bks]
It's almost time again for those it's-almost-time-again news stories about the tax deadline, some old-fashioned good-natured, compassionating grumbling about the pain of civic duty, all of which will be reducible to that old-fashioned good-natured command: PAY TRIBUTE (AND ON TIME PLEASE). But in part or in whole you don't have to, and, especially right now, you might consider coyly withholding some or all of your alienating dollars to be your pressing civic duty. Or you might just get a little extra languorous about deadlines while the military machine gets a little more nervous about time passing. If you're at all interested in blocking the intersection of you and government, go to the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee at http://www.nwtrcc.org/. -- Geoffrey G. O'Brien
(Gothic News Services, 03/29) United Nations, Secretary-General Koffi Annan's Washington, D.C. Address at an undisclosed location where the Secretary-General briefly spoke on Britain and the United States¹ Refusal to Comply with the Inspection Process and the Joint Decision of these two former Member countries to secede from the rule of the United Nations and Invade the Sovereign Nation of Iraq:
Two score and eighteen years ago, our nations' leaders brought forth on this globe, the United Nations, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all member nations are created equal. Now we are engaged in an international civil war, testing whether the United Nations, or any global body so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are not yet met on the great battle-field of this war. We have not yet come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who will give their lives so that these United Nations will live. It will be altogether fitting and proper do this.But in a larger sense, we will not dedicate we will not consecrate we will not hallow this ground. The brave men and women, living and dead, who will have struggled here, will have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it will never forget what they will have done here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who will have fought here will have so nobly advanced. It is for us to be dedicated to the great task remaining before us that from the to be honored dead we may take increased devotion to that cause for which they will give the last full measure of devotion that we here highly resolve that the future dead shall not have died in vain that these United Nations shall have a new birth of freedom and that the government of nations, by the nations, for the nations, and for the peoples of these nations of the world, shall not perish from the earth.
