Understanding America’s Terrorist Crisis
July 30, 2008
Gore Vidal in conversation with Lewis Lapham. To buy the full 50 minute interview see the TUC Radio website.
One of America’s most famous novelists, playwrights and essayists had problems publishing his most recent book: Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, how we got to be so hated. The Federation of American Scientists has catalogued nearly two hundred military incursions since 1945 in which the United States has been the aggressor. Vidal quotes from this list. He spoke at a belated book release event in San Francisco on terrorism, Timothy McVeigh, the Patriot Act and the Bush administration. Could it be, he says, that the greatest victim of the September 11 terror attack will be American liberty?
Scottish Government Hires Torture Firm
July 30, 2008
I’m a fan of the SNP Government but with this decision they’re making a grave mistake. They’ve hired a private company accused of torture at Abu Ghraib to conduct the next census. This is morally reprehensible and we might question whether we can trust a group so heavily involved in the War of Terror to keep the information out of the hands of the CIA or US Government. The following article is by the excellent Neil Mackay courtesy of Craig Murray.
Granting CACI (UK) – a subsidiary of the firm accused of torture – the £18.5 million contract has not only badly wounded the SNP government’s claims of being more ethical than Labour and putting human rights at the top of its agenda, but has also led to fears personal data on millions of Scots collected by the company might be sifted by the US government given the close relationship between the Bush administration and the CACI head office in Arlington, Virginia.
Scotland’s leading human rights campaigners have damned the appointment, accusing the SNP of selling its soul, and raised the spectre of a mass boycott of the census by the nation’s population.
CACI’s parent company in the US was one of two private US contractors hit with lawsuits from four Iraqis at the end of last month, over allegations they were tortured in Abu Ghraib.
Acts of War
July 29, 2008
‘The war between the US and Iran is already on,’ writes Scott Ritter.
The war between the United States and Iran is on. American taxpayer dollars are being used, with the permission of Congress, to fund activities which result in Iranians being killed and wounded, and Iranian property destroyed. This wanton violation of a nation’s sovereignty would not be tolerated if the tables were turned and Americans were being subjected to Iranian-funded covert actions which took the lives of Americans, on American soil, and destroyed American property and livelihood. Many Americans remain unaware of what is transpiring abroad in their name. Many of those who are cognizant of these activities are supportive of them, an outgrowth of misguided sentiment which holds Iran accountable for a list of grievances used by the U.S. government to justify the ongoing global war on terror. Iran, we are told, is not just a nation pursuing nuclear weapons, but is the largest state sponsor of terror in the world today.
Much of the information behind this is being promulgated by Israel, which has a vested interest in seeing Iran neutralized as a potential threat. But Israel is joined by another source, even more puzzling in terms of its broad-based acceptance in the world of American journalism: the Mujahadeen-e Khalk, or MEK, an Iranian opposition group sworn to overthrow the theocracy in Tehran. The CIA today provides material support to the actions of the MEK inside Iran. The recent spate of explosions in Iran, including a particularly devastating “accident” involving a military convoy transporting ammunition in downtown Tehran, appears to be linked to an MEK operation; its agents working inside munitions manufacturing plants deliberately are committing acts of sabotage which lead to such explosions. If CIA money and planning support are behind these actions, the agency’s backing constitutes nothing less than an act of war on the part of the United States against Iran.
War Meets Values on Campaign Trail
July 29, 2008
‘Will the Big Winner of 2008 Once Again Be a Conservative Culture-Wars Narrative?’, asks Ira Chernus (from TomDispatch)
By Ira ChernusWhile the Iraq war has largely faded from our TV screens, some 85% of all voters still call it an important issue. Most of them want U.S. troops home from Iraq within a couple of years, many of them far sooner. They support Barack Obama’s position, not John McCain’s. Yet when the polls ask which candidate voters trust more on the war, McCain wins almost every time.
Maybe that’s because, according to the Pew Center for the People and the Press, nearly 40% of the public doesn’t know McCain’s position on troop withdrawal. In a June Washington Post/ABC poll, the same percentage weren’t sure he had a clear position. When that poll told voters that McCain opposed a timetable for withdrawal, support for his view actually shot up dramatically. It looks like a significant chunk of the electorate cares more about the man than the issue. Newer polls suggest that McCain’s arguments against a timetable may, in fact, be shifting public opinion his way.
McCain’s Only Chance: Values-plus Voters
Pundits and activists who oppose the war in Iraq generally assume that the issue has to work against McCain because they treat American politics as if it were a college classroom full of rational truth-seekers. The reality is much more like a theatrical spectacle. Symbolism and the emotion it evokes — not facts and logic — rule the day.
In fact, the Pew Center survey found that only about a quarter of those who say they’ll vote for McCain base their choice on issues at all. What appeals to them above all, his supporters say, is his “experience,” a word that can conveniently mean many things to many people.
Vote for Nobody
July 29, 2008
Hollywood’s Terror Dream
July 29, 2008
Today I went to see the much-hyped Batman film, The Dark Knight. I find the whole idea of comic book superhero films a bit silly, but it is always the subtext that interests me. Leaving the theatre I remarked to a friend that the film could very well have been written by neoconservative guru Leo Strauss. In this case it carried two key tenets of neoconservative ideology — the ‘noble lie’ and unitary executive. The film could also be seen as apologia for Bush’s ‘war-on-terror’ — Batman uses surveillance, torture, kidnapping (rendition), and suppresses the truth lest the Joker (aka the ‘terrorist’) wins.
Having said that, the IMAX aerial shots of the city were breathtaking. The direction is slick, but most memorable of all — worth the price of the ticket in itself — is the turn by Heath Ledger as the Joker. Should he win an Oscar, he would have earned it. But unfortunately isn’t enough to rescue the film from its dross plot.
Who’s crazier, the Joker or his admirers? Christopher Nolan’s Batman sequel The Dark Knight has been compared to Hamlet, hailed as a work that “smashes [the Batman] legend into a million broken pieces,” praised as a film that refuses to “disguise from us the fantastic chimeras that dominate our real lives,” and singled out for “manag[ing] to handle grown-up subjects such as domestic surveillance with more frankness and honesty than our own real-life representatives.”
So what is all the fuss about? If you haven’t seen the film, here is a brief summary, with a few necessary spoilers. After the events of Batman Begins—which concluded with Bruce Wayne/Batman buying up and privatizing all the shares of his slain father’s company and teaming up with honest Lieutenant Gordon to battle crime as a wealthy corporatist playboy duce by day and a fear-inspiring vigilante by night—Wayne and Gordon are joined in their crusade against crime by new golden-boy D.A. Harvey Dent. The men form a “band of brothers” to crush the mob, but their plan goes awry when a madman called the Joker shows up preaching a doctrine of anarchic violence and absolute resistance to all forms of order.
The Joker gets himself hired by the mob to deal with Batman and Dent and complications ensue, some of them hinging upon Dent and Wayne’s homosocial erotic rivalry: Rachel Dawes, Dent’s new girlfriend, is Wayne’s long-lost love, and she spends her brief screen time torn between the two men, before being brutally dispatched in a glaring instance of the “women in refrigerators syndrome,” a sexist literary trope identified by feminist comic-book readers in which male authors kill, maim or de-power strong female characters as a woman-devaluing plot device.
Hypocritical Measures
July 28, 2008
‘International law is one long legacy of double dealing,’ writes Ramzy Baroud.
The crimes committed against innocent people in Darfur represent a shameful episode in the history of Sudan and its neighbours, including Chad, which has played a dubious role in sustaining the seething conflict. Equally disgraceful is the politicising of the bloody conflict in ways that will ensure its continuation.The decision of the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) prosecutor-general, Luis Moreno- Ocampo, to file an arrest warrant for Sudan’s current President Omar Hassan Al-Bashir, and the international responses to his decision, demonstrate both the politicising of the crisis and the selectiveness of international law.
Consider this bizarre twist. The US Congress passed a resolution, on 22 June 2004, declaring that the violence in Darfur was state-sponsored genocide. The resolution — named the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act — was signed into law by President Bush in October 2006.
Between the vote and Bush’s signature the United Nations conducted a sweeping investigation — unlike Congress’s rash decision which was based almost entirely on lobby and interest group pressure — declaring, in early 2005, that both the government and militias were systematically abusing civilians in Sudan’s western province. It insisted, however, that no genocide had taken place.
Obama and Palestine
July 28, 2008
Mustafa Barghouti: Obama needs to see real life in Palestine
More here.
The Military-Industrial Complex
July 27, 2008
‘It’s Much Later Than You Think,’ Chalmers Johnson reminds us. (from the excellent TomDispatch)
Most Americans have a rough idea what the term “military-industrial complex” means when they come across it in a newspaper or hear a politician mention it. President Dwight D. Eisenhower introduced the idea to the public in his farewell address of January 17, 1961. “Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime,” he said, “or indeed by the fighting men of World War II and Korea… We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions… We must not fail to comprehend its grave implications… We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”
Although Eisenhower’s reference to the military-industrial complex is, by now, well-known, his warning against its “unwarranted influence” has, I believe, largely been ignored. Since 1961, there has been too little serious study of, or discussion of, the origins of the military-industrial complex, how it has changed over time, how governmental secrecy has hidden it from oversight by members of Congress or attentive citizens, and how it degrades our Constitutional structure of checks and balances.
From its origins in the early 1940s, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was building up his “arsenal of democracy,” down to the present moment, public opinion has usually assumed that it involved more or less equitable relations — often termed a “partnership” — between the high command and civilian overlords of the United States military and privately-owned, for-profit manufacturing and service enterprises. Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is that, from the time they first emerged, these relations were never equitable.
Chris Hedges on the New Atheists
July 27, 2008
In his book, I Don’t Believe in Atheists, Nation contributor and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges takes on the so-called “new atheists” movement, led by writers like Christopher Hitchens. In this VideoNation preview, Hedges lays out a scathing critique of both religious and secular fundamentalists, arguing that their ideological extremes aren’t so different after all, and are quite dangerous for society.
